Remembering ‘Oru Muraithaan Pookkum’(“Blooms Only Once”)

There was a time when I didn’t know the difference between popular taste and literary merit—nor did I need to. All I knew was that I was hooked. Every week, like clockwork, I would pick up the latest issue of Ananda Vikatan to read the next chapter of a serialised novel that had captured our collective imagination: ‘Oru Muraithaan Pookkum’, which translates to “Blooms Only Once.”

The wait between episodes felt eternal. But that anticipation was part of the charm. Monday mornings at school would open with more than just classes—we had ‘literary debates’, though we didn’t call them that. With friends like Venkatesh, Srinivasan, and Karki Raj, the freshly read chapter would be discussed with the intensity of a cricket match post-mortem. Did she really mean what she said in that line? Why did he walk away? Where is this heading?

We were not critics. We were believers. We gave ourselves over to the story fully, with no filters.

I remember the setting as vividly as the pages. The bustling streets of Ramnagar in Coimbatore, the iconic Lighthouse bus stop, the magic of Baba Complex theatres—they weren’t just physical spaces, they were part of that reading experience. We read the novel in one world and discussed it in another, yet they flowed into each other seamlessly, like the ink that seeped into our imagination.

Looking back, I realise how formative those experiences were. They taught me the rhythm of serialized storytelling, the intimacy of weekly waiting, and the power of shared narrative consumption. Before binge-watching, before Goodreads, before algorithms knew our tastes—there was something raw, beautiful, and deeply human about how stories reached us and stayed with us.

‘Oru Muraithaan Pookkum’ wasn’t just a novel. It was a chapter in our lives.

And like the bloom it was named after, perhaps it came only once—but left behind a lasting fragrance.