This was enough for us to let loose our imaginations and enough to send most biologists into spasms of annoyance. Roses don’t get off that way, they snorted. Two birds yes, but two flowers?

The muse of many a Hindi film lyricist, roses have wooed a reluctant beloved’s heart, even inspiring countless comparisons with her blushing cheeks and coquettish airs. Jerry Pinto freezes the guest appearances of the rose in popular Bollywood hits...

In one of those moments that makes Mughal-e-Azam such a three-bars-of-chocolate film, Prince Salim is entertained to a qawwali, a competition between Anarkali who speaks for love while Bahaar speaks for a slightly more worldly form of dalliance. When Anarkali makes her claim for immortality (Mohabbat humne jaana zindagi barbaad karti hai /Yeh kya kaam hai ki mar jaane ke baad duniya yaad karti hai) and the last chorus of Teri mehfil mein kismet aazmaakar hum bhi dekhenge dies away, Salim must choose. He rips the thorns of the rose, hands the flower to Bahaar and gives the thorns to Anarkali. Cinematic magic.

It helps that it’s Dilip Kumar, Madhubala and Nigar Sultana all gathered around that hapless rose, a white one, so that it would stand out against the darkness of the silk on Prince Salim’s chest. It helps that the debate that decided the fate of the rose was written by Shakeel Badayuni and put to music by Naushad. The other great rose moment came in Pyaasa when Waheeda Rehman’s beautiful seductiveness was given the name of Gulabo.

Not too many other roses have been as fortunate. The large majority that we have seen come out of stock photographs when they served as aids to the imagination. While everyone blamed the censors for being killjoys, it was actually a grand act of largesse to the directors who cut away each time the hero and heroine got close and showed us a couple of roses bobbing around frantically, trying to get at each other. This was enough for us to let loose our imaginations and enough to send most biologists into spasms of annoyance. Roses don’t get off that way, they snorted. Two birds yes, but two flowers? What were they going to do when they got close? Exchange floral fluids? They were a lot happier with the love-mad bee stumbling from the heart of the rose, although the purists didn’t much care for it when the kali in question turned out to be a rose.

Sanskrit literature doesn’t seem to care for too many flowers other than the lotus and anyway the rose wasn’t even here in Kalidas’ time, so he couldn’t put it in, could he? The rose, historians of that kind of thing like to say, wended its way out of China to Europe via the Middle East and was brought back to Kashmir by Babur in 1526.

Roses got their big moment on the marquee, up in lights no less, with Red Rose. Only, no one could figure out who was the red rose. Was it Rajesh Khanna, the serial killer who was slaughtering women? Was it Poonam Dhillon, the heroine, who escapes by the skin of her teeth? Or was it the cat who got thrown across the room and started one of the first protests about animal cruelty in Hindi cinema? Or was it simply the Sigappu Rojakkal that Kamal Haasan was in the habit of leaving behind near the bodies of his victims in the original?

But it was downhill after that.

It’s sad because if you think about it, roses did a lot of work. What would lyricists do without roses? A beautiful woman was a gulbadan as in “Eh gulbadan, eh gulbadan, phoolon ki mehek, kaanton ki chubhan” as Shammi Kapoor crooned to Kalpana in Professor. That was in 1962. We knew what Jalal Agha meant when he sang to his mehbooba, Helen, “Gulshan mein gul khilte hain/ Jab sehra mein milte hain.” That was in 1975.

Almost 20 years later, the rose was still around.

Ek ladki ko dekha to aisa laga, hums Anil Kapoor in 1942 – A Love Story (1994) and the first image that comes to his (and Javed Akhtar’s mind) is “Jaise khilta gulaab”. You couldn’t turn around without bumping into a rose in Chandni and Lamhe. Yashji (Chopra), always a long-time admirer of the power of the rose, allowed some tulips into Silsila but as soon as it was Lataji’s (Mangeshkar) turn to sing Neela aasmaan so gaya, Rekha got some roses to match her lip gloss for glossiness. A bunch of them got caught in a slammed door when Amitabh Bachchan courted Hema Malini in Satte Pe Satta, a remake of the Hollywood musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers; there’s much play around roses and Rose Day in Mohabbatein (although it seems odd to name a day after a plant that is going to die in droves).

Today, we do see the odd rose or two. In Armaan, Preity Zinta takes a bath with an equal volume of water and red roses. But it isn’t the same. Because when Mallika Sherawat and Himanshu Malik kiss 17 times in a single film (Khwaahish, if it makes a difference), we do not see 32 roses. We see Mallika and Himanshu kissing.

We miss the roses.