An eager bud
Waits for the dawn ...
Bloom !
-  Self 

WHEN does a bud become a flower ?! Very few can claim to have captured that precise moment. Of course, pre-set cameras have captured those precious moments. For the ordinary mortals, though, that moment has often remained elusive. Children the world over often spend nights awake and alert to actually see a bud bloom into a flower -- a vain wait, though. No matter how alert you are and how focused in your watch of the bud in those precious moments before its petals open, you miss the actual loosening of the bud’s tight petals. Silently, stealthily, the bud blooms into a flower -- in front of you ... but without your notice. Science may have its own version, but the belief is that a bud blooms into a flower at or around dawn.

 

 

That belief kept my little sister and me awake whole summer nights to watch jasmine buds bloom into fragrant, vibrant flowers. Countless such watches went by, but we could never freeze in our eyes that precise moment when a jasmine bud bloomed into a little flower -- a white peck in the dark green foliage in the flower-beds in our courtyard. We never, never realised that the bud we had our eyes fixated upon had already opened its petals into a tiny flower. When did that happen ? -- we never knew.

 

There were times when people had their bed-spreads in courtyards during summer nights. Sleeping under the starlit sky, in the vicinity of flower-beds, basking in the fragrance, listening to the stories Mother told and then falling asleep, was the pattern. But when the jasmines were flowering, we wanted to watch the bud bloom into flowers, loosening their lips, spreading their petals to welcome the world. In those nights, Mother’s urgings to go to bed were rejected. We sat on our beds’ edges and kept an overnight vigil to know when the jasmine buds bloomed into flowers. That moment, of course, eluded us all the time. Human growth, too, takes place likewise, one supposes -- silently, without fanfare. For, growth is never an outward business. It happens within -- beyond any watch. What actually happens is we only sense the growth and its vibes, but actually see the outcome only after it happens. We only have a loose sense of somebody growing, so to say. That sense is very much poetic. And just as poetry emerges and assumes words, growth, too, does. A bud, too, does. In silence. In stealth.