Jacaranda

Tejaswinee Roychowdury

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The evening smells sweet because where our snake-infested and untamed garden ends and the paint-chipped wood fence stands crooked, there is a tree adorned with fresh purple blooms. 

“Jacaranda,” my father had called it one Sunday morning, under the simmering February sun of ’02. We had dug up a small pit with a tiny shovel and placed the sapling in it while my mother watched us from the kitchen as she brushed ghee on hot rotis for breakfast. I remember it as though it was yesterday; that morning had smelled of earth under my nails, and it had rung with laughter.

I haven’t seen my father in years. When I used to sit at the creaky secretariat table from my grandfather’s time, pretending to be lost in the reign of Akbar, I would sneak glances at him twitching his salt-and-pepper moustache as he read a copy of the Dainik Jagran, murmuring the news to himself, his round copper-rimmed spectacles balanced on the edge of his nose, while sipping on adrak wali chai from his favourite bone china teacup even though its dainty handle was cracked and held together with superglue. My blushing mother would walk past him, swelling with pride that he refused to replace it.

“Your father has a penchant for preserving old and broken things,” she had said to me one day, “and that is why I know he will never leave me, no matter how old and broken I get.”

Old, frail, and broken, on the outside and the inside, my mother barely leaves her bed, and I’ve heard his broken teacup whisper that he lives in another city with a woman as young as myself.

Tonight, I yearn to travel back in time and I promise I won’t make fun of my father, because I now need to believe what he used to believe eight years ago. “When a Jacaranda flower drops onto your head,” he had explained as we had dipped our soft rotis in steamy split lentil soup, “it brings good fortune, but it will take at least eight years for the first bloom.”

His words still ring in my ears, echoes from a time long gone. And I stand underneath the Jacaranda canopy, praying for a wild miracle, for my father to return and mend, with superglue, his old and broken bone china teacup.