Memories of Magnolias

A sharp thwack cut through the raga playing on our vinyl player, and my palm instinctively goes to my stinging cheek. The tabla kicks in as I look back up to Baba towering over me.

The lamp behind him catches on his wrinkles and flaps, casting his face in shadow deep enough to make him inscrutable. But I can see three distinct white shapes. His stark hair, always slicked back, now falls forward. And his eyes, now tinged red, cut crystalline focus on me. They’re hard, not like they always are, but harder still. Like a wood plane, I feel them shaving me down strip by strip. The veena of the ustad does nothing to soften his blades.

And right when I’m unable to bear being split, something changes, and his eyes become more bloodshot. His hand, still held aloft, trembles, just slightly. Imperceptibly. His brow lowers. The lamp betrays his attempt to hide the sag of his face, the shadows run deeper. He turns around and walks away, closing his bedroom door behind him.

The raga continues playing, the tabla becoming more frenetic, until Maa takes the needle off the vinyl. “Go to your room, please,” she says, and that was that.

I can’t stop my eyes from going. My room feels colder than usual; I feel the salt flow into my mouth as I clench hard in bed. The sting on my cheek subsides in a few minutes, though the groove it carved in my chest aches with a numbing pain. I rock myself back and forth, but can’t stop myself from shaking as my nails dig into my arms. I pull a blanket over me, and it dries my eyes enough for me to lie there for a few minutes.

There’s a knock at my door, and Maa walks in with a steaming cup. I sit up.

“Here,” she says, pushing it into my hand as she sits down on the bed. I look at her, not saying anything. She does the same. Her face is expressionless, though her gaze is fixed on me. A minute passes as I hold the cup in between us.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally.

“Hmm…” she responds. We stay as we are.

I look at the cup. It feels warm. I hold it with both palms.

I take a sip. Maa gets up to leave. I look up to say something, and she pauses at the door to look at me. She leaves.

The cup in my hand is warm. I take another sip.

---

The next day, I have an opportunity. I had a small allowance saved up, from which I take a fistful of rupees to the plant nursery nearby. The florist there is a slim young man, a number of years older than me but much younger than the adults around us.

Maa always liked magnolias, so I pick one out. I hold it up to him and he cheerily asks me the occasion.

“It’s a gift for my Maa,” I say. “I said something bad yesterday, so I want to make her happy today.”

“Well then, will you only give her the one flower? It looks lonely,” he says.

I furrow my brow as I take in this new information. It’s a nice, big flower, but then it does look a bit lonely.

“Here,” he offers. “Who all are in your family?”

“At home, it’s just Baba, Maa, and me,” I say.

“Three total? Then you should take three flowers. Here, I’ll show you,” he says. He takes another magnolia and puts them side by side, and then takes a smaller one and sets it between them. “See? It looks better now. And once you have these big open flowers, you can do a bit more with smaller ones around it.” He takes a few Rajnigandha flowers and some green fronds, and puts them all together, showing me how he does it.

When he’s finished, he hands me a small bouquet, wrapped in white parchment paper. It smells vibrant and perfumed. A white bouquet that fits in my hands, with a few green spots in between.

My eyes light up — Maa will definitely love this! I give him the money and start hurrying back. He waves to me as I leave and wishes me well.

When I come home, Baba is out. He goes out on Thursdays to play cards with his friends, and he’s always back before sundown in time for dinner. I call to Maa and find her reading in the study. She looks over her glasses at me, and I feel shy and small.

I hide the bouquet behind my back and go up to her. When I pull it out with a big grin, she doesn’t move for a few seconds. But then she puts her book aside and stands up to accept it from me. She caresses my face and smiles. The ice between us from yesterday melts.

“Come with me,” she says. We take the bouquet to her room, and gives it to me to hold while she rummages in her cupboard. From the bottom shelf, behind sarees and dresses I haven’t seen her wear, she pulls out a box of books, from which she takes a diary. “You knew I love magnolias?”

“Yes! I’ve seen you look at them whenever we go to the stores together. You always take a moment to stop at the nursery and smell them, so I thought I’d bring you some!” I say.

“That is so very thoughtful of you,” she says. “I think that thought should be remembered.” And she shows me her diary. It has a soft, brown cover, and its pages are slightly yellowed. She turns through the pages and I see pressed flowers, some red, some yellow, many white. Some of these flowers have notes next to them, some have photos.

I see a photo of some teenage girls, wearing black robes and square hats, holding bouquets. “Who are they?” I ask.

“These are my friends the day we finished college,” Maa says. She runs a finger over each one as she tells me about them.

“That’s you?!” I say. “Wow Maa, I can’t recognize you!”

She smiles. “Yes, this is many, many years ago. Long before you were born.”

She shows me other pages and pressed flowers. Birthdays and weddings, friends and family members, notes about others and notes about herself. We stop at a photo where she is standing with a man. He looks different, but I recognize him.

“Is that Baba?” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “He got me the flower here.” In the photo, she is holding a bouquet of magnolias. One of them is pressed into the adjoining page, dried and preserved.

I look closer. His hair is black, not white. His face has no wrinkles. His mouth is not frowning. He’s smiling, and his smile reaches his eyes, which glimmer like stars.

She opens to a fresh page and takes the small flower from my bouquet. At her request, I fetch a pair of scissors and some paper napkins. She cuts it in half and separates the petals out, and directs me to lay them in a pattern I like on the napkin. Together, we prepare it and press it between doubled napkins, and lay it on a fresh page in the diary. She closes it and puts it back in the box, putting other books on top.

We look up to see the lights from the windows have dimmed. It is dinner time. She shooes me away to wash up while she prepares the table. We sit and wait for Baba to come back any moment. He always comes back by sundown and we have dinner together.

The dim light of the evening gives away entirely, and the clock strikes seven. Baba hasn’t come back yet.

We wait. Half an hour passes. If Maa is worried, I don’t see it. Another fifteen minutes later, she calls me to the table and sets my plate. I’m not sure, but she encourages me to eat. She sits with me and smiles, and slowly I start eating. “What about you, Maa?” I say, but she says she’ll wait. I finish up and we clear the table together. We’re just about finished when Baba walks in through the door. I leave the kitchen to greet him.

He looks different. Tired. I welcome him home and he barely acknowledges me. He takes off his shoes and walks over to the couch and sinks into it, laying his head back. Maa walks into the room and they look at each other.

I feel something has changed. She asks me to fetch Baba a glass of water. While I’m in the kitchen, I hear them a little in the living room.

“…shouldn’t have happened,” Baba says. “I don’t know where he…”

“Children echo what they see…” says Maa.

I come back with the water. He nods and drinks the whole thing. I take it back to the kitchen, and Maa sends me to my room. I go, but press my ear to the door.

“I don’t know how to address this,” I hear Baba say.

“This is how you address it? Coming home drunk?” Maa says.

“I only had two. Do you think I’m some raging drunk?” says Baba, that last part a little too harshly. Maa responds in kind, and I back away from the door. They go back and forth, getting louder. I try to play with my toys, though I know I’ll hear them for a little while longer.

---

A few days later, Maa tells me there is a fair at the park, and Baba has agreed to take me. I’m surprised, but I don’t argue when she asks me to go get ready.

I come out and my parents are waiting in the living room. I squirm as Maa holds my face tight to comb my hair. Baba looks me over, satisfied, and he and I leave.

I sit on the back of his scooter holding him. He doesn’t say anything while we’re riding. When we get there, he grumbles about the admission fee but buys two tickets. He walks in and I follow, two steps behind.

The fair itself is nice. There are rides, games, stores, and treats. The ferris wheel catches my eye but Baba walks towards a ring game instead. He pays the attendant, who hands me three rings to try and throw at some bottles. My hands are unsteady as Baba watches me. I throw one, and it clinks off the edge of a bottle. I throw another, and it falls short.

I turn to Baba and offer him the last ring. He shakes his head. “No, no. Go ahead. We came here for you.”

I turn back and take careful aim. My focus is fully on a bottleneck and cannot see anything else. I take a breath, and throw. It hits the bottle top and bounces off.

“Oh! So close, young man!” says the attendant. “Would you like to try again?”

“No, thank you,” Baba says for me, and we walk off. I don’t look up at him.

We go towards other stalls. There’s a balloon shooting game, and Baba is about to speak to the attendant, when I stop him. “Um… I don’t want to play.”

“Why not?” he asks. He looks genuinely surprised.

“I… I don’t know,” I say, looking at the ground. “I can’t.”

“Okay,” he says. “What would you like to do instead?”

“Can we… can we ride the ferris wheel?”

“Okay, let’s go.”

We walk back towards the rides. The wheel itself is not very large or impressive; it is made of wood and only has six seats. Baba talks to the two ride helpers, and I hear him arguing about the rate.

“It’s okay, we don’t have to—” I begin to say, but he pays the man. We both get on one of the seats and wait for a few other patrons to turn up, at which point the two helpers begin turning the cranks and the wheel slowly goes around. When we get to the top, it feels taller than I thought. I can see half the fair.

“So…” Baba says. I turn to him. “Do you like it?”

“Yes, it’s nice. Thank you.”

“I’m glad,” he says, looking ahead. The helpers crank on as the wheel goes around about fifteen times, and then stops. We get off when we’re brought down, and make our way to a nearby picnic bench on the grass.

“So, I wanted to talk to you. About what you said to your mother that day.”

“I already said sorry to her. I won’t do it again.”

“Oh, you did?” he says, sounding surprised. “What did she say?”

I tell him about the same evening when she came to my room, and then about the flowers the next day. “She showed me her old photos of both of you, and the flowers she’s kept. We pressed one together.”

He is quiet for a moment, as he considers this. “Good, I’m glad you apologized. I hope you don’t do it again.”

“No, Baba. I won’t.”

The sounds of playful laughter and cheer from nearby patrons of the fair fill the silence in between us. Children holding balloons run ahead of doting parents keeping up. Smells of fried snacks lilt in the air.

“You seem like you want to say something else.”

“No, I… it’s nothing.”

“What is it, son? Tell me.”

I feel myself shaking. My face is stinging again as wetness runs down my cheek and I taste salt. He is startled at the sight, and crosses the bench to sit next to me and put his arms around me.

“I saw two different people that day, Baba! I saw you come home, and I saw you in the picture. And I don’t know why they’re different!” I don’t know what I’m saying, but the words come spilling out. “But these two people are so different to Maa. And I am afraid that I might have changed him into you!” I feel him stiffen, but my head is buried in his chest, so I can’t see his eyes widen. “I’m sorry I changed you, Baba!”

He holds me tighter, even as he trembles with me. “No, my son, no. You did not change me.” I feel a drip in my hair, and another. “You are a gift, and you always have been. I’m sorry that I have let you feel anything less. I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

The sounds of laughter and frolic around us are distant in this moment. The bench on the grass exists in it own world, as if in the light of a street lamp cutting through the shadow of night. In this window, a father holds his son to protect him from the cold, and a son holds his father, pushing down a wall weathered with age.

---

It’s Thursday and Baba has gone to play cards. Maa and I spend most of the afternoon doing a jigsaw puzzle. As the evening comes, we start to get dinner ready, when Baba returns, earlier than usual. I go out to greet him.

He looks different again, but not tired. He’s standing straight, his hair is freshly cut and his face shaved. He beckons me to him and I walk up. He sits down and cups my cheek, smiling. “Thank you,” he says. “Could you please go get your mother?”

I run to the kitchen where Maa is, and grab her hand to bring her out. She stops when she sees him. He brandishes a small bouquet of white flowers, and holds her gaze as he walks up to her. His mouth whispers a silent sentence.

And for a brief moment, as I see his eyes so fixated upon Maa, unsure, nervous, I do not see the father I know. His hair is not stark white, his face is not wrinkled, his mouth is not scowling. And when she nods and accepts the flowers from him, his nervousness gives way to a smile, a smile that reaches his eyes, which glimmer like stars.

---

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