TODAY

The fifth month of Myanmar lunar calendar is Wakhaung corresponding to August. It is the mid month of  Buddhist Lent, so it is called Wa (Lent) Khaung (middle). The south west mon-soon reaches Myanmar in full swing, flooding all aquatic bodies in the country. Hence there is a Myanmar saying 0gqdk? 0gacgif? a&azmifazmif(In Waso and Wakhaung there are billows of rain water). All rain plants and trees come out to display their colourful fragrant buds, blooms and fruits.

Astrological name of Wakhaung is Simha (Leo) with its zodiacal symbol of lion. Traditional festival held in this month is sayeytan ahlue pwe (religious charity by cast-ing lot).

Khatta, land lily (erinum amoenum) is the designated flower of this month. In the Ameri-can Heritage Dictionary Khatta (lily) is scien-tifically described and explained as follows;
“Any of various plants of the genus “lilium, having showy, various colored, often tumpet shaped floers. Any of various plants similar or related to the lily such as the day lily or the water lily, lily of the valley widely cultivated plant, giving a cluster of fragrant white blooms.” The English word “lily” comes from the Latin word “Lilium”.

In Myanmar flora literature, khatta and gamoun are usually mentioned together Gamoun is a generic tern for some herbs with aromatic tubers. There are mostly kyemferia from ginger family but also include a few from the orchid and lily families. Both Khatta and gamoun have some similar characteristics both grow wild anywhere in monsoon rain. They grow out of aromatic tubers. Both have a variety of colours and shapes. They are used in herbal medicine.

Alchemists seek for certain gamoun and khatta for use in their experiments of making mercury ball (philosapher’s stone). panaccea for curing all disease, for longevity of life, immunity from all weapons and danger or for attractive look to opposite gender.

Starting from July till the end of August or even September, khatta grows wild and profusely anywhere in the country. But in the hill regions like Kachin, chin, Shan, Kayah. Rakhine and Mon statesd Khatta creates amazing riots of colour, white, pink, red, yellow, spotted and stripped, giving out very pleasant fragrance, carpelting the entric space, out in the open, or under the shades or on the hill slopes. With their colours, shapes and frangrance khattas give us both eye feed and nose feed. As one English poet John Keats sings in one of his famous poems “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Khatta gives us for ever joy.

In Myanmar literature and songs Khatta is the favourite flower. The following are few specimens.

In one Myanmar classical song “Taung Taw Thaya” which is but a compilation of the name of Myanmar flowers in rhymes, Khatta comes first.

ေတာင္ေတာ၊ ေတာင္ေတာ သာယာ
ပန္းမ်ဳိးစံုစြာ ပြင့္မာလာ
ေခတၱာ ေရႊအင္ၾကင္း
ဇလပ္၀ါ ထပ္တစ္ရာ၊ ခြာျပာသင္း

Pleasant forests and hills
A variety of flowers fills
Khatta and golden Ingyin
Yellow zalat, Htat Taya, blue clematis spring.

In pre-war days, grammaphone record songs with western musical tune and melody were very popular. Two such songs sung by an academy award winner film actress and vocalist May Shin have Khatta flower adoringly sung as follows;

မဲဇာၿမိဳင္
လိုဏ္ဂူနန္းနဲ့ စိမ့္စမ္းေထြေထြ
မာလာစံုေပါတဲ့ ေတာ၀ဏာေဗြ
ကံေကာ္ပြင့္ ေဇာ္ရင့္ ေမ်ာ္တင့္ေ၀ေ၀
ပန္းပိေတာက္က်ဴးရနံ့
ထူးပ်ံ႕လႈိင္ေပ
သရဖီ၊ ေရႊအင္ၾကင္းဆင္းရနံ့
၀င္းဖန့္ဖန့္ ျဖဴေဖြးကာေန
ခတၲာ၊ ပုန္းညက္၊ ႀကိဳင္ထံုသင္းေပ

Meiza Forest
Coves, Spings and falls
Buds blooms and flowers all
Gantgrow, Padauk so fragrant
Gantgaw and Padauk so fragrant
Tharaphe and Ingyin luxuriant
Khatta and Ponnyet fresh and vibrant.

နံ့သာၿမိဳင္
ဇီဇ၀ါဖူးတံခ်ီ
ပန္းေသာ္က၊ ေဒါန ႏႇင္းဆီ
ေလယူရာေမႊးႀကိဳင္သည္
အသည္းထဲ လႈိက္ဖိုၿပီ
စိမ္းညိဳမႈိင္းတဲ့ ေတာတန္းဆီက
ခတၲာ၊ ဇလပ္နဲ့ ေရႊသရဖီ
ပန္း၀ါဆိုအမီ၊ ခူးဖို့ေကာင္းသည္
ၿမိဳင္ေတာမဟီ။

Nanttha Myaing Forest
Zizawa comes out in budding,
Thawka,dohna, roses following.
Being wafted by gentle brceze,
Making me feel pleased and merry.
In that dark green great glade,
Khatta, zalat and Tharaphe mate.
Oh bring all flowers to me,
In time for Wazo to offer at zedi.

Like jasmines, roses and orchids, khatta is a favourite name of a girl with charming beauty and sweet voice. In the countryside, swain (rural youngman) would liken his sweet-heart to a khatta flower. My Khatta flower means my lovely girl sweet heart.

Even in mod and pop songs in these days khatta never loses its pride of place. In one of his hit songs of vocalist Khaing Htoo “Khatta” this flower is adored thus:

ခတၲာ
၁။ စိမ္းလဲ့လဲ့ည၊ လရိပ္သမ္း၊ အခ်စ္ႏႈတ္ခမ္း
အနမ္းေတြ၊ ဖူးပြင့္ဖို့ေလ
ေမ်ာ္သူကို သံသယႀကိဳးရစ္ေႏႇာင္
လြမ္းရစ္ေနတုန္း သရ၀ဏ္
တူယႇဥ္လႇည့္ဦး
ၾကင္နာမည့္အသည္းရႇိတဲ့အရပ္
ညႊန္မယ္ဆို
၀ါဆိုပန္း မင္းလြင္ပုန္းညက္
ႏြမ္းရက္လြန္ ေႂကြၿပီမို့
သိဟ္ရာသီ၊ ၀ါေခါင္မိုးနဲ့
လႇမ္းလာခဲ့ေတာ့ ခတၲာရယ္

၂။ ေႏႇာင္းခက္ခက္ အခ်စ္ရိပ္ဦး
အညည္းမႇာ စူးနစ္ခဲ့လို့
သည္ဒဏ္ကို၊ ရင္မႇာေထြးေပြ့
ပိုက္ထားမလို့
သရ၀ဏ္ ကူညီပါဦး
အရင္လူ ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့တဲ့အခ်စ္
ျပင္မယ္ဆို
၀ါဆိုပန္းပြင့္ေ၀ ပုန္းညက္
ႏြမ္းရက္လြန္ ေႂကြၿပီမို့
သိဟ္ရာသီ၊ ၀ါေခါင္မိုးနဲ့
လႇမ္းလာခဲ့ေတာ့ ခတၲာရယ္။

၃။ ေဆြးေျမ့ေျမ့ေန့ ေမာင့္ကိုယ္စား
မလြမ္းခ်င္ဘူး အသက္ရယ္
မင္းဆံုးျဖတ္မႇ ယံုမယ္ေနာ္
ဒီတစ္ခါ မင္းသစၥာၿမဲရေစေမ
သရ၀ဏ္ကူညီလို့ သည့္အရင္
ေၾကကြဲခဲ့တဲ့ အတိတ္ႏႇင္မယ္ဆိုု
၀ါဆိုပန္းပြင့္ေ၀ ပုန္းညက္
ႏြမ္းရက္လြန္ ေႂကြၿပီမို့
သိဟ္ရာသီ၊ ၀ါေခါင္မိုးနဲ့
လႇမ္းလာခဲ့ေတာ့ ခတၲာေရ။

Khatta
On a fresh green bright right,
In the lovely moon light.
May buds and blooms of kisses
From your lips me caress.
Doubts entwine me so much
Tharawun star, pray come sharp,
To lead me to one with kind heart.
Ponnyet, the flower of Month Wazo
Withered and fallen long ago
In the season of Simha
With wakhaung monsoon,
My love Khatta come to me soon.
Forsaken love of my past,
Damaged much my heart,
Tharawun star, come help me, please,
From forsaken love of past to release.
Ponnyet the flower of month wazo
withered and fallen long ago
In the season of Simha
With wakhaung monsoon
My love Khatta come to me soon.
Sorrowful and longing on my behalf, don’t you feel?
You decide, then only I believe right.
This time your love troth resides.
Tharawun star, come help me,
To dispel my sorrowful past.
Ponnyet the flower of month wazo
Withered and fallen long ago.
In the season Simha
With wakhaung monsoon
My love Khatta, come to me soon.

  Sithu Dr Khin Maung Nyunt