Red Flags

Chhura said you should beware the colour red. Perhaps he was talking about red flags. Red is a beautiful, vibrant colour, full of vitality and life. It also screams at you and if it does, it would serve you well to pause and pay attention to it. It could be warning you about a world of disappointment you could fall trap to. Big disappointments.

It’s like when you receive a bouquet and it’s all anthurium, the vegetable looking flower, I am disgusted. Speaking of which, this is not a flower I have ever felt deserved its attention and fame in Mizoram.

I mean it looks like baibing and aside from the mild allergy it induces, baibing is very tasty, alone or as an herb accompaniment to some other dish. I’d actually thought when I first heard the name that it was some sort of roselle because anthur in Mizo is roselle. But noooooo, a roselle has very pretty flowers and it is good to eat. What point then to give to anthuriums, the penile-shaped poisonous-to-ingest plant? Honestly, no love lost for anthuriums.

I don’t even know where they smuggled it in from but wherever they got it from, I bet it was some land lost to time somewhere in a swampland and some rich gentleman brought his lady along with him boating and she thought, Hey roses are passé I need to convince the other ladies something else is the new black, and she saw red leaf-like plants and she just ordered the servants to go get it, and that’s how anthuriums came to be in the eyes of polite society. The emperor’s new clothes, that’s what anthuriums are.

Which is also what red flags tend to be, come to think of it. It’s amazing how many times red flags can wave about right in front of your eyes but you either completely ignore it or dismiss them as pink-adjacent! But the red bleeds out. And once it does, you wonder how you could ever have not noticed them and then you can no longer un-see them.

Roses have thorns and for that, I think a rose is honest. It is beautiful but it can prick you and bleed you. You are on your guard. If you do allow it to hurt you, you know what you were in for when you went in. Anthuriums are thornless and mild-looking, nothing fancy, humble to behold and unassuming. They tend to throw off your survival instincts. But if you ingest it, you will suffer for it. Ugly can be a very good disguise, I find.

Be like Chhura. He knew to beware the colour red.