The Page Stolen From December-Diary

The red bricked wall surrounds a lush green lawn bordered with various plants and floral bushes. The Loquat tree stands straight like a tall Somali woman who’s aware of all positives about herself, next to it is the Anaar, not so tall though, but filled with so many small, bright orange colored flowers called ‘anarkali’. The name I discovered much later because of tempered history lessons. There is no fruit on the tree yet but little bells of orange flowers make it look like a young Asian bride ready to bloom. Next to this Asian bride is a row of desi gulaab. The bushes are burdened with the clusters of gulaab. The dew drops on the surface of fuchsia pink petals provide a perfect royal sight. The fragrance it offers transports you to almost a different world where everything is weaved around fragility and perfection, away from the odor of an ordinary world. Mottia and Chambeli have little unopened buds. I wonder once these buds bloom into beautiful flowers and evaporate scents, how three fragrances will mate with each other. Will they embrace each other at all or not?

There is a confused humming bird circling an innocent gulab. It keeps going back to that anarkali from which it sipped the nectar while ago, comes back to the gulab, completes two or three circles, goes back and hides itself in the arms of that anarkali. I wonder what they speak about after this tricky repetitive reunion.

A pair of squirrel look anxious and exhausted after a morning crusade of crows around their burrow. It looks crows are working on a special set of symphonies these days and they won’t stop rehearsing.

Mornings are not so cold these days but the warmth from a teacup or from a shawl on the shoulder doesn’t go unutilized. The sun looks a little sulky today. I am sitting in the corner on a staircase.  On the left side there is a row of small shrubs and on the right side there is a marble slab like the ones which gorkan usually use for the gravestones. I stole it from Aba’s study two days ago. I wanted to carve a word on it: ‘aga’ahi’. I don’t know what does it mean but I read it on a very beautiful olive-green cover of a book Aba is reading these days. But it is so difficult to carve this word on a marble slab. The fear of wrong stroke, hard stroke, misaligned stroke, is so strong that I can’t begin with it at all. I plan different ways of doing it all the night and every morning after Aba leaves for office, I take it out from the storeroom where I hide it, come to this side of the lawn and sit here. Every day I get distracted from a flower bud, a little sparrow, a crow song, a bee couple or anything and forget about the piece of stone I have stolen.