Gardens, Flowers, Fragrances and Colours
Gardens, Flowers, Fragrances and Colours
I was sitting in my small terrace garden this morning remembering how we had started to develop it over the last few years. The heady fragrance of jui, frangipani, dolon chapa filled the air and it was a riot of colours – all shades of red, with hibiscus, red ginger and rongon as well as vibrant alamonda surrounding me strange to think that this space had been barren, an expanse of concrete slippery with fungus and dirty after my father’s apartment had been lying vacant since my parents left to stay with me in my latest assignment in New Delhi in 2004. The apartment stayed vacant while we were in Delhi; my mother never returned to live there, having passed away after a two-year battle with cancer in 2009.
When we retuned in 2010, my father was already showing signs of the Alzheimer’s that was destroying his brain. By the time I left for Kathmandu in May 2013 to take up my assignment as Ambassador of Bangladesh, his apathy at leaving behind the apartment which had represented security and sanctuary to him was truly distressing. The fact was that after my mother’s passing followed so shockingly by my eldest sister’s sudden demise two years later in 2011, Abba no longer really cared about the world around him. So, the terrace remained barren and neglected, along with the rest of the apartment.
As I look around me I remember when they had first moved into the apartment in early 2003, after the developer handed it over, Abba had planted dahlias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums; the dahlias were particularly spectacular that year – huge in size and in vibrant colours, deep maroon, shades of lilac and violet and a particularly beautiful shade of yellow and gold. Unfortunately that was the only year that Abba and Amma got to enjoy the terrace garden because they unexpectedly went to the USA in December 2003 when both my sisters fell seriously ill and had to undergo surgery. They never returned to live in the apartment together, since I had moved to Delhi in late February 2004, and they joined me in March after I developed severe eyesight problems following glaucoma related complications. My mother had a premonition when she said one day that she would never return to Dhaka or be able to go to the USA again; she was diagnosed with cancer in January 2007 and passed away in 2009 almost exactly two years to date of her diagnosis….. but that is another story to be told another day.
Earlier, when Abba had first built the small duplex in 1987 in the seven and half katha plot of land, he left enough space for a lovely garden. My parents planted seasonal flowers – dahlias (of course!), chrysanthemums, gladiola, marigolds, phlox, cosmos and calendula; perennials, and a few fruit trees – Ammas’s favorites were the two shefali (sheuli) trees, the kodom, which grew very fast to reach the second floor, the madhobi lata, which reached the roof in six months and bloomed almost all year round and filled the house with its sweet fragrance. We also had a spectacular bougainvillea, which grew on the front façade of the house and made it glow with the bright pink and white colours. We had a few gardenia bushes, a hasnahena, beli (Abba’s favorite) and some more that I cannot recall now. We had two huge coconut trees, lots of papaya trees, five guava trees, one bel tree. We even had a small water tank where we had water hyacinths, blooming shades of purple, violet, mauve and lilac. It had been truly heart-wrenching to give up that beautiful house and the garden to the developers, something that Amma at least took a long time to get over. Unfortunately, life is a series of practical choices, and one hardly has the scope or luxury of enjoying gardens with a little lawn and fragrant blossoms.
Minhas and I had moved in with Abba shortly before I left for Kathmandu when it was obvious to us that Abba could not live alone in the big apartment by himself, though I was right in the next flat. In the two and half years that we had been in Dhaka from August 2010 to May 2013, the terrace remained barren. Abba did not have the physical or mental energy needed to maintain the terrace and I was too busy as Director General (South Asia), managing the shenanigans of our neighbours to spend any time on it. After Abba and I left, Minhas neither had the energy or the opportunity while shuttling between Dhaka and Kathmandu to do anything to the terrace.
Every time I visited I Dhaka from Kathmandu in those seven years, the vacant, blank, concrete terrace was a melancholic reminder of my family – a family which had lost three members out of five in quick succession and left a huge gaping void in my soul, one which I could not express or explain to anyone. Grief, I learned the hard way, is something everyone has to experience in order to be able to empathise with you and even those closest to you cannot comprehend what the grief of losing most of your family means to you. And so the terrace remained vacant.
Seven years later, as I was preparing to return to Dhaka, I looked at the barren concrete and felt that it was time to do something to it. Abba was gone, the final months of his Alzheimer’s taking a greater toll on me than I had ever thought it would. I was still processing the grief of losing three family members in the span of six years, - amma, apa and abba - gone in quick succession. I was depressed, and felt lonely; my career was stagnating, I knew my Ministry would use my impaired vision as an excuse to deprive me from important assignments. I needed to channel my energies into something and I thought of the terrace.