Golu and Navaratri décor at home
Steps, backdrops, lights and flowers for a golu display that guests remember, from ₹6,500 for a Chennai flat.
Four in the morning at Koyambedu
How we buy two hundred kilos of flowers before sunrise, and what we check before a single garland is strung.
Every working day, our van leaves the Mylapore warehouse at 3.40 am for the flower market at Koyambedu. By 4 am, the market is already loud and wet, lit by tube lights, with trucks from Hosur, Dindigul and the villages around Chennai unloading sacks of marigold, crates of roses and baskets of jasmine. Senthil has done this run for nineteen years.
He goes first to the marigold traders he has bought from for years. He opens a sack, pushes a hand in and pulls out a fistful from the middle. Fresh marigold is cool, springy and bright to the base; flowers that have heated in the sack overnight are soft and brown underneath. He checks three sacks before agreeing a price by the kilo. On a wedding day we may buy 200 kg of marigold alone.
Jasmine is bought as late as possible, closer to 5 am, when the morning’s picking arrives. It is sold by weight or by the measure, and the price can double overnight in the wedding season. Roses come in bunches of twenty, checked for firm heads and clean stems. Mango leaves, banana stems and coconut fronds come from a separate corner of the market.
By 5.30 am the van is back in Mylapore. Flowers are spread on wet jute sacks in the shade, sprinkled with water and sorted by size. Our team of eight begins stringing at 6 am, and by the time most of Chennai is awake, the first thoranams are already on their way to the hall.
