Five years ago in an Uzbek home in the town of Kokand, my hostess, a prosperous merchant’s wife, gave me green tea to drink in a medieval courtyard full of fat, pink, disheveled roses. Everything was charmingly ‘esky’ (a Turkish-derived word for ‘old’). Sniffing in luxury, I waved a hand at the flowers: “Gul!” I said and rolled my eyes in ecstasy. My hostess suddenly leapt off the cushions. “No gul, no problem!” she cried, breaking off a sprig of dark leaves from a plant near the wall. “But this plant, must have. Khuda plant. Uzbek name,‘raihon’”. One sniff and I almost tumbled backward into a very thorny rose bed. Uzma Apa’s “khuda plant” was a black tulsi. Back in Delhi, the then Uzbek ambassador told me how he took a raihon along on all foreign postings, “even to Germany”. And its place was in the angan, like here (and I have a nasty feeling I told you this story three years ago). Anyway, it’s impossible to see Ocimum sanctum the same way again. Its allure as Mahavishnu’s plant is invested with new romance as sacred also to the “crescent worshippers” in Central Asia. Very “vasudaiva kutumbakam” and so much more interesting to share a poetic notion than just biology, don’t you think? The reason tulasi-raihon came to mind was that this month, sacred to Shiva, all the little girls in my neighbourhood are looting another sacred plant, the bel, for its leaves. It’s because Shiva loves the bilva or vilva (Aegles marmelos) so much. The Shivling in our colony temple is rakishly festooned with these woodland offerings even in our urban jungle while Ganesha, massively hewn in black South Indian granite, gleaming with the oil of countless lamps, is bestrewn most profligately with durba grass. You think of Europeans writing scholarly texts comparing Shiva with Dionysios and a laugh escapes, because how can anyone compare a dead deity with the living Divine, except in the most superficial list-making terms? Here before you is the living faith handed down the ages. It does not need to explain itself to anybody though bloodless books may be written until time’s end. As the Maitri Upanishad says, “Knowledge has to dissolve from the mind into the heart; the rest is mere multiplication of books”. Meanwhile what do we in North India do with these pretty notions while scattering grass and leaves most promiscuously on God? Pray like mad of course and hope that Shiva, as Rudra, Lord of the Storms (who at present is unaccountably over-generous elsewhere in the land), will whoosh triumphantly across our burning skies with dark, heavy rain clouds thundering in his wake like galloping Uzbeks.
