Where have all the flowers in Bangalore gone?

Where have all the flowers in Bangalore gone? Yes, this is a good question, but one that can be answered quite easily. They've gone in Maya's grubby (or sweet-smelling I should say), thieving little mitts. Maya has, like many other children of her age I have no doubt, an obsession with flowers. Trying to walk anywhere takes a very, very long time, not because Maya is a slow walker but because this being the 'garden city', there are lots of flower-filled bushes everywhere. Even on polluted, grimy streets. So here's what happens: we walk a couple of steps and then Maya chirps 'Oooh, hang on, hang on', runs back to pluck a couple of flowers from a bush. Then we start again and maybe manage to move five or six steps this time before she sees a poor little fallen flower on the ground which she thinks needs her loving care and so scoops that one up. Off we go again, but this time she sees another one lying in the gutter and I have to literally restrain her to stop her from climbing down to rescue it. Yup, you get the idea.

To begin with, I found Maya's flower obsession quite sweet. After all, sometimes we do lovely things with the flowers like arrange them into a small bowl with water, as we did this weekend in the picture above. But I have to say that it's all gone a bit over the top now, as Maya wants to pick literally every flower from each stem, bush and tree that we encounter. Andy and I have tried a few different tacks: that the flowers look so lovely on the stem, for everyone to enjoy. Or that actually the poor flowers die quicker once they're picked. She doesn't believe us, and as far as Maya is concerned, every pretty flower in Bangalore (particularly if it's pink) has her name on it. I've lost count of the number of times I've found a foul-smelling, rotting heap of month-old petals hidden at the back of a cupboard or stuffed deep into the pocket of a skirt.

This morning, we went to our favourite Sai Baba temple briefly and it wasn't till after we'd left the temple that I realised Maya had thieved a small rose from the offering table no less. There's an important religious Ganesha festival going on at the moment and this act would, I have no doubt, be met with more than a few raised eyebrows. But we were all strapped back up into sandals again at this point and I didn't much feel like going back to lay the rose on the puja temple so I just gasped, swiftly admonished Maya and we scarpered, my little flower thief cackling in tow.