My Mother’s Roses
A post on my facebook cross-stitch group and the tea roses blooming at my kitchen window were the catalysts for the memories in this piece.
My mom loved roses. She grew roses in our garden in Ernakulam, pottering around happily between the beds, pruning, clipping and talking to the flowers. Every morning, she went out with a handful of crushed eggshells to feed her beloved rose (even in Ernakulum, deep in puttu and duck curry territory, we Parsis ate eggs for brekkers, don’t you know, dear Reader). I liked the crocuses better, they were quieter in their beauty and grew modestly along the edges of the rose beds.
The roses seemed large and flashy to my child’s eyes. I pompously declared that I didn’t like them or their perfume. One afternoon, I was bored and unsupervised. In an uncharacteristically reckless moment, I decided that it would be fun to decorate the roses growing in pots on my mother’s bedroom balcony and chose for my artistic medium a plump tube of Binaca toothpaste (though sometimes I remember it as a tube of Odomos. The two witnesses to my heinous act, my brother and my mother, are long gone so the reader will just have to take my word for it). There is something fascinating about squeezing out a thick squirt of gooey paste out of a full tube. That afternoon, I didn’t hold back. I gave in to temptation and squeezed away. The thick lines of strong smelling paste looked beautiful at first, as they covered the leaves and roses in full bloom with a sickly mess. But then it dawned on me that the odour was going to be my downfall. It was as if the smell snapped me out of my daydream and there I was, filled with horror at the enormity of my crime, when Mum burst out onto the balcony, following the odoriferous trail. She was speechless at first. Her eyes literally goggled at the thick lines of paste, her face incredulous that her little girl, demure, well-behaved, almost perfect, could have been the author of this act of hooliganism. I stared wide- eyed at her, unsure whether to fly or fight it out. It too was my first experience of acting out. What was going to happen now? Would I get spanked the way my brothers had described to me in ghoulish detail? Time hung for several moments, that traitorous odour filling my nostrils…and then she began to laugh. She roared and whooped with the hilarity, tears streaming down her face, holding her sides. My brothers grumbled for weeks afterwards. Lucky escape, they groused. Just imagine what she’d have done to us, they asked self-righteously. We wouldn’t have been able to sit on our behinds for a week at least. I couldn’t care less what they said. Mum had forgiven me and all was right in my world.
Mum often insisted that we go away for the weekend in those early years, usually to the cool and misty hill stations near by. Here there was a brief respite from the intense heat of the backwaters, the dazzling blues and greens and the humidity that bore down relentlessly. Here the colours were gentled and muted by the cool mist and steady drizzle of razor sharp rain. Here too, we each had a passion that needed tending.
Mine was horseriding so a horse and its owner were picked out by Dad and me after much deliberations on the owner’s trustworthiness and absence of shifty eyes, and more importantly on the glossy coat of the horse and the softness of its nose as it nuzzled my cheek. I would get my fill of Enid Blytonish daydreams, riding that little pony around the lake. Dad’s nose would lead him straight to a little cheese making monastery or a chocolate making business run out of some expatriate European’s home. There he would happily spend the morning, spinning tall tales and sampling the produce. Farhad liked the little cafés, fancying himself very exotic and grown up as he sat there, drinking terrible coffee and eating brilliantly frosted pastry, eyeing the young locals as they slouched past.
But Mum headed straight for the rose gardens. Every hill station worth its name had gardens filled with the most gorgeous hybrids and cross pollinated rose plants. She would point out the two toned roses, white petals dipped in red or the alarming pink and yellow petals on the same flower. Her favourites were the dark purple, almost velvety black roses. She would suck in her breath at the sight of these and spend many rapturous minutes admiring them. She never tried to grow these at home, I think she saved the sight as a treat for all her senses whenever we went to holiday in the hills.
Mum missed her garden when we moved. She bought bunches of roses and filled the new home with them but it wasn’t the same. Our new apartment had tiny balconies and there was no space for plants. The family was going through a rough patch. Dad had had a heart attack and Mum had no time to think of gardens anymore. An elderly neighbour called on her one day to ask after Dad. She gently coaxed a very proud and independent woman to let down her guard. Mum poured her heart out to the old lady, the conversation rambling from her worries about Dad and the family finances to her feeling of claustrophobia in this cheerless apartment. She might have mentioned her beloved rose garden that she had left behind.
Some days later, Mum received a summons from our elderly neighbour. She handed over a bundle, saying that she could no longer see well enough to carry on her projects. Would Mum be interested in trying her hand at cross stitch? Desperate for a mental diversion, Mum accepted the bundle gratefully. It consisted of a pile of Ondori floral pattern books, canvas, embroidery floss, conversion charts, needles and a precious roll of fine white cross stitch cloth the likes of which could not be found for love or money in India.
And so it began. Started on a whim, cross stitching became a lifelong hobby she loved, taught to me and so passed on that love. The very first project she worked on was a huge tapestry of roses – blood red, set off by dark green leaves and little violet and purple crocus like flowers. Lacking experience, she went out and bought a huge roll of canvas. It must have been a six count canvas – that is, six stitches to an inch. To fill that large space, she not only had to use all six strands of the floss (I normally use two) but she also had to create star stitches – a plus sign overlapped by a cross. As the design progressed, the background began to look increasingly drab. She asked our neighbour’s opinion, who suggested filling in the empty canvas in black. Mum loved that idea but couldn’t be bothered with the mundane, repititive black, her creativity reserved for the beautiful colours of the design itself. She looked at me, my head stuck in a book, and decided it was time for me to learn a new craft. I was deputed to fill in the black background. It was boring work but appealed to some exacting, technical part of my personality. I was hooked. Those roses still hang over the dining table in my parents’ home, glowing like the rubies that were my mother’s favourite precious stones.
The roll of soft white fabric was the next ambitious project. This time, Mum let her imagination run riot. She designed a saree border of multicoloured roses, a garland of flowers interwoven with leaves, using the tiniest, most exquisite stitches. All the roses of her past found expression in this border. There were the two toned roses, the ones with petals dipped in blood, the roses as black as night. There were the delicate wild pinks, the flamboyant yellow and orange hybrids. She wore that border for my brother’s wedding, a silent testament to her fortitude and resilience even in the face of unspeakable tragedy. She had lost a child and gained a daughter-in-law all within three months and she kept a smile on her face right through that time, even though it seemed to me that she was howling with rage and pain inside.
Another cross stitched saree border followed – this time large red roses on a black background. This saree she allowed me to wear many times. I was enchanted by the drama of the red against the black. And I had earned the right to wear it. I have ever since hated filling in a black background for my own projects.
By the time my mother began to lose her eyesight, the only roses left in her home were the dusty bunch of pink plastic monstrosities stuck carelessly in a vase. And the cross stitched roses glowing sullenly on the wall.
My mother loved roses. As she lay dying, I wish that I had thought to fill her room with roses in every colour. Instead, I filled her senses with hospital smells and sounds. That is something I can never change. The strange thing is, in the years after her death, I have begun to appreciate the beauty of a rose. I finally understand that a rose is beautiful not because it wants or seeks attention but because it knows no other way to be. And really, one can’t hold its nature against the flower.
So I grow little tea roses on my balcony and I think my mum would have grinned ironically to see me spread crushed egg shells in the pot every morning. After all, it’s entirely possible that she had never forgotten the Incident of the Toothpaste in the Afternoon. My new found respect for her roses would have appealed to her very twisted dark humour as well as that strongly developed sense of karma and justice.