By Z.G.Muhammad
In our childhood, tulips; red as martyr’s blood, yellow as deathly faces of peasants and white as famished faces of artisans bedecked many lush green rooftops in and around my city, The flower was not then seen as an elite’s preserve but a common man’s possession. Then it had not to be imported from Holland but grew everywhere in our land.
The flower was a part of folklore. Some poets compared it with rubicund cheeks of their beloved. Some used silky petals of the flower as metaphor for lips of their love. Some saw the flower as an epitome of scarlet history of the land that had suffered many invaders and marauders in the past and compared its redness to martyrs blood that had many a times turned translucent waters carmine.
The flower continued to be part of landscape till early sixties. The emerging new middle class in fifties knelled its death, when people in my part of city started replacing their roofs with corrugated galvanized sheets. It was the period when bells had started tolling in my birth burg both for aesthetics, values and traditions. Then changing enchanting birch-bark roofs with starting into eyes CGS roofs seen as symbol of status.
Irises ; pink, blue, magenta and white in our childhood soothed the dead buried in vast tracts of Malakah-cemetery purchased by Mir Muhammad Hamadani great son of the greatest benefactor of Kashmir Shah-e-Hamadan. Then none plucked these flowers to sell them as cut flowers to sell them as cut flowers – putting an iris in a flower vase was seen as ominous. Rhizomes, with sword shaped blades that bloomed in summers and lived through autumns on the rooftops, cemeteries and wastelands had not become a merchandise for unscrupulous- who stole them from graveyards sold them for peanuts to outside traders. I do not know if there is tradition of cultivating irises on graveyards anywhere else. I have not seen any graveyards not even christen cemeteries beautified with three petal flower with three drooping sepals-perhaps this tradition of beautifying graveyards has also reached here to Kashmir from the Central Asia. Irises bloomed in all graveyards in our childhood. The flower did adorn eternal resting place of the elite and the have-nots. Most of the shrine in our childhood had birch bark roofs covered with six to seven inch thin layer of soil.
Lots of all wild flowers of all colors would grow on these roof tops. The shrines of saints other than carrying spiritual aura around them were a feast of colours that soothed the eyes and filled hearts with joy. The walls around these shrines were also made of massive blocks of soil that topped with brownish clay.
In our childhood there were many myths attached to blooming of irises on the graves of people. If an Iris would sprout out of the cracked tombstone –we believed that the person underneath that grave would be in the Promised Land. Growth of a Datura plants around the grave was not only seen as inauspicious but boding ill for the dead. Most of children believed that those on whose the barbed plant with large pink flower grew might not have been a good person. How this belief had indoctrinated in our minds.I do not know ?Perhaps the philosophy behind it was not to allow plants like Datura grow around the burial grounds.
Irises not only added natural beauty to burial areas but also saved soil from erosion and kept rodents away them.
Many times, after school hours, we took retreat to Malakhah as some open spaces in this vast graveyard that then stretched from Ranawari to Hawal were used as playground by juniors. Sometimes we used big tombstone as wickets. Other than young cricketers the gamblers would also be seen playing cards under the shade of trees. It was not playing cricket on the graveyard that engaged our attention. Another plant that caught of our attention was Pegnum Harmala (Eshphand or Isband). This plant grew profusely in Malakah. It grew on many other wastelands also in the city. The shrub was believed to have arrived in Kashmir from Syria- perhaps in eight century with the first Syrian Hamam-bin-Sam who built the first mosque in Kashmir.
Many believed that this shrub has reached Kashmir from Persia along with the Sufi Saints that descended in good numbers in Kashmir in fourteenth and fifteenth century and transformed socio-cultural milieu of this land. Whether the shrub has is indigenous or has arrived from outside but it was great past time for us in our childhood to gather dried seed capsules of Harmal (isband).
While plucking dried seed capsule, we often cried (Isband Jalay Dushaman Galay- Dushman Galay)(when Harmal burns – enemy perishes). What was genesis of this slogan- neither I nor my friends knew it. How this become part of our lingua franca- maybe a moot point for researchers of Kashmir language but perhaps had something to do with the belief that burning of the Harmal seeds wards of evil eye. We did not know if it was a Zoroastrian ritual that had found its way into Kashmir through Persia or if Kashmiris were ever Zoroastrians.
Zoroastrians believed that burning the seeds protects from evil eye. This belief perhaps survived even after the advent of lslam in Persia and other central Asian countries and from there it travelled to Kashmir.
True now tulips do not grow on roof tops andmy city no more looks as an extension of Eden;true, irises no more adorn the eternal home of millions of city dwellers, plucking harmal pods no more thrill children but tradition of burning Esphand survives.
Z.G. Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist.
