‘And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever’

– Dylan Thomas

The other day, my attention was drawn to a pink rose in full bloom outside the bedroom that was once used by my mother and my two daughters. It was also used by the occasional guest scared to spend the night alone in other bedrooms of my house. The rose seemed to look into the bedroom. It appeared to me that it was attempting to attract the attention of those who used to use the bedroom, who the plant as a sapling had become familiar with.   

The rose plant seemed to be oblivious of the years that had rolled by, and  changes time had brought to those who had once used the bedroom. My mother had passed away. My older daughter left home after marriage. My younger daughter too left home to pursue her career on completing education.

These days, the bedroom is used by my daughters and son-in-law when they visit, and by me on Sundays for my favorite nap, when my wife displaces me from our bedroom when the helper who cleans the house turns up on Sundays.

To me, it appeared as though the rose which peeped into the now empty and silent bedroom expecting to listen once more to the church hymns my mother used to play on her organ, especially on Sunday evenings after her bath. The rose seemed to expect once more the banter between my daughters and their grandmother. The teasing, the leg-pulling and rebuke that were exchanged between them.

The rose seemed to forget that ravages of time that would soon have its petals fall had taken their toll on the people who used to once use the bedroom, in terms of inevitable changes in circumstances that time brings along.

Was the rose blooming in vain? Or, was it blooming hoping that time would do a ‘rewind act’? Hoping it would catch a glimpse of an encore of its younger days as a sapling, once again?

I hope that the rose would realize that it would have to find company in the man who uses the bedroom on Sundays for his favorite siesta, and hope for renewed sounds and sights of years that have flown by, from generations to come. The rose wouldn’t surely be blooming in vain if the latter happened!