Fiction: Of Wildflowers and Weeds

Butterfly weed 

- Richa Shirish

I was outside my home that morning, reversing the car in the deafening sound of the rain, when I saw a figure coming the same way towing his motorbike, his outline sketchy in the rain. It took me a moment to recognise him when he came closer. That lanky boy I had known in my childhood had bulked up and his shoulders did not stoop anymore. In place of his brown curls was now a crop of short grey hair, partly covered with his rain-cheater jacket. His face had filled up a little. A short smile appeared on his face and for an instant, it reflected the same Buddha-like visage I was once familiar with.

I rolled down the window. We exchanged a brief look of familiarity. We smiled awkwardly. “It had to break down now of all times!” he said. I offered a ride. He parked his motorbike and sat quietly on the front chair. I looked at the windscreen vipers zealously flinging sheets of rainwater off the glass and was grateful that the air was packed with their sheer noise. 

He was here for a short while, he said, —a couple of months, until his father recovered from the two recent heart surgeries. “Then back to Bangalore?” I asked when we were on the highway and the rain and the windscreen vipers had calmed down. 

He nodded slowly. 

“And uncle?” I asked after debating with myself for a moment.

“With his condition he can’t… It’s not possible for him now to stay here,” he said. 

“Right.” I said, feeling sorry about asking.

“I have talked to a few brokers. I have put the house up,” he said. 

“Oh…” I uttered with a long exhalation. I thought about that sap-green and peach coloured house standing entirely empty after his father leaves. His mother had passed away two years ago.

“We won’t be able to maintain it from so far.”

I looked at him and nodded, still thinking of sap-green and peach coloured walls. 

We manoeuvred through a patch full of fallen tree branches after the heavy rain. The rain had let up now completely. The sky was clearing up.

I calculated the years that had gone by without us seeing each other. It had been more than a decade. Our visits back home rarely coincided. Sick of constant shifting and bland, lonely dinners, I had moved back home a few months ago to work for an exciting new job. And now, I could not stop thinking about his whole family leaving their adobe of 45 years and some strangers moving into that house with walls that his father always kept safe from us children with regular coats of smooth plastic paint up to our heights.

***

Clicked by Anurag Sharma

I was four and my sister was barely a year old when our parents bought a plot of land in this pocket and built the house. Our house and the house of Shrivastavas were at the two opposite ends of our lane. Then, there were barely any other houses in between the two. Just a long empty stretch of land on which weeds and wildflowers grew. At that time, there were less than twenty houses in the entire pocket. 

The sparsely-populated area made for a tightly-knit community. Parents regularly paid visits to each other, to spill secrets, to sing happy birthdays and eat pastries-colas-potato chips in crimpled paper plates, to “taste” each other’s home-cooked delicacies, or to borrow tools and equipment. On festivals, they passed around handkerchief-covered-plates of sweetmeats, and gathered together for every small or big occasion. Sticking together was the only way they felt safe in the vastly open landscape, too far away from any professional help or convenience. There were no colony gates, no watchmen, no street lights, but every once in a while, it was possible to see fireflies flickering among the weeds. 

There was always a home being built on one or another plot. The site became abundant adventure for children, for we ran deliriously through the dug trenches and climbed on mounds of sand and made sand castles under the cool blue moonlight. We ran through the empty plots overgrown with tall grasses that gave a bad itch. In them were the rugged beauty of the crown flowers of milkweed, the fragile yellow petals of the prickly poppies, whose thorny leaves scratched our bare legs as we ran through them, or the spiny nightshades with tiny poisonous orange tomatoes that we loved to open and watch the seeds inside with wonder. We loved to press the tender green cockleburs between our fingers, knowing very well we wouldn’t dare touch the hardened brown ones that stuck to everything that passed by and were impossible to get out of our sweaters and hair.

We had to be careful playing in the empty plots of land, for sometimes the land was uneven and in a burrow under a mound somewhere, a ferocious animal mom sometimes kept her new-born puppies safe and alive. We kept bowls of milk with soaked rotis outside their burrows. We sat on our hunches, watching tiny closed-eyed pups tumbling over each other to lap up all milk. We gave each of them names and when some of them passed away, dug little graves for them. A small fox too had its den for some time under a mound, adding too much frenzy in the colony adults. But before the grown-ups could do something about it, it disappeared for its own good.

***

I don't think Sahil and I were friends in the common sense of the word. But we happened to spend a long time together. While I and other children scampered about noisily, he made silent rushed trips back and forth to the rental comics bookstore. He rarely played in the sand or mud with us. That was also because he was a couple of years older to most of us.

For other children, he went mostly unnoticed. But since his and my set of parents became good friends early on, who paid daily visits to each other and discussed the smallest of things about their children—measles and chicken poxes, marksheets, tantrums and idiocies, unacceptable flaws and a few beauties. Meanwhile, we children sat among them quietly watching the discussion about us, with no opinion but for the slight awe of the charisma and uprightness of the grownups who ruled the world and us.

I went to the same school that Sahil and his big sister went to. The school was far and all three of us boarded the school bus every day at the bus stop by the small Shirish tree with its white and green blooms coolly wafting their aroma in the misty early morning breeze. Sahil’s father, who was employed at the same school as supervisor of the transport department, commuted to the school by his own scooter. Every time I saw him at school, he was either scolding someone for any perceived lack of rigour in words or deeds or walking by in his Safari suit with a grave air about him. I can only guess now that perhaps the responsibility of getting children safely to and from the school weighed heavy on him. Then he also had to deal with demanding parents and rich kids. His simmering face and knitted eyebrows could scare anybody and therefore I made sure to stay as far away from him as possible. 

Since the school was too far and the rickshaw prohibitively expensive for my parents to attend any of the school’s special functions or parent-teacher meets, Sahil’s father offered to be my guardian at school to attend everything on my parents’ behalf. My parents were relieved, and I was not to be asked for my preferences. Sahil’s father met my class teachers, collected my report cards, looked sombrely at my marks, picked or dropped me to school on the rare occasions when the buses didn’t ply, and even took my school fee from my mother and deposited it at the school counter when I was too little to do so myself. Doing all these favours, he walked about with his chin up and chest swelled with pride. He would hand me the receipt with such grave silence and knitted eyebrows that I focused only on speaking as little and as correctly as possible when asked about anything.

In return for the many gracious services provided by Sahil’s father, my mother would babysit Sahil and his big sister when their parents needed to go out shopping to the market that felt like the other end of the world. On those occasions, uncle wore his finest safari suit and beamed through a most pleasant air about him, and aunty sparkled in her best purple sari and long bindi. Diya didi hated to be left behind and excluded from the excursion, but Sahil would immediately go find a corner and take out his comics. Diya didi walked about bored with everything and wanting to go home to her mother. Sometimes, she and Sahil broke into a wild fight and they both ran all over our house. My mother worried sick about them and her precious flower pots which were under constant threat of getting knocked over from all the wild running. 

***

In the front courtyard, my father had fixed a simple swing for me from a long thick rope and a little plank of wood for sitting. There were low boundary walls surrounding the courtyard on three sides. When inspired, Sahil would remove the plank and coil the rope on itself. Then he held the rope and swung from one boundary wall to the other. He called himself “Nagraj,” the superhero of Raj comics, and flew across the “river of fire,” that was the courtyard. When he was midair, I saw the river of fire blazing underneath, as real to me as everything else about. My little eyes widened watching the lanky daredevil boy shooting in the air. I could hardly match the sheer pace of his antics and instead watched wide-eyed his imaginary world come alive.

His father despised the Raj comics and all other magazines that Sahil loved reading. It soon became a source of contention at their home. Sahil adapted by developing the ability for superfast reading. In the two hours after school and before his father came home, he had already borrowed, read, and returned the comics to the neighbourhood rental shop. 

When my father came home from his office, he sometimes brought children’s magazines for me to read. Champak, Nandan, Amar Chitra Katha, Lot-Pot, and others. While I took several weeks to get through one magazine, by which I mean reading a select few entries, he swallowed each magazine cover to cover and returned it to my mother in half an hour! My mother gave him the look as if she had just seen the most curious thing ever. She asked him questions on the contents of each story or poem, and was surprised to see him answering very well and with good details. Then he would make a dash to his home before his father saw him doing anything like reading stories and poems that were not out of his textbooks.

***

In class 3, I was selected for gymnastics at school. The class was held twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and everyone in it was instructed to wear white shorts. The regular uniform was blue-grey, which was replaced on Saturday with white skirt for girls and white shorts for boys. I did not have any shorts at all and my mother could not spend money on buying something so frivolous. Money was not with endless supply, I was told, and was to be spent strictly for actual needs. Naturally, she borrowed Sahil’s uniform white shorts from his mother, an arrangement that left me red in the face. 

My mother was often too busy cooking in the mornings, and on the days of the gymnastic class, she would ask me to run up to Sahil’s house and get his shorts from his mother. It mortified me and I refused to go. Frustrated with my stubbornness, my mother had to leave her cooking in the middle and rush to his place, but not before calling me difficult and lazy. The shorts, however, always arrived in neatly washed and ironed condition and went back likewise. On the white shorts days, I did not meet Sahil’s eyes at the bus stop. But he didn’t seem to care at all for he was always preoccupied with things in his head. 

On the bus back home, I would sit in the front and he preferred to sit on the back seat. The last seat was home to the unruliest of boys—but also to those who did not have friends and didn't want the pressure to make one. The unruly boys who gathered at the back sometimes picked on him for he was a quiet, thin boy. He often got into fist fights with them. I turned back to watch the fight—the boys rolling into each other, shirt buttons torn, hair matted with dust, a drop of blood or two from ear or nose, faces red from being scratched on, nail bites. Other boys were all much bulkier than him. Although he had a thin and long frame, his knees were big and knobby, with which he was able to press down his big adversary sometimes and win the fight for the day.

But at home, dark clouds awaited him.

All complaints about bus fights reached his father for he was the bus supervisor. What was he doing supervising the buses when his own kid was hurting good children? Rich, resentful parents made sure their complaints reached the supervisor and the principal loud and clear. 

Once Sahil's father had nothing to do in the evening, and out of his habit of seeing my father, he found himself at our home, only to realize there were still 2 hours before my father returned from office. To pass time, he offered to help with my homework. He liked the unchallengeable authority teachers possessed over children. Within the first few minutes, a slap struck my cheek and I ran to the other room. My mother winced and politely declined his offer to teach me again. I was saved. 

But Sahil did not have it this easy.

That one evening was enough for me to picture a series of slaps landing on Sahil’s small face every now and then for small and big reasons. His never studying hard for exams was already a big source of contention between him and his father. And between his father and his mother who doted over her son. Every afternoon uncle came home, he wanted to see Sahil afraid of the exams and poring over his books motionless for hours, like all other normal children. He did not pay attention to Sahil's sharp mind and photographic memory which meant he didn’t need to read anything twice. Sahil read his school books just once—the night before the exam, understood them instantly, stored them deep in his brain, and scored close to 100 percent. But that did nothing to calm his father’s anger. If anything, it probably increased it. 

We often heard about Sahil running away from home. Everyone in the neighbourhood looked for him. We searched for him in parks, on terraces, in newly-dug out foundations, behind the mounds of sand and cement, in the green belt near the highway, at the far end of the pocket. His father with sweat beads on his forehead and air expunged from his lungs went all around the town on his scooter looking for his son. His parched throat and hollow eyes searched for Sahil at the railway station, old bus stand, and even the old lake in the town. Often, Sahil was found from his hiding spot after 6 or 7 hours. Tired neighbours handed him over to his father, entreating him to be nice to the child and not to beat him now that he was found. Uncle neither said yes or no but stared in the distance with a mix of fatigue and hot anger in his bloodshot eyes. Nobody knew for sure how he would treat his son once they all returned home, yet everyone kind of knew.

Late one evening after I had seen Sahil beat up a bully in the school bus, Diya didi came running and told my mother about Sahil having run away again. We all set out to find him. We made three circles. The first circle, made mostly of children and aunties, was positioned in our lane and was tasked to look into houses and all the empty plots. The second circle, made of uncles and older boys, screened the pocket and the green belt. The third searched in the nearby pockets and parks, the old lake, the bus stand, and the railway station. 

Children held their position and looked around. I too was in this circle and was positioned near the empty plot next to my house. Every few minutes someone yelled and asked from a distance, “found?” to which I replied, straining my neck, “not yet.”

The sky was darkening. All faces were beginning to look worried. I kept my eyes steadily on the plot which was growing dark. Weeds and tall plants were now turning into a black mass. 

Soon, a man on his motorbike brought Sahil and dropped him near me. Diya didi came running to fetch him. “Where was he? Where was he?” she asked the man breathlessly. “Green belt. Was sitting in a mango tree,” the man said in a tired voice and left. Diya didi hurriedly turned Sahil round and round to make sure he wasn’t hurt. “You, silly boy! Come home Now!” she screamed at him and pulled him toward their home. “No.” he said softly and shook his head. He wouldn’t budge. He stuck his feet to the ground. Exasperated and worried, his sister looked around for their mother and father. She could not locate them. Finding me standing nearby, she thrust her brother’s arm in my hands and said with a trembling, raging voice, “Hold him. Tightly. I’ll run and get mother. Don’t let him run. I’ll be back in a minute. Hold tightly,” she said as she ran. I held Sahil’s arm. His sister was running as fast as her feet could carry her.

I quietly stood holding the thin wrist of the boy everyone was still searching for. The one whose white shorts I wore to the school and who had never uttered a word about it. The boy who flew across my courtyard from this to that wall like a superhero. The one who could read hundreds of stories and keep all characters and riddles alive in his magical mind. That boy, now made to stand in my custody. Not resisting. Not questioning. Quietly allowing me to hold his freedom. I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. I decided to focus my eyes on the empty plot of land in front of us, overgrown with tall wild grass. 

I could still make out under the twilight sky the tall milkweed, with its beautiful strange crown flowers. I thought of its green pods that I loved popping open on lazy afternoons to see a glistening mass of seeds collected in the shape of a little white fish. I thought of the soft silk floss of the seeds that drifted aimlessly in the breeze. Then I thought of how I needed to keep hold of my prisoner at the same spot until Diya didi returned. It made my throat dry. Against all directives from Diya didi, I had held the thin wrist lightly. We both stood listening to crickets singing somewhere among the tall wild grass. 

I heard him say quietly, “Let me go?” he said. I turned to look at him. In those little brown eyes, I saw everything that awaited him at home. His father’s knitted eyebrows, flaring whiskers, swinging hand, shoe, and leather belt. I believed all of us children wanted to grow up fast and free ourselves from these things that came flying at our faces and bodies. There are worse things in the world than getting beaten inside the quiet walls of your own home, while you can hear other families watching television and eating happy dinners. But if you had asked me then, I would have shaken my head quietly and said no, there aren’t. 

I was small and awkward around Sahil. He could have easily set himself free and run away. Instead, he quietly stood there asking my permission to leave. I didn’t know I had that authority. The sky had grown dark. I saw Diya didi coming running toward us. I did not know when my hand opened its loose grip and let go of his thin wrist. He slipped like a small cat into the darkness of the empty plot in front of us. 

He couldn’t get farther than that because by then Diya didi had reached us wheezing and panting. “Where’s he?” she asked, bent in half and breathing fast. He was there, right in front of us. But under the cover of darkness, no one could see him. My eyes traced his shadow as he crept under the tall wild grasses. I was afraid of the dark. I worried for him. As long as I could hold him with my gaze, I thought, he was safe.

“Where is he?” Diya didi screamed. Tears were rushing out of her eyes. I saw Sahil’s shadow slip out of the plot into the far beyond. My stomach knotted in terror. “How could you lose him?” she asked and shook me violently from my shoulders, crying in anger. Her mother and the rest of the adults followed soon. Everybody felt miserable when they learnt that the child was found and was now lost again. I found myself in the circle of exhausted, dejected, and angry adults all bombarding me with questions. My words had all sunk deep in a well and changed their shapes such that no one could recognize them anymore. Tears started gushing down my cheeks. 

I felt a soft touch on my arm. Another small arm scraped by. The crowd broke into a huge uproar on seeing Sahil. I saw from the corners of my eyes. He was standing beside me, quietly, looking down at his feet. There was admonishing, there were sighs of relief, there were glares. We were now being explained about the dangerous evil traps that the children who run from homes found themselves in. There is no second home in the world, the adults told us. I wiped my tears and looked at him without turning toward him. 

Sahil’s father returned on his scooter. Sahil was duly handed over to him, but not without words of caution to his father: that the child needs just a little love from his father, and he will mend his ways, and so please do not beat him to the extent that he runs from home again. My father made Sahil’s father sit on a cane chair in our verandah. “Your son is a rare gift, bhaisahab. A real gem,” he said. “He needs a bit of soft touch,” he added. I do not know if that helped calm his father’s rage. 

I do not remember ever talking to Sahil about that day afterward. I do not remember him running away from home after that. He came less and less to our home. For a few years after that, his mother, whenever she came to chat with my mother, spoke of domestic bliss, not of beatings and crying, and that Sahil was studying harder like his father wanted him to. That his visits to the comic rental shop were becoming less and less. That he would top in the board exam just as his father wanted him to. That he would sit through the chartered accountancy exam just as his father wanted him to. That he would interview for the Bangalore job just as his father wanted him to. That he would marry the girl in Bangalore just as his father wanted him to. In between the pleasant news, sometimes, she slipped in a note of sadness, about Sahil’s father complaining of having been slowly left alone in his own house. That he had left home and was found twenty-seven hours later, sitting on a bench near the old lake, with an old sadhu for company. 

***

I became the adult I longed to be. The adults of yesteryears had turned frail and strolled their grandchildren in the streets, which were now paved with cement and had blazing streetlights all through the night. The pocket had been fortressed with tall spiked gates and scores of watchmen. The neighbourhood now was packed with houses standing wall to wall. There were many committees and clubs now for people to socialize on set times of the day or year. Children marched from one class to the next. There was no sand or milkweed to be found anywhere.

Diya didi had married and moved to Singapore. I was a young editor with a children’s publishing house in Delhi. Sahil had long moved out of home. He came for a few days after his mother passed away and then left. 

Sahil’s father who was now alone in the house, had built up a busy schedule around himself, volunteering or becoming a member of the many cultural and security committees of the pocket. He performed all his roles earnestly and with a zeal that sometimes left his other younger colleagues resenting him in hushed tones. We often saw the eighty-year-old man, hidden inside a loose safari suit, marching up and down the lane in his upright frame, scrutinising the watchmen’s registers with a scowl, and discussing the pocket’s important concerns with the elected RWA members. When he had had enough of the obtuseness of the younger generation, he presented himself at our home to speak of it to us. My parents listened with patience, made him his black unsweetened tea, and continued to sympathize with him even if it was sometimes hard to do so.

His two heart surgeries left him homebound for several months. Sahil was here to look after the hospitalization. He took him to best doctors in Gurgaon, paid all expense, and nursed him back to health. His wife and their two newborns stayed for a few weeks, letting uncle play with the newborns and recover. In those days, we often saw uncle walking the stroller in winter sun one frail, hesitant step at a time. One day, he managed to come to our home all on his own, his daughter-in-law keeping a watch from their house. He wanted to show us his tiny grandsons, with bulging cheeks, and tiny brown eyes of his son, lying next to each other in the navy-blue stroller. Uncle’s face looked melted with love that I had never imagined was possible for his argumentative, raging heart to experience. His eyebrows were no longer knitted or fearsome. They had arranged themselves sheepishly in a face that was now soothing, kind, frail, and smiled a lot. 

He spoke of Sahil as a rare gem, the bright, hardworking child any parent would be proud of. His proud voice had just a tint of sadness. He wished only for Sahil to sit by him sometimes after work and have a cup of tea, just father and son, talking about things small and big. But the son had too much to take care of.

Sahil had been busy setting up a system of nurses, helps, and a cook for his father, and arranging with kind neighbours to keep a check on him. Once the system was all set up, he left taking his young family along, knowing that before long, his father would be back on his feet, more from his restless spirit, than from his body’s actual strength. 

In the months to come, his father, instead of getting back on his feet, required further surgeries. Sahil returned, but this time, to sell the house and take his father with him after the surgery. 

In the weeks after that shared ride, the rains had gone. The skies were cleared of the dark clouds and the air had turned crisp. Throwing a light shawl around my shoulders, I left for work. On the front chair beside me lay a bundle of inked proofs, my packed lunch, and a water bottle I instinctively protected from falling off the seat with my arm every time we went over a bump. 

As I turned around a little hillock with a rare patch of unoccupied land, I saw everything covered in white silk floss. I looked up. Tiny brown specks of seeds with lush silk floss were gliding by softly along the autumn breeze. 

***

Bio: Richa is a publishing professional and is based in Faridabad. Her first short story “The Wedding” was published in the November 2024 issue of the Setu magazine. 

Email: shirishricha@gmail.com

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Setu, August 2025