Frangipani

The fragrance of the new blossoms went unnoticed, as seven pairs of eyeballs followed the rugged, scratched cricket ball, the colour of stale meat, flying across their makeshift pitch and landing with an audible crunch over the dozen half-broken flowerpots overgrown with grass and weeds on Mr. Ranganathan’s balcony.

Rohan had broken the only rule of Vijay Jyoti Paradise’s gully cricket. Never hit the ball into Rangarok’s house. He turned to look at his friends sheepishly, shuffling the bat between his hands.

‘It’s my ball! Rohan, you have to go and get it,’ Karthik whined in his wheezy, rheumatic voice.

‘But I didn’t…’ he protested, uselessly.

Everyone knew not to mess with Rangarok. Shuttle-cocks, cricket balls and even clothes knocked into his balcony by strong winds, had disappeared into their recesses forever, drowning in the stringy mass of cellulose that had long turned brown. Nobody knew how to get them back, because nobody had dared to ask. The ancient, gaunt, withdrawn widower was best left alone.

‘We can’t play anymore if you don’t get that ball back, Rohan,’ Ashwin persisted.

‘You know what? Fine. I’ll go,’ Rohan threw the bat on the ground with a dramatic thud and ran up the staircase. He was sure nobody would dare to follow him.

‘You can style them with these lace-up boots or these simple cut- Ugh! Why do people keep climbing up and down the stairs? Can’t I even record in peace?’ Shreya screamed, turning to Rohan.

She was a nineteen-year-old creator who made fashion content on Instagram. During the lockdown, she had begun posting a few styling videos from her everyday looks just for fun, but the massive reach she got was unexpectedly encouraging. With the growing influx of new followers, several small businesses and even relatively large brands had contacted her for paid promotions. Now she posted new videos thrice a week, curating, shooting and editing content almost every day.

At first, it was just a hobby she pursued on the side, but seeing the growth with every passing day and the slow but steady trickle of revenue coming in, Shreya was sure she could soon make a career out of this. All of that would end up being just a far-fetched dream, unless she finished atleast one of the six branded videos she had to send that weekend for approval, which seemed impossible, with these pesky kids screaming in the background. Recording at home, in its pristine silence would have been a better choice, but a patterned curtain as a backdrop just wasn’t as aesthetic as the marble staircase against faded cream walls, with a window overlooking the white-and-yellow blooms. She sighed as she turned her camera off for the seventeenth time in the past hour.

Rohan merely laughed as he ran back into his own house and locked the door behind him, panting.

‘Woah, what happened? You’re back so soon?’ his mother Deepa asked, looking at the floral wall clock that was far too flashy to go with anything else in the room. It was a wedding gift, and those usually tended to cling on to homes far more than anything else from that day.

‘Nothing! We finished playing,’ he offered in way of explanation and quickly walked off into his room.

‘Rohan, go take a shower first. I’ll get your milk,’ she shouted behind him, but the protesting creak of his bed was the only reply she received.

‘Why don’t you ever listen-’ her screams were cut off by the sudden trilling of the intercom.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me, Avni,’ a voice came from the other end.

‘I was just waiting for you to call,’ Deepa’s lips instantly widened into a smile, as she settled down on the sofa, Rohan’s bath completely forgotten.

After a few minutes of generic small-talk, Avni finally came to the reason she called.

‘So, did you get the job?’

Deepa was silent for a second.

‘I… did,’ she whispered slowly, as if realising the implications of her words for the first time.

‘Congratulations! That’s such great news. When are you joining?’

‘About that…’ Deepa hesitated.

‘Wait. You’re taking the job, right?’

There was only silence at the other end.

‘Deepa, did you discuss this with Vishal yet?’

‘I… didn’t find the time,’ she twirled the cable around her fingers distractedly.

‘But now you landed the job, and we both know how much you wanted it, so there’s no question of declining the offer, right?’

‘Urghh, why is everything so hard?’ Deepa sighed into the phone.

‘Okay, calm down and tell me what’s bothering you,’ Avni said, slowly.

‘It’s just, I don’t really know at this point. With Rohan and all-’ she began.

‘Such a sweet boy,’ Avni couldn’t help adding.

‘Of course, but,’ she paused, breathing heavily, ‘I feel like such a horrible mother right now.’ She was back to withdrawing into her shell.

‘What, no! Why are you saying that?’

‘He’s my son, and I love him so much, but taking care of him can’t be everything my life is about, right? I don’t want to, but that’s how I feel. Every morning Vishal and Rohan leave, and all I’m left with is an empty house with nothing but chores to while away my day. It’s frustrating to see Vishal having this whole other part of his life going on, the business trips, the parties, the dinners while all I do is sit here and whine, thinking of my wasted time and potential.’

‘Deepa,’ Avni began, with no clue how to comfort her friend, but she was instantly cut off, ‘The worst part is, I planned this. We both had decided that one of us has to stay home with Rohan. We didn’t want to be those parents who had absolutely no role to play in their son’s childhood, shuttling him from one daycare to another. And in the beginning, I liked that, I really did, but now, all I feel is this sense of purposelessness, which I shouldn’t, because I do have a purpose, a huge and important one, but,’ she took a deep, shaky breath, trying to hold in her tears.

Avni was quiet for a while, as her mind wandered to her own life. She and Karan had been married for six years, but the couple had seen more fertility clinics than vacation resorts. It was only a few months ago that they decided to put an end to hoping that a ninth opinion would bear some positive news and adopt a child instead. It was proving difficult to convince their in-laws that bloodlines and ‘own-ness’ didn’t matter, when they involved severe depression, self-consuming jealousy and tear and blood-stained sheets.

Even as she heard Deepa’s muffled sniffs, she couldn’t get the image of having a lively ten-year-old to play with, love and cherish out of her mind. She imagined her stroking his head, as he finally solved that long-division sum that had been giving him trouble, the words whistling through the gaps in his teeth, asking for ten more minutes of playtime on her phone, his reward for an hour of hard work, as she attempted to make the best of those few moments when math did not feel like such a pain.

She tossed away the half-decayed flowers floating on an embossed brass bowl that she had forgotten to replace in three days through the balcony. No matter where they came from, or what they did, in the end, every one of them ended up getting trampled underfoot.

A pair of footsteps shuffling downstairs shook her out of her reverie. She recognised him instantly. Sarthak and his five unsuccessful attempts at passing the UPSC exam were popular gossip material at the apartments. Almost everyone used him as a way to make themselves feel better about their shortcomings or warn others about ending up like him. Avni had heard of his involvement with a girl from the same building, a couple of years ago. Eight months back, she had received a wedding invite from her family. The boy was settled in the states, they said.

She tried waving at him, but he was too preoccupied to notice. The elevator had stopped working. The delivery guy would leave if Sarthak didn’t make it downstairs quickly.

‘Eh, makes for cardio, I guess,’ he muttered to himself, as he walked towards the gates of the building. The security guard was standing there with the delivery guy, his package on the table.

‘Thank you,’ Sarthak smiled, signing on the delivery slip, brushing away a stray blossom from the table.

He slightly removed the tape on the parcel to check if everything was in order.

The smell of the new guidebooks couldn’t compensate for how heavily they bogged his hands down.

‘Sixth time’s the charm,’ he whispered, as he headed back in, narrowly missing bumping against a little girl riding an orange bicycle with printed flames stuck on the sides.

‘See where you’re going, Champa,’ the guard rushed towards her, his fatherly instincts kicking in immediately. She stuck her tongue out at him and rode off, laughing. The two tiny ponytails on her head bobbed up and down as her cycle traversed the pathway indented with patterned tiles. She picked up a fallen flower and placed it into the basket already overflowing with them, dropping a few at every jerk and turn, picking them back up in the next round.

‘I love cycle-dada!’ she squealed, craning her neck to peer into the balcony on the second floor.

Those eyes didn’t see the overgrown, rotten weeds, or the railing painted white with pigeon droppings. They found an enchanted mini-garden full of buried treasures, a few stray frangipanis lodging themselves into them, as if they’d bloomed there.

Rangarok waved at her, to the amazement of the six pairs of eyeballs still waiting for their deserter. He rummaged for their ball in grassy growth that almost came up to his knees, tossed it out like trash, and headed back in.

An ambitious branch snaked across the sides of the rusted iron grill, as one little bloom floated in circles, down, down, down.