kaapi aaytha?

“tap..taptap..tap!!”

“Oh! please…God, why are you doing this thing to me?!?”

“tap..tap..tap!”

I get off the bed muttering obscenities and look outside the window. There he was trying to bend the branch of nandabattlu down so that he could pluck flowers.

Since the nandabattlu shrub was just next to my room window..I was inevitably woken up everyday morning!

I don’t have anything against God per se but I hate all his devotees who wake me up with their attempts at plucking flowers off my garden.

I am a person who likes my garden untouched . He was an old man and this put me in a fix because I found it very difficult to tell him to let those flowers be. If he were a kid I could have hit him and thrown him out or if he were some kind of animal, I could have stoned him. But age gave him protection from my wrath.

A shrub in bloom is beautiful to behold…your God can manage without flowers to make him pretty, I wanted to say.

Some days, I would walk out into the garden in vain attempt to make him feel guilty...but the old man would simply give me a toothless grin and say “kaapi aaytha? Eega bersodaadre nangoo ond lota kodu” (Did you have your coffee? If you are making some now, I would like one cup as well). As expected I was bereft of words and I would stomp my way into the house.

This continued for nearly two years. Please don’t think I didn’t have a fence or a gate! The old man would simply open the gate…or bang on the gates till I actually went and opened it for him.

Once I asked him whether people didn’t mind his barging into the garden and plucking their flowers! He said “ avra hoova? naanu kittodu marada melero hoovu maatra! Ella mara aa bhoomi thaayidu..nandoo alla, avrdoo alla. Aa mara hoov bidodu Devra poojegee”

(Their flowers? I pluck flowers from the trees which belong to mother earth which belong to neither me or them….the tree blooms so that we can use the flowers for pooja)

This weird logic left me thinking. I considered explaining pollination to him but then I decided I wasn’t equipped to answer his questions.

A week later the old man died after falling from my neighbor’s compound when he was trying to pluck sampige hoovu for pooja.

Many were of the opinion that it served the impertinent old fool right…but some days I miss the sound of his cane on my window and his toothless grin while he asked me

“kaapi aaytha?”