Where the Long Grass Bends by Neela Vaswani

Author:Neela Vaswani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2012-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Gardening Gloves. Circa 1980. Astoria, Queens.

The gloves were green, the palms lined with rubber nodules that looked, to Kumar, like taste buds. Mary said they were good for grip.

A narrow dirt plot stretched behind the building. The other tenants had no interest in gardening, and the landlord told Mary she could harvest the yard—an eighth of an acre more wondrous to her than the Botanical Gardens. She planted Emperor tulips, a rhododendron bush with waxen leaves and lavender blooms. Her roses (Kumar named them after Mughal emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, the thorniest one: Aurangzeb) were robust, the soil around their roots pampered with special treatments of ground eggshells and diced banana peels.

“Roses don’t die; they turn into something else,” Mary liked to say as she arranged the yellow, red, and white petals on plates. Inside the apartment, cups and glasses burst with roses, some tight to the bud or frosted and festooned, some cut long and stripped of their serrated greens. The small tea roses Mary decapitated and floated with candles in bowls of water. Priyanka’s and Rita’s drawers overflowed with potpourri, and Mary bottled rose water, left it stoppered by the bathtub, so Kumar could spill some in while he soaked. At the end of the season, she made rosehip tea. Rita said it tasted greasy, but the idea of drinking roses delighted Priyanka and she had cup after cup.

Mary spoiled her flora. She made coffee just for the zinnias and managed to contain the bamboo along the back fence in a neat, rectangular grove. She liked the way it creaked when the wind blew. A couple of rows into the bamboo, she tucked a small statue of the Virgin Mary and one of Shirdi Sai Baba. Despite Kumar’s pleading, she refused to raise anything functional—no herbs or vegetables, nothing edible. She grew only beautiful, frivolous things.

Kumar could not be in the garden if she was transplanting. The sound of roots being ripped, the separation of clustered flowers, upset him. He said it sounded like loss, like eviction: “It’s not natural to leave roots behind.”

“That’s why flowers put out so many, so some will survive. Like the Irish and children.” Mary rinsed her gloves at the garden hose and wrung them out. “If you and my grandmother hadn’t uprooted, we would have no Priyanka, no Rita.”

“True, true,” Kumar said. Still, when Mary transplanted, he stayed inside.

Every summer, Mary trained jasmine to climb a six-foot trellis. When the delicate flowers bloomed, Kumar took his plastic folding chair and sat, saying the smell of mogra reminded him of Sikanderabad. No one was allowed to talk to him for at least an hour while he closed his eyes and wandered around his memory.

Once, the four of them drove to the Rockaways on what Kumar called “The Great Seaweed March.” They piled out of the car (Mary in her green gloves, striding over the sand), the ocean rolling and sucking at their feet, each carrying a black trash bag that ballooned in the wind.

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