Outgrowth

June in Jagiroad is an invite to breathlessness. The sun hangs low and lasts a full hour past five. I wonder if I like this extension of daylight. There’s a blanket of mango blossoms laid on the tree. I don’t think it’s going to dry, we are all drowning in moisture. Mother is outside. She can stand now. She is reading an augury of watery death on the blossoms. “This is not going to be a good year.” I would have smirked at that comment a few years ago. Things were different back then. I don’t think aging is anything less than an adventure hunt for gathering the most acceptable incoherencies and you being proved wrong for disbelieving them. Experience is you reading death on the flowerbeds for 26 years and remembering that her eyes have seen them 30 years more. I wouldn’t have smirked in my arrogant common sense, even without knowing what would happen this year. This surely wasn’t going to be a good year.

She lodges herself in front of the serpentine plant now.

We knew nothing about it except that it pre-existed us in this house, slithering through time on its flattened foliage. There was no pretence of self-fashioning, no attempt at being bred for show. It simply existed, green and lasting. And where there should have been a manicured edge were further appendages taking shelter. And so it grew, not an ounce of predetermination or curation allowed stay on the edges, only sprouts. But something was changing. “Look!” mother lets out a melodic sigh. “There are flower buds.” We had something to look forward to today, other than the pills on the hour. Mystery had suddenly found its way on our grains of polished rice. They were anything but pretty. The bud was snarled by what appeared to be a hundred crimsoned claws, girdling the bloom as if in a desperate attempt to safeguard the secret.

Epiphyllum. Brahma Kamal. Parijat. There, names to the mystique, a flower after all, ethereal and transient. The perks of a snoopy search engine. It’s almost sunset and the tinned roofs are getting ready to set ablaze the air above it. Heat and sweat and bouts of anemic breathlessness. But, for now, the clouds are a pearled garland of orange and pinks and every possible hue in-between. There are speckles of blue near the edge where the trees hug the horizon. We have something to look forward to today. An abundance of mango flowers always presages floods, my mother says, as we’re looking at the bedecked tree again. A man pushing something on a cart spooks my eyes for a millisecond, something wrapped in white. A distant memory. But people are fleeing their villages on foot as we speak, wading through an ochre deluge. Dhubri, Dhing, Barpeta, places where people have stopped resting dreams for fear of uprooting, again and again.

t’s almost close to dinner and I’m spilling on the edges. There is food to be cooked, family to be fed, files to submit, money to be earned. And, in the end, if there’s a second where the eyes don’t seek distraction, respites to be sketched. I almost miss out on the whiff of an overwhelmingly sweet smell suddenly materializing in the thick air. A small, globular spectre greets me and I see that the one of the flowers have bloomed.

It almost seems like the ghost of the sun, its long-extinguished flames slowly wrapping over its core. I call my mother, my brothers and even speak about it to my father who pretends not to notice me as he’s going downstairs. Several photos and exaltations to its beauty occupy our limiting attention. I do not have time for fancy now. I must return to my duties. I try to gather enough to take the family through the night. Enough potassium, magnesium, enough tingling of the tastebuds for the brothers to forget the weights on their heads. I go outside looking for my mother and she is sitting beside the flower. Her face has the glow of a person existing in an in-between state, a calm resignation that comes after a serious illness. Or is it tiredness? Must be. She seeks my eyes and directs me to the flowers. “The leaves have suffered so much for something which will stay just the night.” Better to not see the night at all than to see it just once. So much beauty, all lost in the lengthened wink of the night. I had a deep rumbling in my stomach and a knot that was tightening in my chest. I wanted her to look at the beauty. Didn’t Keats say that something effervescent could still be a lasting joy? Why did she have to ponder so much on the ending, on the brevity of the joy?

I have never been proficient at fostering life. I bought a tendril and it dried up despite my many attempts at rearing it to adulthood. Did I overwater it? Under-water it? Did it die of lack of sunlight? Or did I burn it by keeping it under the sun? Anything I touch withers. I get up from my temporary rest and find the bedsheet stained a deep red. I run to the bathroom before it dries, before it becomes a permanent blot of my loss. I can feel my father’s scowl on my back. His friends permanently bobbing their heads left and right in tandem with his grunts of disapproval. “He’s such a fine boy. Her mother has ruined her head.” Mother hears him talk. She reports it to me.

She is now tending to the snake plant my brother had bought. She found it humorous that this outgrowth had a name and it was sold as something which accrued money. And a considerable amount of it. “We had it growing by our backyard pond, kaka had to dig them up, otherwise snakes would nestle between them.” The plant had more decay than its leaves by now and it seemed like she was whispering her own hail Marys within its ears. But not even a week would pass by and there would be a thriving set of leaves newly growing from the erstwhile impotent soil.

During that trip where my brother got his plant and mine, both dying, his saved by my mother’s grace, we saw trees which looped in ways trees weren’t supposed to loop. There was an eerie precision, a routinized order in which the branches moved and the leaves spiked. Ficus bonsai, the namecard reads. The lady in-charge of guiding us (away from theft) also scoffed softly at our surprise and said, “These trees are older than all of us here.” I felt an acute pinch in the rolls of my fat. “They are older than me”, I thought. Twenty-seven-year old bonsai. Would their owner be proud, that he sheared and bent and motivated their branches and tops to how he wanted it to be? Am I gathering moss by my rebellion? Will my crowning hedge lose its leaf now that I’ve stopped following the stencil?

The flowers have bloomed at the cost of the leaves, my mother repeats, again. One of the ways you contend with distending time is by not letting go of it. You loop them around your neck, around your head, around your heart till you are sure you are wearing your life on your skin. Repetition as a survival tactic. Nostalgia. The leaves have lost their sap providing for the flowers. I wonder if she’s seeing herself wearing a pink salwar kameez with white flowers embroidered on the borders while she’s saying that. “Why don’t you wear salwar, Maa? I’ll buy it for you.” She shrugs my fanciful attempts at making her smile. “Because you were born. I lost all my weight and it never came back.”

I wish I could ask her if she ever forgave me for that, her first-born, her first and only-surviving girl. I wonder now if it’s permissible, even, for me to ask for that forgiveness. I needed to be safeguarded from the world, so she enclosed hers too, away from her life, the job with the typewriters, her handwriting which made her the office sweetheart. There are some things you can never repay. A broken heart is one of them. The murmurings of a quieted woman found its way to her heart.