It had been a year since she had last seen them. They grew at the road side. One could only find them in the mornings; the children would pluck them all for selling early in the morning. Poor little children who did not know that the flowers they plucked would not all be used in the garlands and ‘gajaras’. She could only sympathize with them… maybe donate a sum to a charity, knowing fully well it may never reach the unfortunate kids.
She and her husband had donated a large amount to an orphanage in a coastal town, a year back. Back when a child’s happiness had meant something to her.
Julia was a little more mature, a little more stronger than the last time she had come to India. Come to India and lost all that she had acquired over the past one year. And yet this place beckoned to her. Maybe it was the last time she ever came here. If only for closure.
Her knack for converting one sort of closure into another beginning scared her. She did not wish for this closure to be a beginning of any sort. If it would be, this closure would mean nothing.
The afternoon heat and the barely bearable humidity crept its way down her back and her soaking cotton blouse. The walk to the auto stand was converting into some sort of monstrous journey... like a destination that moved away, every time you moved towards it.
She was trying to appear more dignified than her condition was permitting, because she knew the stares that would follow her everywhere. She had experienced this before.
They stared at the ones with the fair hair. A foreigner with dark hair was not much inspected. The innocent attention of the little ones made her smile and wave, and then hurriedly tuck her arms back, ashamed that she was no one to be treated that way and yet understanding their curiosity, or rather to justify her act to herself.
Finally, soaking and tired, Julia reached the auto stand and took an auto (who was over charging but that did not seem important to her at the moment) to her guest house in Pondicherry.
The same one where she had stayed last year.
Such sweet memories they could have been, marred by tragedy, nothing but anguish and pain remained of them. Like the stump of an amputated limb. Would- be happy memories turned to a phantom of what could have been.
Whenever said memories were recalled she skipped the perfection before and to the actual incident that had brought on the beginning of the end.
It had begun with them sleeping facing away from each other… creating a silence that neither she nor her husband dared question. The space that they apparently gave each other… to settle back into their previous lives widened into a chasm so wide neither of them could cross… or maybe had the inclination to cross.
At first it was a forgotten birthday… a late evening that went unquestioned… him shifting to the sofa in the hall… ‘the silence is uncomfortable’, he had said… then why not break it?
Broken pieces fell into place like a monstrous jig saw puzzle composing itself.
Late nights to sleeping in an empty house.
The smell of cigarettes and feminine perfume.
And finally their last evening together… when she had quietly questioned him about his string of affairs. Predictably he had turned the table on her. ‘If only you had been a better wife… a better mother… supported me like you should have…’
It had broken her heart.
More than the polite distances that had grown between them. More than the affairs. That he would ask her for support when she too needed it. Maybe more than him. The guilty one often feels the hurt worse. And she accepted this pain as penance for her crime. Even if, the cause was not her, not completely at least.
She had asked for some time alone, to visit the last place they were happy, together. And he had cared less than little. She had run away. Hoping to escape the pain and tragedy that awaited in her house. Not telling him the cause or her reasons for leaving in such haste, lying about her destination, like it served him right to be lied to.
And over her solitary journey across the oceans and miles back to India, to the flowers her beloved daughter had loved so much, she had come to a realization. It was time to move on. To bid farewell to her life as it was now. To stop trying to move on and just move on. To let go.
She thought of the flowers that she had tried to plant at her daughters grave, while her husband had tried to pry her hands off the muddy roots near the grave. He had not understood. He had not seen what they meant to her.
He had never understood. He never would. And it was not helping her, in any way.
That evening, Julia sat hunched by the dirt road, smiling for the first time in ages, it felt, as she remembered the smoothness of her daughter’s cheeks. The petals she now touched reminded her of the softness of her baby’s palms as they rested in her bigger hands.
also reminded her of her frantic attempts at looking for those orange flowers with eight petals that her angel had insisted on calling sunflowers, for her funeral.
Collecting the flowers in a hat, she put them carefully in a bag. She had to be careful lest she crush them on the way to the beach. The place Angela, her daughter had last smiled, played and thrown a tantrum and run away from her when she had scolded her for playing in the water.
And she had run into the arms of the sea again. It was her fault, wasn’t it?
For sending her running into the water, where tide after tide had come for her, like evil demons in a dream, with soulless eyes and drooling mouths. The tides had tumbled her in the water, like the washing machine advertisements on TV, Julia thought, before turning into a toddler’s watery grave.
Swiping away fresh tears, that were ever ready to spill from the past one year, she stepped into the calm water… gentle tides soothing her tanned legs. She walked in deeper, till the helm of her blouse floated in the water.
That one good cry she had thought would end it, happened then. The shoulder shaking, blurry eyed, heart wrenching sobs, the open mouthed silent cry of grief and that emotional whirlpool of loss gave her company as she laid the flowers on the tides as if it were a grave; wishing for them to reach a place her daughter was in. The flowers floated around her for a while before drifting away into the ocean… she wished the sea had taken her daughter as gently as it took the flowers. She wished the sea had not taken her daughter at all.
A sense of liberation overtook her as she let the tides sway her, lull her into a thought process so gentle it was like nudging a scared child.
Her daughter was at peace now, probably. Happy to see her beloved flowers. To know that her mother had finally taken a step out of the trench she was in. And maybe she was proud that it was her favorite flowers that had helped her mother get up. To end the misery. And begin again.
Julia had planted actual sunflowers and the orange sunflowers so that her daughter would know the difference in her next life. And this time, there was no one to pull her away as she chatted to her dead daughter about the flowers, and said a goodbye, with a smile that she meant.
A month later, David received an envelope from Julia.
It held divorce papers and dried flowers, each with eight petals.
The orange sunflowers.
