Nargis, the most destructive cyclone in our recorded history,
hit us on the second of May 2008. Until
now I had known and remembered vaguely that the name Nargis stood for some
yellow flower in some language of the Indian sub-continent. Now only after
rereading the Wikipedia entry on Cyclone Nargis that I'd downloaded in June
2008 do I notice that Nargis is an Urdu word meaning "daffodil" and
has its roots in Persian.
In my mind's eyes, I always see daffodils as carpets of wild
or cultivated yellow flowers, though when I now looked at their pictures on
Google or Flickr, I found other colors, notably white.
The Greek mythology of Echo and Narcissus described the
origins of the echo and daffodil (or Narcissus)
flower. Narcissus the beautiful hunter won't care for Echo who loved him. "Echo was heartbroken and spent the
rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of
her." Learning of this, Nemesis, the goddess of revenge lures
Narcissus to a pond. Narcissus fell in love with his own image in the water,
realized the futility of his obsession, and committed suicide later and "The flower that bears his name sprang
up where he died."
May be some time in the way distant future, when many, many generations
have passed, our great-great-grandchildren would have invented their own brand
of mythologies to tell their children about a monster wind that flatten hills and
waves that rose as high as toddy palms and that it was named after a mysterious
yellow flower. While there will certainly be heroes and villains in their
legends we could only hope that they won't turn their stories upside down.
By the time all this happen I don't know if my one souvenir
from Nargis would have survived the passage of time. For I had saved a small
clump of an obscure orchid that seemed to have been struck down by a satellite
dish blown down and have landed on a mango sapling the day Nargis made landfall.
Only after the flood water had gone away did I spot this little orchid. So I
attached it to a piece of wood.
It flowered on August 3, 2008 full three months after I
saved it. After that the orchid did well but didn't flower for a long time.
A few days ago, on August 28, 2015 it put out seven flower
spikes and flowered again for the first time. I had identified it as Eria fragrans and my friend, the former
owner, told me that it comes from the Tanintharyi Division. Its flowers are
deliciously fragrant, but unfortunately the flowers last only for about three
days. This description is by Captain Bartle Grant in his Orchids of Burma, 1895:
This little orchid symbolizes the only good deed, though a
pathetic one, that I had done with my own hands in defiance of Nargis. With
that I could very well appreciate the selflessness and conviction and
sacrifices the countless volunteers thrown in into rescuing or helping the
people during the storm or its aftermath. Many times they have to swim against
the current and that literally, oftentimes. Alas, some have to pay the ultimate
price with their lives. It's worth it?
With the recent floods we all were glad to see not only this
trend of helping each other been kept alive, but also that it is vibrant and
actually growing. And again we saw some young volunteer lives lost.
We all will die, but our children and their children will
thrive. The old orchid bulbs will shrivel and die, but new ones will grow and
multiply. We die, animals and plants die, but life goes on.
