Flowerwoman

FLOWERWOMAN: Magic words surrounded by petals

Last updated: March 27th, 2019

She runs a 24-hour flower shop in some lane in Montreal. It has a narrow entrance, but is long within. It’s 2 a.m. and the light from her shop creates a luminous section of pavement, white and glaring. We pass it earlier in the night and Nik pokes his head in to see if she is there. I saw bent shoulders and a broom. That’s her daughter, he said. She’s not here now—but we’ll bring you back to meet her. She’s a bit of a legend around here. Her shop burnt down last year and the neighbour raised money to rebuild it. That’s how much she means around here.

Now the birdcages glow, reminding me of quaint shops in England. There’s another pair of shoulders in there. They look the same to me, but Nik says that this is her—hair cropped short, face young (40 maximum? Not old enough to have 14 children. She shows me the pictures of the daughter she’s just married off), eyes troubled and roving. She talks for a while about people complaining about her flowers on the pavement—the complaints wear heavy on her and she unburdens to Nik and Nihal like they are old friends. Nihal introduces me as the friend from India, and she peers at me from in between the gap they create. I smile, and say hello, and tell her I have heard much about her.

She tells me, in her broken English, that I must make my mother proud. Work hard, maybe find a job in Montreal, but never forget all that she’s done for me, and where I come from. Then with a short leading twitch of her fingers, she guides me in and pulls out a small beaten red box. This is for you, she says. I open it. It’s a small twisted Chinese dragon sculpture. “It brings strength and luck,” she says. “Use.”

I offer money, but she smiles and shakes her head. “Money like toilet paper. You need, but too much—what you do? You throw away.” On the way out, she pulls out two tiger lilies, and hands them to me, also for free. They are remarkably resilient and last for at least a week. She tells me to come back, and I say I will, I am here for two weeks. “No,” she says abruptly, working her way around her limited English. “Not now. You come back a year later. You go be stronger. Better. Beautiful. Go find yourself.”

I wrote to someone recently how writing gives everything purpose. But I forgot to add the flipside of this—taking what feels exceptional and kind and writing it into something that seems common and usual, part of all the literature you’ve read and clichés you’ve encountered. Perhaps both effects come from the same skill—the universality of a language. I read back on this and I now see it as being far more ordinary than I felt in the moment. Then it felt serendipitous, a stranger reaching out from the circle of her world to touch mine. Here, the magic dies in words, live as it might in memory.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Tashan Mehta is a 24-year-old writer living in Mumbai. While travelling the world with a notebook and a backpack, she is completing her first novel (and finding inspiration for the second) and coordinating TEDx Prabhadevi. Her short stories have appeared in several publications, including Out of Print and Notes. You can find more of her thoughts at https://theinadequacyoflanguage.wordpress.com.

image: tiger lilies in garden via Shutterstock