Flower Child

I saw a flower-child as I waited to cross the intersection. We waited by the bulk of an expressway in the making. Delhi is the womb for expressways in the making. It was hot. The stewardess had been politely incredulous as she announced before we deplaned: ‘The temperature outside is 48º centigrade.’

We tittered with surprise. The stewardess sounded a bit like well-meaning pilots who burble near 40,000 feet: ‘The temperature outside is minus 42º centigrade but for your comfort we’re maintaining a cabin temperature of 24º centigrade.’ Imbeciles.

We tittered too with relief. Few of us are ever outside like the flower-child.

As she offered me a small bunch of roses—surely more roses than her age—my taxi driver said they were filched from a graveyard, water sprinkled on, then sold. I’ve heard that in my two decades of living in Delhi, but never believed it. Too many people would need to die all at once, too many dead people visited by relatives all at once, all with fetching red roses, for flower children to erupt across a city-state larger than some European principalities. I don’t believe it now.

I bought the roses. Instantly, as happens, there was another flower-child. And a magazine-child. All bare feet, bare heads. Too young to be self-conscious about the tears in what must have been clothes.

She carried a magazine with an article about more like her being spawned: India’s everywhere destitute. Seen yet unseen. Debris of development. Debris of someone’s anger or foolishness. Just debris.

Magazine-child also carried a glossy about homes and gardens, and another about good housekeeping. I took the one about debris.

‘Dekha?’ sneered the taxi driver. See, I told you. I told you, I told you, I told you…

We stopped at many intersections on the way to the heart of Delhi, usually near loops of busily ferrying “flyovers”. All had flower children and magazine children. In several places, as happens, there were also children who carried children. At one such (without a flyover), just down the road from the prime minister’s house, a flower-child sold a rose, and was fondled by a man in a car. She screamed obscenities as he drove off, smiling.

Another came to us. I lowered the window to tell her I already had roses. And I already had that magazine. She muttered an obscenity and angrily shook the bunch of roses in her hand, sprinkling water on a story about orphans of rioting in Gujarat.