Wild Tricks from Our Ancestors
Hibiscus Tisane
Response to the prompt ‘Wild Tricks From Our Ancestors’
If you look carefully at the photograph, above, you can see a hand in the background. It is a surgeon’s capable hand, and belongs to my sister in law, the doctor. She is holding out, as an offering to the camera lens, a handful of fresh-picked hibiscus, from the tree in my Kerala home. I had gone to Kerala to spend time with my father, who is 91 years old. Ambily, my sister in law had come home after a twenty-four hour work-schedule at the Public Hospital, and yet, she managed to get up before dawn, and finish every chore she needed to do, by 8 am. I felt tired, just looking at the energy she was radiating, and whizzing around with. Her name means ‘moon’ or ‘moonlight’, but she is more attuned to the Sun, going to bed by 9 pm, if she does not get a call to attend some patient, at night.
“It is the best antioxidant I know,” she told me. “It cleanses the entire system, beginning with the skin. I have a glass everyday. All you need to do,” she went on, “is, pick them fresh off the tree, wash them in running water, and drop them into a pot of water. Boil the water, let it steep for some time, and then drink it, either hot or cold.”
And that’s what she did. Boiled the flowers in two cups of water. Allowed it to steep for some time. And then poured it out into a clear glass for me. “I have it almost everyday,” she told me, with her beautiful smile, “I made this for you.” And I wonder again what goodness my brother, or we, as a family have done in this life, or our past lives to merit the advent of this wonderful human being into our lives…
The tisane tasted a little tart, like cranberry juice: but it was the colour that floored me. Depending on the way the light fell on that glass of goodness, it turned mauve, lavender, lilac, magenta, periwinkle, amethyst, iris, orchid, cranberry, grape and plum. I was fascinated by the colours, turning it this way and that, to see how the light caught the colours, transforming it to a liquid, jewel-like glow.
When Ambily came by after some more chores were done, I was still staring at the glass. She gave me an indulgent look, shook her head and went away. She was probably realising that the whole family she had married into, was nuts in their own separate ways.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This is a response to a prompt from the ‘Tea With Mother Nature’ pub, called ‘Wild Tricks From Our Ancestors.’
