A young woman in printed leggings — it might have been jeggings — on the London Tube. The woman’s thighs and legs, in the photo that my friend sent me of his co-passenger, seemed like a surreal version of coconut trees. Surreal also because of the presence of these tropical trees, even if only on a pair of legs, in cold London. The print was kitschy, the colours of the trees like a cheap imitation of Gauguin. In the stretchable fabric with the print of coconut trees was an obvious question: why do women wear prints and embroidered designs that imitate plant life?

That’s a gendered question, of course, and one that needs to be asked — why don’t men wear similar prints of plant life in their attire? Besides the caricature of the so-called Hawaiian shirt and the army man’s camouflage forest-print uniform, where are the prints about plant life on men’s items of clothing? Monotone or a permutation of geometric lines, checks or stripes (I want to say Paul Klee-like but can only think of an inspired math teacher’s blackboard) — only these seem to have become the code of seriousness with which men are supposed to meet the world. Even if men wear floral prints, it is inevitably as an upper-body garment, a shirt or a kurta. The male south must retain its masculinity — and so no floral-printed trousers. Even the dhoti — sedate and serious white, its thin border the only attempt at colour and dialogue — and the lungi, with its stern and orderly stripes and checks, these unstitched garments that allow flow but not flower. I wonder whether it is about geometry, the privileging of straight lines over arcs and bends. Who has seen a straight-lined stem or a rectangular petal, after all? It is as if the straightness of lines, their meeting at right angles, all of these are a part of the apparatus of seriousness. Why else would they become the staple of modern male clothing?

Compare the straight lines; of the ironed folds of a pair of trousers — that hold the man’s legs as if they were jewels inside a chest of drawers — with the flow of a skirt. It is not difficult to see how the shape of the skirt is a subconscious mimicking of the shape of a flower, a whorl, a datura (the ‘devil’s trumpets’) or any bell or trumpet-shaped flower. Not to mention the peplum and extravagant pleats that give character and contour to women’s clothing. ‘Petal’ is an anagram of ‘pleat’, and this sense of floweriness attends the sleeves, the waistline and, in the case of a sari, the area between the thighs, as if these are the regions where a woman is expected to exhibit the characteristics of a flower.

It’d be easy to put these only to illustrations of the woman being ‘prakriti’, as if the association between the female and flowers is natural, even biological. Only women wear flowers in their hair — this is semi-tautology, for a flower to stress her floweriness by punctuating her visual form with the addition of another flower. A man’s flower-wearing is restricted to the boutonnière — a carnation pushed through the lapel buttonhole. The boutonnière, one can’t fail to notice, is very close to the position of the heart. It is as if that is the only place in the male body where a flower is allowed to brush. (Some weird subversion is on its way, I see: men are beginning to wear flowers in their beard. The two hashtags on Pinterest for this are #flowerbeard and #foliagebeard. They remind me of my childhood thoughts about the stories of sages meditating in the Himalayas, and now those years have been condensed by a beautician’s time-lapse machine — how moss might form on their beards, because they didn’t move.)

What would women’s clothing be without its prints, drawings and embroidery of flowers, stems, leaves and paisleys, and those imagined hybrids of flower and leaf that have their own vocabulary in every culture? And what would names of Indian women be without flowers too? Aparajita, Jnui, Jasmine, Golapi, Dahlia, Zinnia, Parijat, Henna, and so on. Men are not named after flowers, except when generic. Suman, the Hindi word for flower, is a unisex name.

Armed with this intuitive knowledge, when I come to the world of old Hindi films, the songs about love and romance, I notice the elision of the kiss from the screen. There is a display of desire and its immediate thwarting, awkward lip-chewing passing for symbolic language, and then the substitution of the human by the non-human. Two flowers, usually roses, touch and peck. And I’m bewildered — is this an advocacy of same-sex love, since the flowers are both female?

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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