Brahmakamal

Biology was never my subject of choice in school. Except for the birds and the bees part of it, I found everything else fairly boring. Last week however, I had the chance to do some research on a flower, so I thought I share with you some of my new found knowledge.

In India there is a flower popularly known as the “Brahma-Kamal”  which literally translated would stand for Brahma (the Hindu God of creation) Lotus the flower(And for a moment if you visualized Brahma whizzing around in a Lotus (car), don’t worry, you are not alone!). Now my knowledge of Brahma’s relation to the lotus is limited to the fact that he is supposed to be sitting in a lotus that grew out of Vishnu’s (the Hindu God of preservation) navel. Anyway, this flower is supposed to bring good luck. It blooms rarely and it blooms and wilts over one night. My mom has had the flowering plant potted for close to 5 years now and we never had a chance to see it bloom, till last week.

After seeing a bud, we were obviously excited, and we were all prepared for the flower to bloom. I took out my camera only to realize that it was no longer working. Luckily I could borrow a camera (Sony DSC-H10) from a friend of mine and all the pictures that I took are thanks to him. The funny part is – his camera was so sophisticated that however hard I tried, the flash kept whitewashing my entire image and I couldn’t take a picture at all. Finally I came up with this stupid idea that I would light the flower using an ordinary white-light based emergency lamp and then take pictures with the flash off. The pictures have been put here for your viewing pleasure.

Now for some trivia. Being the wanna-be geek I am, I obviously did some googling around before posting this blog. Apparently, the flower that is actually termed the “Brahmakamal” is Saussurea obvallata and is found in the Himalayas. It looks like the one shown below:

The flower that grew in our house was actually  a Epiphyllum oxypetalum (also known as Dutchman’s pipe, Night queen or Nishigandhi). It is a type of cactus (a variety of nightblooming Cereus). And there goes away all my luck! How I wish I hadn’t googled and remained happy with the fact that there was indeed good luck blooming in our house!