Mogra and Daffodils

The daffodils had opened overnight.

I noticed them while walking back home, the sun was unusually generous for early spring. They leaned toward the light, bright and unapologetically yellow against the neat grey pavement. The garden had looked bare all winter, a quiet patch of earth I sometimes forgot belonged to me.

I stopped by the gate and watched them move in the breeze.

My father used to water plants every morning before the sun grew harsh. Not daffodils. Mogra. Jasmine was climbing slowly along the small backyard garden of our house back home in Mumbai. The scent of it travelled easily through warm air, slipping through open windows before anyone had properly woken up.

He would hold the pipe loosely, letting the water run longer than it needed to.

Sometimes he overwatered them.

My mother would complain that the soil was turning to mud, that the roots would rot if he continued like that. But he would murmur something under his breath and tilt the pipe a little more, as if the water itself carried affection.

To him, watering plants was a form of love.

In one hand, he held the pipe. In the other, almost always, a handkerchief folded into a careful square. He would wipe the sweat from his forehead, tuck the cloth back into his pocket, and continue with quiet determination.

I used to watch him most mornings over a cup of chai.

Back then, I never thought much about those small routines. They belonged to the ordinary rhythm of home: the sound of water hitting leaves, my mother's voice from the kitchen, the faint fragrance of mogra drifting through the yard.

The daffodils bent again in the wind.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The house was still and bright in the way afternoon light fills empty rooms. My suitcase sat in the corner of the hallway, the one I had not yet unpacked properly since returning from India.

I had meant to empty it days ago.

Instead, I opened it slowly and knelt beside it.

The clothes had already been taken out. What remained were the smaller things that somehow resisted leaving the suitcase. At the top lay packets of snacks my neighbours had pushed into my hands before I left.

"You must take these," they had insisted. "You must be bored of pizza and burgers."

They had come one by one to the gate when they heard I was leaving again. Plastic bags rustling with homemade sweets, roasted peanuts, and double-taped bottles of pickle. Someone had slipped in a small box of laddoos wrapped carefully in newspaper.

Their generosity always travelled heavier than the suitcase allowed.

So did the guilt of leaving them behind.

I picked up one of the snack packets and turned it over in my hands. The plastic still smelled faintly of spices and roasted peanuts. For a moment, I could almost hear the lane outside our house: scooters passing, children calling to each other, someone bargaining loudly with a vegetable vendor.

Then the quiet room returned.

Beneath the packets lay the handkerchief.

White with grey stripes, thin cotton, folded into a square.

I held it for a long moment before touching it to my face. It still carried the faintest trace of Old Spice aftershave. Or perhaps I imagined it. Memory has its own way of preserving things.

My phone vibrated softly on the table.

For months now, our family has learned to live across three different time zones. My mother never quite cared for the arithmetic of it. She only knew that sometimes it was morning for her while the sun was already disappearing where I stood.

Often she would call from outside, walking through the neighbourhood as she spoke. The camera rarely stayed still. It shook wildly as she turned corners or greeted neighbours, the screen filling with fragments of sky, houses, trees.

Sometimes she would point the phone toward a shop or a vegetable stall, narrating the smallest details as if we were still walking beside her.

One evening, the call came from my father's native village.

My brother and I watched from two different continents, laughing as the camera bounced clumsily between faces and buildings. She flashed it toward distant relatives and swept it away before either of us could finish greeting them.

At one point, the screen tilted suddenly upward and rested on the idol of a deity being adorned for the evening ritual.

The statue's large painted eyes looked directly into the camera.

Into us.

We laughed harder then. My mother laughed too, slightly out of breath from walking. The sound of her catching that breath travelled through the screen so clearly that for a moment it felt as though she were standing beside me.

Temple bells rang somewhere behind her.

Voices drifted in and out.

Then the call ended.

The silence returned all at once.

I pressed the handkerchief against my eyes now, gently, the way I had seen him do countless times.

Outside, the daffodils swayed in the soft March light. Someone down the street had hung a small yellow flag for St David's Day.

I stepped out with a watering can and poured water carefully at the base of the flowers.

Not too much.

Just enough.

Back home, my father used to water the mogra until the soil nearly turned to mud.

For a long time, I stood there, the watering can still in my hand.

The daffodils moved gently in the wind, their yellow heads nodding as if in quiet agreement with something I could not quite hear. A few drops of water slid down the stems and disappeared into the soil.

Back home, my father would never have stopped there.

He would walk slowly along the narrow edge of the garden, pipe dragging softly behind him, letting the water run longer than it needed to. The mogra leaves would shine under the stream, the soil darkening until it nearly turned to mud. My mother would scold him from the doorway, telling him the roots would drown.

But he always believed the plants understood.

Sometimes, when the water splashed too far, he would step back and wipe his face with that same handkerchief. Then he would look around the garden with quiet satisfaction, as if the plants had answered him in a language only he could hear.

I folded the handkerchief again and placed it gently on the table beside me.

My phone lit up soon after.

One by one, small notifications appeared on the family WhatsApp group. My brother reacted with a heart. My mother sent back a message saying the flowers looked bright. An aunt added folded hands.

The daffodils swayed again outside.

I stood there watching them for a while longer, the open suitcase behind me, the garden in front of me, and somewhere between the two the quiet space where my father once stood with a pipe in one hand and a handkerchief in the other.

The suitcase remained open behind me.