21
My youngest aunt owned a small flower kiosk. She also designed silver jewelry, adorned necklaces and bracelets with colorful precious stones, and sold them to friends and relatives. She did many things, and she liked colors and strange designs. She had never married. Since my childhood, I had always seen her as the most beautiful woman in our family. She wore delicate clothes with lace details. She was in her fifties when she gave up everything else and bought a small kiosk, using the money of her share in the sale of my grandfather’s land. There was no one to tend the land, but she could tend flowers. She read a lot about flowers, and began by growing chrysanthemums. I didn’t know much about flowers except that I liked lilies. Any man I got close to soon discovered that a bouquet of lilies could put me in a good mood for at least a day.
But my aunt grew chrysanthemums, delicate flowers with pinkish petals and a dark yellow heart. The flower’s name was beautiful, but it didn’t do justice to its delicateness and sweetness. My aunt arranged flowers in vases and sprinkled them with cold water. She also grew daffodils, irises, tulips, and Egyptian red roses, which filled her kiosk with their fragrance—real roses, not like the odorless, spiritless ones I saw in the fancier flower shops. She sourced plant food from strange places, and asked anyone coming from abroad to bring her seeds so she could add new species to her beautiful, mesmerizing bouquets.
Zayn always brought me flowers. He used to go to my aunt’s kiosk and buy me a bouquet of his favorites with a single branch of lilies with closed buds in the center. I’d receive this gift eagerly. In each flower I saw a word Zayn had told me in a moment of clarity. I placed the flowers in the big vase at his place and instructed him to sprinkle them every morning with cold water, until the lilies opened and their dark hearts leaped forward with a passion for life akin to my own in those days. I don’t think I have ever been as open to life as I was when I was loved by Zayn.
I miss his words, his tenderness, the pleasure of feeling his hands on me. I remember my eagerness to taste life. I wasn’t exhausted back then. I didn’t wake up every morning dreading the start of a new day. I woke up at peace; no preemptive damning of the day to come, of which I knew nothing yet. I woke up early and raced through the day until the time I saw Zayn. He was good-natured, serene, understanding, mature, and just brilliant in every way. I wanted every new day to go on forever, because of Zayn and for him. With him I could be myself and no other. I could rest my body and my nerves. The scent of lilies penetrated my every cell. I closed my eyes and felt a deep calm—a sensation that I and everyone I loved were safe from illness and death. As Zayn read poetry to me, I entered a gentle trance.
If only we were two branches of a tree
Our veins fed together by the sun
Drinking together the dawn’s dew
Turning together a buoyant green
Standing tall and reaching out
We dress in colors in the spring
Shed our clothes in the fall
Expose our naked bodies
And in the winter, we bathe
Kept warm by devotion
I slept in Zayn’s arms with a smile on my face. Nothing that had come before or was still to come mattered then.
22
Ali was coming over for dinner. It had to be something new because I thought he must be bored with the usual. Though he used to say that I cooked with my soul, and once, when I was away on one of my long trips, he wrote to me: “Come back. I miss you and miss your cooking! Whatever you make turns out good!” Ali had a clumsy way of expressing his feelings sometimes, but I got him. I opened the freezer, got out some chicken breasts, and put them under hot running water. I had some potatoes and thought I could make mashed potatoes, which Ali liked. I would add some cheese. But I wasn’t going to start yet. The day was still long.
I lit a cigarette and inhaled the smell of the burning match. I looked out of the window to the horizon and thought of Ali. He always came up behind me when I stood at this spot, putting his arms around me and resting his head on my shoulder, both of us looking out at the world. I’d smile—a smile he didn’t see. Nothing mattered in those moments but the silence between us. I smiled at the memory, then frowned again. I always knew those moments were transient. He knew that too, but as usual he didn’t seem to care.
“So what if I wake up one morning and feel I don’t want to come to you any more? What’s the big deal?” he would say.
“It’s no big deal, Ali; it’s just that endings are always kind of painful.”
“Yeah, but what matters is that we’ll always have this beautiful thing between us.”
There was no point in trying to persuade a child that life wasn’t that simple. Endings were painful and cruel and left permanent and bloody scars. If I had said any of that, he would have frowned and shut me out. I would have spent the rest of the day trying to make it up to him. It was better to let it be and leave endings to another day.
Ali always came over late in the evening, when he was done with his coffeehouse sessions with his friends whom I didn’t know. I knew some of their names, but he was careful to keep his life a closed circle I couldn’t enter. And I didn’t ask. Mostly I didn’t want to know. The solitude of
