Word: lotus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...year-old Narayan let himself down to the bottom of a deep, six-foot-square pit outside of New Delhi. He spread the skin of a deer on the pit's wooden floor, placed his sandals carefully by his side, sat down and assumed the cross-legged "lotus position." Then he passed out a signed statement: "If anything wrong happens to my physical body, nobody should be held responsible but myself." At Narayan's signal, the pit was closed with wooden planks, and ten feet of earth were shoveled...
Married. Prince Muazzam Jah, 43, second son of the Nizam ("richest man in the world") of Hyderabad; and Sahebzadi Anwar Begum, 18, daughter of a wealthy Indian landowner; he for the second time (his first: Princess Niloufer ["Blue Lotus"] of Turkey), she for the first; in his father's King Kothi palace; in Hyderabad...
Ordinarily a blooming lotus merits no such rapt attention from Professor Ohga, who has been studying the genus for 30 years and is known in Japan as "Dr. Lotus." But this plant, lovingly tended by the doctor's good friend, 69-year-old Soy Saucemaker Moemon Ihara, had sprouted from a seed found in a nearby peat bog, imbedded in a neolithic canoe. Counting on 100 years to form each foot of the 15 feet of peat that covered the seed, and adding 500 years for the layer of topsoil above the peat, Dr. Lotus calculated that his seed...
...four days, while the plant flowered, the patient botanist watched and kept a detailed diary. He saw nothing that he had not seen many times before while studying the modern lotus. "On the first day," he wrote, "it assumes the shape of a sake bottle; on the second, the shape of a sake cup; on the third, the shape of a soup bowl; on the fourth, the shape of a saucer." By the end of the fourth day, the pale pink petals begin to wither and turn brown. Soon, all that is left is the seed pod, splayed out like...
...Lotus' observations convinced him of a second point. He did not hear the faint, soft pop of opening petals that has echoed for centuries through Japanese literature. Some years ago on a summer morning, the skeptical scientist dragged recording equipment to the shore of a lotus pond. There he assured himself that the modern flower blooms in silent beauty. Last week he "listened" to a prehistoric plant open to morning sunlight. Smiling till his tiny eyes all but disappeared in his face, he had bad news for sentimentalists: in spite of all that the poets have said, even...