The Guardian Goddess

 

The Guardian Goddess

Once, at four in the morning, on my way to Bhubaneswar railway station, I noticed a pair of flower-pluckers at work. They were tugging at the last blossom of a crepe jasmine (tagar) plant, showing no hesitation in stripping the tree bare. We usually refrain from plucking the last few flowers; to render a tree flowerless is the worst kind of insult one can inflict upon it. But nocturnal flower-pluckers in this city are of a different breed.

A butcher, when he kills, has a sense of compassion for the animal—at least a belief that the last pain should be the least pain. But these flower-pluckers? They are careless, cruel, and almost entirely without compunction. And they do this to trees that do not even belong to them. Should I call them thieves? Opinions may differ, for they gather their booty only to lay it at the feet of the gods.

The somnambulist flower pluckers, with their god-given night vision, perform with the same effectiveness at night as they would during the day. If a blossom blooms out of reach, they will not hesitate to snap a tender branch, even after prodding with their crooked iron staves. Watching them, I felt an impulse to jump down from the vehicle and frighten them with a warning about cobras lurking in the jasmine branches—an urban joke, perhaps, like crocodiles in the sewers!

That thought of cobras instantly carried me back to my childhood and to my sister’s flower-plucking adventures. Remember, what I tell you now belongs to a world sixty years ago.

In our village, we celebrated a spring festival dedicated to the cuckoo gods. Younger girls would fashion tiny earthen idols of a pair of cuckoos and place them in niches on the mud walls of their homes. For five to seven days, these fragile idols of unbaked clay were worshipped with a profusion of flowers.

Such was the demand that a silent competition arose: who could wake earliest to claim the choicest blossoms? And these were all springtime blooms—amaltas (laburnum), shimli (silk-cotton), gulmohar, even mango flowers if they were late to bloom.

The earliest teams returned with overflowing baskets, sometimes lending flowers to their friends—creating a curious “flower credit market.” If a lender overslept one morning, she could borrow back from the very borrower she once supplied. Worship, economy, and camaraderie were woven into this fragrant ritual.

The cuckoo gods received prasad of powdered puffed rice paste mixed with the tang of raw green mango and molasses. This was spring’s own offering—mangoes yet unripe, flowers at their peak. Boys, though mostly excluded, lingered at the edges in hope. Only the favoured few were invited to share the offerings.

At the week’s end, the cuckoo idols were taken from their niches, placed on the boughs of mango trees, and bidden farewell with poems recited by the girls:

O cuckoo dear, must you now depart?

Till mango blossoms wake the heart?

The year ahead will weigh so long,

Yet sing for us, keep us in your song.

My story begins here….

One year, my sister and her friend set out at 3:30 a.m. for a distant amaltas tree, locally known as the Varun tree, half a kilometre away. She had been a young girl then; today, she lives only in memory, having left us twenty-seven years ago. Brave girls, they relied on the faint moonlight to guide them along the field path. But as they neared the tree, they froze.

A shadowy figure was performing sit-ups beneath the branches. No rival team could have dared venture there at that hour, so it could not be human. Their fear deepened when the figure began moving on its hands, upside-down, as though its feet sprouted from its nose like an aeroplane’s landing gear. The girls had never seen an aircraft, but they knew this was neither man nor beast. Perhaps, they thought, it was the spectral motion of a spirit—an apparition in levitation.

By then, they were certain: it was no human but a ghost—or perhaps a guardian deity of the tree. Some trees in the village were known to house terracotta horses and images of forgotten goddesses around their roots, which were worshipped only once a year on Makar Sankranti, January 14, or Vishuv Sankranti on April 14.

Terrified, my sister and her friend retreated without plucking a single flower. That day, they managed with borrowed blossoms, confident that the cuckoo gods would forgive their failure.

Words spread. Who was the strange figure? If not ghost or rival, then perhaps a goddess herself? Nobody doubted my sister—she was considered the ideal girl for her exemplary conduct.

To add to the mystery, a villager later dreamt that a goddess had demanded worship for her defiled amaltas tree. That dream was enough; the community accepted it.

From then on, the amaltas tree was sacred. Every 14th of April, the goddess received offerings of ground puffed rice and green mango. The dreamer himself would dance in a trance, shaking his head, clad in a sequined skirt, elevated briefly beyond the human realm. Only after the sacred mixture was offered to him would his frenzy subside.

My sister and her friend were forever praised for “discovering” a goddess while out in search of flowers for the cuckoo gods.

And now, I wonder if the greedy nocturnal flower-pluckers of Bhubaneswar too should stumble upon such a guardian goddess—one who guards her tree fiercely, who turns careless hands into trembling ones. Perhaps that is the only solution: for superstition to succeed where compassion fails.

Until then, the crepe jasmine trees must bear their pain in silence, stripped and scarred before dawn.

---------------------------------------

By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

18-09-2025

Bhubaneswar

--------------------------------------