New Delhi, July 26 -- I was at the end of a book tour in Bengaluru when I spotted something bright in the paved courtyard of a historic bookstore. I had been surrounded by paper all day, and this thing was the very opposite in its feel. Velvety, possessing a kind of glad, un-curated quality: a florid plant shooting in every direction. The leaves were a bright spinach green, the branches crowned with elegant, hot-pink blossoms so that even from a distance-and belying the imperviousness of the concrete it spouted from-it gave out a fragrant, wafting smell. It was a happy sprawl having a conversation with everything around it.

Generations ago, our kith and kin may have known this plant and its blossoms by a different name: the four-o-clock ...