her lover will soon return and they will be united forever after ceremonial wed-lock.³⁰ This association of the veenkai with weddings led to the custom of new brides adorning their hair with these golden flowers, and of parents carrying out deliberations regarding their children’s espousals, and of the festive dances taking place on the marriage day, under a flowering veenkai.³¹ A touching poem in the Naṛṛiṇai collection speaks of a heroine weeping almost unconsciously as soon as she adverted the veenkai had flowered, for she realized that of her lover’s return there was as yet no sign.³²

   Veenkai flowers were among those whose lovers preferred to give their beloveds, especially during the period of courtship. Lovers exchanged garlands among themselves.³³ The hero himself adorns the heroine’s tresses with the flowers he has brought for her.³⁴ He makes presents of bouquets of flowers and leafy-dresses or leafy-girdles to be worn as ornaments around the waist.³⁵ Another flower commonly presented by lovers of the hills was the gloriosa superba. In the first poem of Kuṛuntokai, the maid companion rebukes a chief mildly when he hands bunches of gloriosa superba that he has brought from his own hills to be presented to the heroine. She implies by the rebuke that the chief ought to marry the heroine, and thus end the courtship which has been the occasion for gossip in the vicinity. Her laconic statement is, “On our own hill sacred to Murukan, flowers also this clustered blood-red flower”, meaning that she rejects his offer of flowers to her lady.³⁶

The heroine on the other hand, once in love is desperately in love with all the natural objects connected with her lover, with the hills which are his possession, with the clouds that sail over them, with river or stream that brings waters of the hills, with the plants and flowers which these waters wash down from the chief’s mountainons abode. To a maid sorrowful because of her mistress languishing for her lover, the mistress says:

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   ³⁰Akam; 2; Kali; 38, Nar; 206. Cfr: Akam; 378.

   ³¹Nar; 313; Kali; 42; Cfr; Kur; 241