I grew up in Assam, India, in a middle-class household of professionals: academics, scientists and doctors. We did not live on a farm, but behind our house was a plot of land big enough for a large vegetable garden, a shed for our three cows and a coop full of chickens. My professor father had a passion for teaching English literature, but he also took abundant pride and satisfaction in growing flawless cauliflower and 12-inch dahlias and serving his children organic food straight from his yard. At eight I tended a tiny corner plot in the garden, where I proudly grew kohlrabi and sweet peas with a passion that matched my father’s.
Early spring turned the garden in front of the house into a fragrant bouquet of flowers: gardenias, lilies and roses and many more. The fragrance wafted through the air, enhanced by all the other flowers in the neighborhood. Orchids adorned the jackfruit tree for weeks before the Indian New Year celebration in mid-April. Then they became crowning glories in our young eyes, lovingly arranged by our mother to go with our pastel spring dresses. Now, decades later, the whiff of a lone gardenia in a store across the globe from my childhood home brings tears to my eyes and myriad questions from my own six-year-old child. Cloaked in that fragrance was my childhood, my adolescence and the world that I left behind to embrace a new one.
Our favorite spot to hang out on a warm afternoon was on a blanket under the gooseberry tree by the pond. Sometimes the sky turned black as we watched flocks of white herons try to maintain their dignity while fighting against a late spring breeze. That sky had a special name. We called it the “raven’s feather.” Minutes later the earth was drenched with rain, the trees swayed fervently in the wind and the electrified sky made us run for cover in the house. The beauty of Mother Nature’s turning into fury was an enigma for our little minds.
Fate dealt a cruel blow to our family when my father passed away 11 years after I moved to America, leaving my mother alone (my sister had moved to Kolkata). Over the years, our huge backyard, which once resonated with the laughter of children, but which was now too big for my mother to care for, made room for someone else’s cottage. The once big pond, filled with silver carp, became an apology for its former glory. The perennials still bloom, but with no one to tend them, and there are no dahlias bobbing their heads to greet the sunrise.
In contemplative moments, I mourn those changes. But I also know that my sister and I, along with our cousins, had a blessed childhood in an idyllic setting that many of us took for granted. Now I grow flowers with my daughter in my front and back yards. With an apron tied around her tiny waist and a rake in her hand, it is my daughter’s turn to match her house-proud dad—like my father, an avid gardener—in his endeavors. I know that the county fair will be her only chance to touch a calf and gaze at a chicken. But by next year she will be, like her mother once was, the proud owner of a corner plot in our vegetable garden. My trips to the cowshed with my sister to watch our physician uncle take on the role of a vet for a night, awaiting the birth of a calf, will always be a story to her. And the tale of my cousin’s pet, the greedy hen that once gulped down a live mouse, will provide endless entertainment until she will no longer beg us to narrate these stories from our childhood. I appreciate the blessed childhood that I had. I now equally enjoy the nest we have built here in the United States.
As I grow older, the door to my childhood home will soon close on me forever. But through the flowers we’ve planted and the deer and rabbits that gather around our crabapple tree, my daughter and I are opening another glorious one.
Sarma Lives In Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
