Turtle Channel!!!

Since she was five, her mother had told her the story of the most beautiful flower in the world. It is a big flower, of about an arm’s length. It has petals of a lovely shade of red that faded slowly into a rosy pink colour at the tips. It fills the air with a strong sweet smell and was a precious, rare flower that many would sought after. If you find one, you can sell it for 3 sacks of gold!

Find the flower, her mother always told her, and you will be happy for the rest of your life.

In fact, the flower is so rare, so exquisite and so beautiful that if you found one, you could present it to the castle and may actually be accepted by one of the princes! What a wonderful fairytale ending it would be for a young village girl to become a princess!!

The little girl grew up looking forward to the day she would be old enough to go hunting for her very own flower. ‘I would be a princess someday’, she thought.

Now it is the tradition in their village (and the all the nearby villages in the kingdom) that after a certain age, young girls must venture out for a maximum period of three days and find one flower to bring home and plant in their front yard. It was said to signify the coming of age. After the flower had been planted, the girl would be ready for marriage. The flowers that would henceforth bloom from the original plant can be sold in markets and the money would be the girl’s spending money. Women were not allowed to ask their husbands for any additional money for household expenditure!

If the girl was not home after a period of three days, when she returned she was to report to the nearest convent and become a nun. Her life would be a life of charity and penance. Although there are some girls who would voluntarily enter the convent, there was always shortage of nuns to do charitable works such as feeding the hungry and providing shelter to the homeless. Without the girls who could not meet the flower-hunting dateline, the convent’s Sisterhood would be in grave danger of extinction. The Sisterhood is an important part of their society as they are viewed upon as the life support of the kingdom, especially during times of war, draught and floods.

This flower-hunting and cultivation tradition is said to be aimed at grooming young girls to be responsible adults since they had to take care of the flowers in their front yard for the rest of their lives. If the flower-plant should die, the woman would be destitute and her husband had a right to divorce her (since she would no longer be able to care for the household expenditures).

(To be continued…)