Written piece
String of Flowers
Nuzhat Nisar
Pakistan
About this piece
The text is about the heritage and tradition of stringing flower adornments by hand particularly with jasmine and marigold onto cotton threads with needles for the people we love and care about in South Asia. It is a tradition, central to personal grooming and cultural life.
String of Flowers
My grandmother called it belaa. She always said, “It is not jasmine, but a species of jasmine flower called belaa.” When she first visited her homeland after three years of migration, she brought back a flowerpot from Bihar, India, and planted it in our courtyard in Karachi, Pakistan. The house we had was arranged around an open courtyard. It provided natural light and ventilation on hot summer days, and we had our bonfires there in winter. It was our family gathering space and my grandmother’s favourite spot.
In that same courtyard, I watched my grandmother sit and pick her beloved belaas one by one and make a string of flowers for my mother. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, a thin cotton string wrapped around her fingers, she strung the tiny blossoms one by one, threading them with gentle precision. Sometimes it was a gajra, a floral adornment worn as a hair accessory, draping down the hair or wrapped around my mother’s braid. Sometimes it was a long garland to be wrapped around the wrist with her glass bangles, and sometimes she would call my mother and put floral earrings on her herself. She spent hours with those sweet, fragrant white blooms, so much so that when she fed me rice and lentil curry with her hands, I could still feel the subtle fragrance on her fingers.
Now that she, that courtyard, and her belaas have become memories of a distant past, I cannot shake off the urge to take a moment to sit cross-legged on the floor, with a thin cotton thread wrapped around my finger, and make a garland for the one I love.