Holi Garden
This is our third April without Bharat in his garden, our third April not discussing when we’ll attend Holi celebrations; an Indian holiday marking the arrival of spring.
Holi was Bharat’s favorite holiday, followed closely by Christmas. He’d tell us stories of his youth in Mumbai, chasing after girls he had a crush on, brightly colored powder clenched in his palms, enjoying the hiatus from a typically forbidden touch, as he smudged a bit of blue or red on a nose, a cheek.
“That’s kinda creepy,” I snorted.
“It wasn’t like that!” he protested. “We were kids!”
Memories of our last Holi together as a family resurface and I remember us smeared with colored powder, mouths wide with laughter, filling our river guns, ready to spray our next unsuspecting victim. After the festivities, stomachs full of dosa and samosa, we run shivering to the car, spread towels over the seats, and yell at each other (over the ear-splitting Bollywood tunes Bharat blasts on the cd player), about who gets to shower first when we arrive home. I remind Arjun and Taara to go through the garage to hose off in the back first so they don’t track all that messy, colored powder (turned wet paste) through the house. In the hours and days following, even after two or three scrubbings, a bit of pink remains in their ears or green stays in their hair - such sweet reminders of our playful abandon.
Now, as I sit tossing balls to our pups in the backyard, I see nature mirror those very colors: intoxicating white orange blossoms, lavender wisteria, and yellow, pink, and peach roses pose next to green tipped calla lilies. Orange cannas (just like the ones blooming near my in-laws home in Chennai) peek from the corner by the shed. Even my neighbor's bottle brush tree wants to be included - the red, spiny blossoms bending low over the fence. Above it the jacaranda also leans in as the towering palm stands behind.
Only a few of those rose bushes lined the back fence when we moved in at the end of December, 1996. Bharat had lobbied hard for this house because he saw potential in the garden. I know he thought about growing bougainvillea and Australian tea trees almost as much as he thought about growing our family with children and dogs; filling us up and all around with beauty - a beauty neither of us had known as children. We talked about manifesting unconditional love. Safety. Joy. Acceptance. We planted a vision of home.
Slowly, slowly - with trips to Home Depot and Orchard Supply Hardware and Summerwinds Nursery - the garden took shape and form. Bharat moved the hydrangeas, plying them with various titrations of nitrogen in the weeks before Memorial Day and July 4th - coaxing them to take on the red, white, and blue. He found purple agapanthus for the back and white for the front (where Taara and he had sown a ‘moonlight’ garden filled with flora in gradations of white). When I begged for a bird of paradise, he put one in. After our trip to Giverny, he purchased the purple lily bulbs and we waited for their sensual arcs and buds. Hanging pots dripped with pink and purple fuchsia as well as spindly spider plants. Ochre cymbidium, tiny, fat succulents, and a lone, carefully trimmed bonsai lined the back patio. We sat back and marinated in our success, we grinned like idiots, we sighed.
Twice a year Bharat exhorted us to attend the Baliga-Savel cocktail party - fertilizer cocktail, that is. Bone meal, ironite, and manganese are some of the ingredients I recall. We formed a bucket brigade: I stirred the mixture (using a recipe Bharat had clipped from the San Jose Mercury News), while one of the other three came to retrieve it and shoveled the contents under each plant. As much as we might have grumbled at first, the Beatles or ABBA cheered us, there was laughter, the work was done, we felt satisfied and looked smug.
These are the recollections in which I attempt to ground myself. The April sun on my face forces me to close my eyes and the warmth evokes gratitude for the various healing balms in my life : family and friends loving me through (and despite!) my prickly moodiness, my children giving and accepting love, the dogs doling out licks and happily receiving cuddles. And this profusion of flowers Bharat so lovingly planted begins to build the smallest of bridges across my loss, mending me.
