Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib

Author:Shahnaz Habib [Habib, Shahnaz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, History, Adult
ISBN: 9781646220168
Google: _JZpEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B09XM5DFRZ
Barnesnoble: B09XM5DFRZ
Goodreads: 106930802
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter

SIX

I HAVE SO MANY PHOTOS OF IT. BOUGAINVILLEA DRAPING over walls next to cobbled streets, bougainvillea running wild over the iron railings of restaurants, bougainvillea bonsai in a rock garden. They are hardy, flowering even in near-droughts. They come in an array of lollipop colors, from golden yellow to magenta. They fit into any context, somehow managing to look as if they have always belonged here. Cobbled street in Rome? Sure. Beachside balcony in Miami? Why not. Dusty Delhi road? No problem.

I remember my mental muscles twitching the first time I learned that the papery petals of the bougainvillea are actually not flowers; they are leaves. We lived then in a small house, rented from a family friend. The neighbors on both sides were wealthy and their houses had gardens, and the households had stay-at-home mothers and servants to water the plants. As a result, a luxuriant bough of bougainvillea clambered over one tall wall and spilled over into the yard between our house and their wall. I thought of it as our bougainvillea and felt even then the grace of this plant, climbing over walls, bridging social chasms, bringing its beauty to people who had done nothing to deserve it.

It was my aunt, an agricultural scientist, who told me that the bougainvillea flowers were not flowers. The scientific term is bract—a modified leaf. Bougainvillea bracts come in extraordinary colors, from shades of pink that go from the lightest of blushes to extravagant fuchsias. There are crinkly yellows that remind me of crumpled first drafts and oranges and saffrons and whites, often brilliant against the lush green leafery that surrounds them. “These bracts are actually protecting the real flowers, by pretending to be flowers,” my aunt told me, teasing out the tiny white flower hiding inside a cluster of magenta bracts.

My parents eventually built a house of their own. By the time they finished the house, we children had left home. After years of living in a house that was too small, my parents now live alone in a house that is too big for them. My mother, whose bank-clerk salary was the only source of income for most of our childhood, started gardening, turning her practical maternal attention to green peppers and curry leaves and aloe vera. “I am not interested in flowers,” she would say, frugally choosing “useful plants” to make the most of her small yard. But then the bougainvillea bug bit her. One year when I came home from Brooklyn, there was a row of pots on the wall, with bougainvilleas in different colors spilling out of them. It was my job that summer to water them carefully. Bougainvillea roots are weak—they are climbers, so they have no idea how to support their own weight. What they have instead is a strong grip—using their thorns, they wind their way up or down, finding a home for themselves on hedges, walls, other trees, making themselves both ordinary and spectacular at the same time. They reminded me of

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