A Man With A Bouquet Of Flowers

The man in the Rajiv Chowk metro station stood chatting to the security officials. Nothing set him apart from the numerous bodies on the platform, waiting for the next train going towards Samaypur Badli. He wore a maroon polo shirt and faded blue jeans. His hair was cropped to a length that can only be described as normal. A dull silver watch wrapped around his wrist. My friend and I walked briskly through the throng of anticipating, impatient people towards the end of the platform that corresponded to the ladies’ coach. My friend stopped abruptly at the midway point of the platform, where the man was standing chatting with the guards. I turned to look at her, confused. I followed my friend’s gaze and spotted the man and understood, instantly, why she was stopped in her tracks. He was holding a bouquet of flowers, cradling it against his chest.

My friend, who was also my roommate in college, has a penchant for flowers. We often joke that she has built a marketable personal brand that revolves around flowers. Her Instagram handle reads phool ho tum, a Hindi phrase that translates to ‘you are a flower.’ When she changed her username to this, she had said, when people receive a text from me, they’ll be notified that they are a flower. A couple of months into knowing her and living with her in a shoebox room that held two identical beds and two identical desks, she called me over to her bed and gestured for me to sit beside her. I don’t usually show this to people but you can see this. She thrust a big, fat handmade notebook into my hands. Dried flowers were stuck to sturdy recycled pages with watercolour sketches of the same flowers next to them. Some of the sketches were so realistic that I could not, at a glance, distinguish between the real flower and its image. As we flipped through the pages, she told me the story of each one—picked this one up from Sundar Nursery in February 2022 after spending a whole day with Vani. When I went on a trip to Dharamshala later that year, I picked up three intact rhododendron blossoms fallen on the road leading up to my hostel. They were kept sandwiched between the pages of the book that was her gift to me on my twenty-third birthday. When I saw her in late March, back in our room, I gave her the dried rhododendron flowers that, despite being pressed and dried for over two weeks, had retained their reddish tint. She never plucked flowers. It’s a matter of principle, she would say when asked about the practice. It’s not about taking but about accepting the offering. She always picked up fallen flowers.

I understood that the man holding a bouquet of flowers in the Rajiv Chowk metro station was the reason she had stopped and fished out her phone. He interrupted our single-minded motion to the pink border on the far end of the platform. Earlier that day, pointing to a woman selling red roses in Connaught Place, I told her, I could buy you a rose. I know I’m not your boyfriend, but since he’s not here right now, I don’t want you to be without flowers. It is no secret that Connaught Place was the preferred haunt of lovers, new and old. They walk hand in hand, unhurriedly, along the circular structure. They would walk into a hole-in-the-wall speciality hot chocolate café and share a cup of overpriced beverage. We sat on a bench and watched the lovers walk. I enjoy watching other people hold flowers, you know. I like the roses in the flower-seller’s hands a whole lot better than if they’re in mine. That would make a better photograph. She doesn’t chase good photographs, my friend, but she has an eye for them. On our way to the metro station, she spotted a deflated flower-shaped balloon on the ground of a parking lot. Its dirty plastic skin glistened under the street lights against the black tarred floor. She took a photo of it. We were tired from a full day of walking and shopping under the Delhi sun. I told her, right now, you are a deflated flower balloon. She was taken aback and then amused.

I knew that the man on the platform would become the man with flowers in the photograph shared on her Instagram account. That was his destiny. One cannot stand holding a large bouquet of flowers on a crowded platform, under a clock hanging from the roof, and not expect to be photographed. The scene was ripe for capture, like a Champa left untrampled in Sundar Nursery calling to be picked up, preserved in a book and painted. I am no photographer, but even I could see the faint, gold shimmer of the rectangular frame enclosing the ordinary man with the flowers, the clock hanging over his head and the closed safety gate of the platform before him. If photographed, the scene before the eye would turn into a composition whose quiet symbolisms would be made to speak. The viewer would be compelled to decipher this speech and to begin a dialogue. The obsessive, essentially human, desire to give meaning to an enigma translates into the act of interpretation. The clock hanging over the waiting man’s head; the white and red flowers interspersed tastefully with green foliage, vibrating with life; the man’s faded blue jeans; the people flying helter-skelter about him in the underground metro station. To interpret is to arrest the confounding dynamism of the phenomenon in order to bestow on it a meaning. I told my friend, who was trying to arrive at a good frame to immortalise the moment, most likely, he is a flower delivery person. There’s nothing romantic about him. I saw her face fall for a moment before she dismissed me as a cynic. She said, that big man over there in the outrageously red shirt is getting in the way of my photograph. We heard the rumble of the approaching train. The people on the platform pressed forward toward the closed safety gates. Taking one last photograph, she put her phone away. I think I’ve got something, she said. And we were single-minded again, pushing through the crowd to the end of the platform.

Late in the night, home in our shoebox room, I asked her to send me all the photos taken on her phone during our day out in Delhi. It was a quiet ritual—the two of us lying on our separate, identical beds, our phones in our hands, occasionally speaking aloud to make a remark that the other would respond to briefly, and then recede into the shared silence, folding over us like a kambal. I looked at the photograph of the man with the flowers she had just sent me. This one turned out surprisingly well despite the rush and the crowd, I said. Perhaps, she did not seem content. There are too many people, she added. The eye isn’t necessarily drawn to the man. People won’t know that he is the subject. There are far too many distractions. I did not understand this. I told her, isn’t that the whole point. That was the real scene anyway—a man holding a bouquet in the midst of a crowded platform, waiting for a train. She thought that the man was not sufficiently obvious. But he was obvious enough for her eyes, to have stopped her in her tracks. But I am the photographer, she iterated, the audience is a different species. Their collective eye doesn’t work the same way. In any case, I thought, what use is there for a photograph if there is no conscious attempt to direct the viewer’s gaze? It is an act of composition, not necessarily of creation. Creation takes no account of the viewer’s eye. Composition, on the other hand, always presupposes a viewer. What does God care about how we perceive his animated world?

Let me try editing the photo, she said. I went over to her bed to watch the process. I always enjoyed watching her do things. I would watch her get ready for her morning classes while I still lay in bed. She would try on one earring and then another. Turning to me, she would ask, what do you think? The long dangly one with tassels or this modest silver Jhumka? You’re a maximalist and that can’t be helped, I would reply. I know the tassels speak to you. I would watch the precision of her long fingers as she drew a wing with her eyeliner, the deliberately imprecise dabbing of tinted lip balm on her lips, and finally a touch of silver shimmer at the inner corner of her eyes and on the tip of her nose. I would say, amidst clinking and clanking of blue and green glass bangles, you have hardly five minutes. You need to run. She would shove her socked feet frantically into her sneakers, wrap a flimsy silk scarf around her neck and run down stairs. Each of these actions seemed worthy of being shut away in a photograph to be looked at over and over again. I enjoyed being a witness to her many processes. I watched as she tinkered with the brightness, saturation and temperature of the photograph of the man on the platform. She circled a woman at the edge of the frame with a precise finger and pressed erase.

The woman disappeared from the photograph. There was no sign of her ever existing. No shadow had formed of her in the dimly lit underground station that could have signified her presence. You cannot do that! I protested. A cardinal rule was broken. Just as a time traveller must not meddle with the past, one must not erase people from a photograph. It is the same rationale. A photograph is evidence of an event. It indicates, as Barthes says, this has been. It is supposed to be the pocketable, readily accessible past for easy perusal. To alter a photograph, I believed, is to alter the past. Mortified, I watched as she erased a second and, then, a third person. If I could remove him, she said pointing to the big man in the red shirt, I would. But I think he’s too big, too prominent of an object to be taken away without distorting the picture. I agreed and left her to make tea for both of us.

Waiting for the water to boil, I looked at the photographs again. Somehow, they already felt nostalgic. With photographs being numberless and the intervals between them negligible, it seems as if we live in a prolonged present. Photographs, if anything, induce and perpetuate nostalgia. The over-saturation of photographs in our day-today lives compels the question: if everything is nostalgic, is anything nostalgic? The biriyani we had last week in a little Kerala restaurant near Dilli Haat has already turned nostalgic by virtue of having been photographed. As Sontag writes, Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. If nostalgia is the recall of the past in the present aided by a stimulus, usually a photograph, then this constant reinstituting of the past—including its most trivial minutia—in the here and now destabilises our sense of time. Our present is characterised by an attitude of obsessively recalling a past that has not been left alone long enough to settle into the very form of the past. I carried the teapot back into the room and left it on my desk to steep. We both liked a strong brew.

My friend was still on her phone. She looked up and said, I did it. That obnoxious man is gone. I erased him. The man in the obnoxiously red shirt was indeed gone from the photograph. The photograph was immaculate. On the deserted platform in Rajiv Chowk metro station, a man stood waiting for the train. He held a bouquet of red and white flowers. Over his head loomed the white face of the station clock, its hands showing eight forty-two in the evening. The white flowers in the arrangement popped in the dim light. The eye was drawn to them. Except mine of course, which was fixed on the nothingness surrounding the obvious subject. I could not overlook the empty platform, the absence of busy shadows on the floor or the missing murky reflections of faces on the glass safety gates.

The photograph was posted on her Instagram account with the caption: Flowers for you. She told me, only you and I know the reality. She flashed me a conspiratorial grin. I smiled back. To tell the truth, I did not want to be in on the crime. I could not bring myself to accept her tampering with creation in favour of composition. She sensed my disapproval and said, you’re a hypocrite! You’re a writer. She was right, perhaps. The process of writing is always a process of selection. Selection between numberless signifiers, images, memories, sensations and metaphors. The man with the flowers or the man with the bouquet? How to describe the red of the photobomber’s shirt? How to write my friend’s passing remarks? Am I also not constantly grappling with the question of who the subject of this essay is—my photographer friend, the man in the metro station or her photograph? Does it matter that the man wore black jeans instead of the faded blue that came to my fingers as I typed? But certainly, my work was different. No one in their right mind would take this essay as an accurate depiction of a past event. This is decidedly creative non-fiction after all. And Sontag said that Photographs furnish evidence. That they are more of a narrowly selective transparency than a narrowly selective interpretation. However, as it turns out, this essay presents itself as the narrowly selective transparency she describes. The likes came rolling in and my friend was content. The photograph she edited and posted was more of a selective interpretation than my prose had ever been. I asked her, where is your mug. I think the tea is done. She fished out her cup—a salmon pink ceramic creation with an embossed red flower on it—and handed it to me. It was my gift to her on her twenty-third birthday. My reverence for detail will not allow me to leave this out. Where did the big man in the red shirt go when he was erased from the photograph? Is there a realm peopled by the details selectively omitted by the artist? But that is just reality, perhaps.