Flowers in the Blood by Gay Courter

then,” he said with more manly vigor than I had heard in a long time.
    After drinking a third cup of tea, he opened the window and breathed deeply. A strong wind blew his hair in front of his eyes. He pushed it back, grinned, and took the napkin he held in his hand and waved it in the breeze.
    “Good, the wind is from the northwest. This dry weather is perfect.”
    “For what, Papa?”
    “Ah, that you will see, my child, for this is why we have come to Patna.”

     
    Standing before the rickshaw, my father made certain I wore my topee to protect my head from the sun. He himself wore a cork helmet that snapped under the chin. Abdul handed up a leather box tied firmly with straps, and Yali slipped me a package containing fruit and cakes. We proceeded along a narrow but firmly packed path running perpendicular to the river. Soon we stopped amid a collection of mud huts clustered under tall shade trees, each with an untidy garden. Beyond them stretched miles of verdant fields that from a distance seemed to have been sprinkled with streaks of icing sugar. As we came closer I peered more intently, and I could see the whiteness was the petals of millions of gorgeous flowers undulating in the breeze.
    “What are they?” I asked as Papa helped me down. I ran to the head of a blooming row and breathed in the lavish fragrance.
    “Poppies.”
    “Poppies!” My hand brushed a cluster of fringed blossoms that were so ripe the petals flew off like frightened moths. They fluttered a long while in the air currents before settling on the reddish earth. Dazzled by the effect, I moved a few feet down the row and tried again. “Oh!” I cried in delight, running down the slender path between the rows, my fingertips jostling the feathery petals lightly, but having the effect of a scythe. “Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!” I shouted to the wind. A shower of white billowed up around me as I made my way back up a second row.
    Breathless, I met up with my father again. I shook the petals from my hair and grinned. “Why have we come to see them?”
    “Because these flowers are my business, the Sassoon family trade.”
    “You own these fields?”
    “Not exactly. The government owns them, but we will buy most of the crop when it comes to auction in Calcutta later in the year.”
    “So you sell flowers?”
    “Yes, Dinah.”
    “I don't see how you can get them to China before they die.”
    He threw his head back and laughed so hard he had to wipe his tearing eyes. “Today you will learn everything there is to know about poppies.” He plucked a flower. “This is Papaver somniferum,” he said in a reverential tone, “the most prized flower in the world. Not only is it beautiful, it contains a secret substance that eliminates pain, cures diseases, and makes men happy.”
    “Everyone must want it, then.”
    “Yes, and they will pay dearly for it.” He twisted the stem, almost the thickness of my little finger, back and forth. The translucent petals vibrated prettily. “Our little secret is that it is quite easy to grow and process. We purchase it for a handful of rupees and sell it for baskets of silver.”
    My mother had told me tales of weaving straw into gold, explaining these were mere stories, but the idea of converting a plant to a valuable mineral was true! My father plucked the petals and held up the naked, unripened seed capsule. Its pale green flesh, the color of a baby frog, glistened with dew.
    “Watch this.” He took a knife from his pocket and made three vertical slashes in the fat bulb. “This is called 'lancing.' “ A sticky milk, like white blood, began to ooze out. “Lachryma papaveris.” He studied the droplets as though they were precious works of art. “The tears of the poppy. Every spring, when the petals begin to drop, the villagers cut the bulbs in the afternoon, leaving the sap to drip slowly out during the night. The next morning the congealed blackish fluid is scraped off before the heat makes it stick