Manual for Making a Chariot

Sailen Routray

A painting by Sheikh Zainuddin (circa 1777 AD)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

 

You are walking in an ugly middle-class housing colony in Bhubaneswar in the hot July sun. The only saving grace is the foliage on the top of your head. The houses all resemble each other, although they have degenerated in unique manners. There is nothing interesting in sight, not even the poster of a c-grade Hindi movie. Suddenly something hits your nostrils, something maddeningly sweet and cloying that can very easily suffocate you. You look around, and find nothing. 

When you finally look up, a green canopy wobbles in front of your eyes with yellow specks on it. You wonder how a tree, no matter how huge, can hold so many flowers. It has to bow down. But it does not. The tree miraculously stays straight. One of the specks falls down and lands near your feet. You pick up. It’s perfect. The colour has the tinge of turmeric from Phulbani that has ripened under mahua flowers. It has a strange texture. The surface feels as if the flower is trying to find cleavages in your palm to enter it.

 

But not everyone experiences kadamba flowers this way for the first time. One of my earliest memories is of pulling chariots made out of these blossoms. They are perfectly round and yellow. Ideally you should not use already fallen flowers for building a chariot. That’s passé. You have to throw stones at the tall trees and hope that a few flowers fall down. After some attempts, they do. Ideally you should catch them before they hit the ground. 

You have to take four coconut twigs, all of the same length. With four flowers at the four vertices, construct a perfect square by piercing the flowers. Put the square on the ground. Now pick up a couple of pairs of twigs again.  Pierce the vertices of the square  vertically with the twigs. Bend all the twigs towards the center of the square. Pick up another kadamba flower. Make all the twigs pierce the flower at nearly the same place. Tie a piece of thick thread, preferably of jute, to one of the sides of the square. Now the chariot is ready to roll.