In Quest of Lotus

In Quest of Lotus 

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Here is a story in English, anecdotal and endearing. Sometimes, the past comes back not to haunt you, but to hand you a flower--that's how I concluded my story. For those who would like to read the story in Hindi, I'll post its Hindi translation in a day or two.

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It was for the love of a lotus tank that I went to that far-off village on the outskirts of my hometown. Nowadays, finding such a pond is no easy thing — fish-rearing has changed the very character of village tanks, making them practical for commerce rather than hospitable to lotus. But here, in the middle of quiet fields, was a sheet of still water flecked with the white of full-bloom lotus, their fragrance drifting in the air like something that belonged to another age.

I wasn’t alone. A man stood a little distance away, gazing at the flowers as if weighing each petal’s worth in his mind. Finding a fellow appreciator, I walked up to him. There was something familiar in his face. Not just a vague familiarity — a certainty. The cleft in his upper lip had not changed in forty-eight years.

I first saw him in a very different setting: among a jostling crowd outside the police lines, waiting to be recruited as temporary constables. It was the summer of 1977. I was waiting for the classes to resume in my final year of graduation; the elections had come during the vacation. The offer was simple: a month’s duty guarding polling booths and ballot boxes, for a wage of 550 rupees, at a time when rice cost three rupees a kilo, which meant nearly nine months of my mess expenses — just for a month’s work.

I didn’t get the job, not for lack of height or health, but for a slip of the tongue. My college roll number was 145. My recruitment number was 345. When the officer — perhaps a police inspector — called me, he asked for my number and name. I gave him “145” and my name. By the time I realised my mistake, my chance had gone.

That was how 550 rupees — and nine months of food — slipped away from me. But the man standing before me in the queue that day stayed in my mind. A face with a cleft upper lip — the kind of detail you never forget, not because of its oddity, but because it pins a whole scene to memory.

And here he was again, nearly half a century later, on the embankment of a lotus tank.

“Do you remember me?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I tried again. “In the year 1977. Outside the police office. Recruitment for temporary constables…”

The recognition came suddenly. His voice was just as I remembered it — like a blacksmith’s bellow feeding a forge, air rushing into fire. He not only recalled the incident, he recounted my mistake word for word, laughing in that rough, smoky way that seemed to carry the heat of those old afternoons.

And then he added something I hadn’t expected. “You know this tank?” he said, nodding at the water. “Back then, after the election, they put us to work as labourers. We dug it. The other temporary constables and I.”

I looked out over the tank — the white lotus floating like small moons, the faint scent of their pollen riding the breeze. This beauty had sprung from the blisters of those hands, the sweat of men who thought they were only passing time between polling days.

The man with the cleft lip had not only been a witness to my small failure; he had been the creator of this place I had come so far to see. The pond I had loved from a distance was, quite literally, his handiwork.

Sometimes, the past comes back not to haunt you, but to hand you a flower.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Bhubaneswar

11-08-2025

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