Wildflowers

I started this piece in the spring of 2019 for a creative writing class. At the time, it was an orated story in a podcast series of my own, and so it had much greater emphasis on audio elements (raindrops, the wind, horseshoes against a rough roadway) and personal commentary. Below is a significantly evolved version of the audio piece. I chose to use a third-person point of view because I wanted to be able to voice the full range of emotions felt by my original characters. Thank you for reading! :)

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour – William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Meera sat in a horse-drawn cart for several hours, holding her wicker trunk close to her chest. It held a few clean blouses that she had scrubbed and pressed to a crisp, and an assortment of fresh fruit that her grandmother had wrapped carefully in brown paper and tinsel for her. Beneath her garments, Meera had slipped in a few things she hadn’t been able to part with: her father’s old cologne, her mother’s favorite book and her sister’s silver earrings, speckled with stones that she insisted came from the stars.

Meera was on her way to a village school in Dehradun. She had been invited to work there as one of the three new school nurses. When the headmaster had told her in a formal letter that she would be tending to ailing children, she had been overjoyed. Her family had been overwrought.

You're venturing too far, her older sister had complained, and Meera hadn't argued with that. She knew it was true. But she feared that admitting so to her family would make them more worried for her than they already were. This morning, she had smiled through a deep sadness she didn't know she was capable of feeling, and had left before her sister could catch the early morning rays glint off her wet cheeks.

Still clasping her trunk close to her, Meera stared out. The sky was now a dense, black expanse. The bordering vegetation had thickened, making it difficult to see beyond the strip of gravel her cart was trundling over.

The only things visible were the wildflowers that peeked back at her from the bushes.

They were white as milk.

She noticed how, every so often, the shifting moonlight would cast a soft halo around their petals, infusing them with a strange, heady beauty. Meera watched entranced. The flowers were stiller than a winter lake from a distance until, as the cart passed by, the wind stirred up their leaves in a synchronized dance, making them flutter momentarily before they shimmied back into their dark, slender leaves.

Then—all too quickly—the flowers grew sparse, and a sudden surge of emptiness consumed Meera. She blinked hard.

Why had those pretty blossoms made the air so heavy?

Uneasy, she turned her focus away. She called to the stars for comfort—recalling how she and her sister would trace them with their fingers during blackouts—until they swam against the sky, whirling and fading out as her eyes finally gave in to the weight of her exhaustion.

A little after sunrise the next day, Meera was hiking to the village school with the two other school nurses.

The break of dawn had arrived only five hours after Meera had reached her lodge last night. Her nurse roommates had been fast asleep. This morning, after a quick round of introductions, they had packed large sacks for their first day at work. Between them, they shared diaries, emergency medicine, cough syrups, band aids, gauze, sanitizers, pads, wipes, creams, towels, thermometers, warm socks, toys and toffees.

Meera stopped by a large rock. The other two, a few steps behind her, followed suit when they noticed why she had slowed. Their path had led them to the base of an elevated riverbank, beyond which they could hear water rushing with the violence of an angry Monsoon flood. Silver foam spattered upward. The scent of fresh soil and berries permeated the wet air, a striking difference to the stretch of yellow-green behind them, where the air stung with heat and the summer sun had seared the tips of each blade of grass. Up ahead, a weak bridge made of rope balanced precariously over the gorge, tethered only to tree stumps on either side of the river.

Meera’s eyes were caught on the opening of the bridge, where a sinewy, extremely attractive, young man sat on a cane chair with a newspaper. He was effortlessly relaxed despite the force of the water next to him, making him irresistible to look at.

A nurse whispered that he was an expert who was meant to help crossers get safely to the other side of the river.

They watched curiously as he thumbed through the newspaper and nibbled absentmindedly on a carrot. A cotton shirt clung to his torso, patched with rare fabrics around the chest. Bright, sea-green pants that were scrunched at the ankles struck a conflict with the deep reds of the earth behind him. His curly hair loomed around his shadowed face and, Meera noticed, even from a distance, that his eyes were a startling, clear gray. Everything about his appearance mesmerized.

When he heard them approach, he lifted his gaze toward them and broke into a genuine smile. He opened his right hand in a wide wave and shuffled down the elevation, wasting no time in introductions or small talk. One at a time, he helped the trio up the mound and across the bridge.

Meera was the last to go.

She caught a fragrance of peonies and freshwater drift off the expert as she placed a shaky foot on the bridge, and noticed that a thin curl of vine adorned both his wrists. His arms boasted the kind of deep tan only years of earth-loving activity under the sun gave.

Behind her, he slipped his hands between the ropes to steady the bridge against the gush of the river below. Agile and quick, he pulled at different ropes to keep them taut as Meera progressed hesitatingly through the crisscross contraption.

When she emerged onto the embankment on the other side of the river, the expert waved the three of them goodbye and good luck, catching Meera’s eyes for a second too long.

An unexpected blush fleeted across her face.

She walked the rest of the journey feeling slightly flustered, and not from the nerves of starting a new job.

Over the next couple of days, Meera discovered bits and pieces about the expert through the short conversations that the bridge-crossing allowed. She never spoke, but she listened keenly as the nurses prodded him with questions and as he fielded them with amusement. She learned that during the off-season, he assisted his father, his only family in the village, with farming work. The rest of his days in the summer were spent by the river. He explained that even though his hometown was only a few miles away, he had found solace in this small village, and he enjoyed getting to meet workers and travelers.

One morning, a nurse asked him what had brought him to the river.

For the first time since Meera had met him, the expert’s demeanor shifted. It was very subtle, but Meera caught how his sturdy shoulders sagged ever so slightly, and how his smile suddenly appeared too heavy for him to hold. He looked earnestly at them, but his clear eyes were now shadowed with an expression Meera couldn’t easily define. Some type of sadness, she thought, but the kind that had been worn down by layers of age and a difficult acceptance. He wrestled with his flapping shirt as if trying to distract himself from answering the question, then simply stilled and let out a soft sigh.

He revealed, in a terse but beaten tone, that rough winds had taken his sister’s life by the very spot they stood on. She had fallen into the river and drowned in its merciless turbulence.

Meera’s heart went out to the expert. When the silence lingered, she gathered the courage to smile at him—even if to reassure a deep wound—and offered to trade some of her homemade bread for his carrots. He smiled kindly and thanked her, the emotional lilt in his voice wrapping around her like a warm duvet. Meera shied away, pleased.

From the other side of the river, when she caught breadcrumbs tumble down his mouth, she realized that she hated the thought of a day in her life when he might not be around anymore.

Weeks after Meera’s first day at work, she had begun to leave for school an hour earlier than usual. She spent the extra time trading some of her new recipes with the expert and talking to him about the village, hoping he noticed her newly-kohled eyes and the intricate meshwork of her special blouses. He noticed, amused, but said nothing. Instead, he jested that her loose hair was unpresentable for a school nurse. She scowled. Internally, she soared.

He reveled in their little food sharing enterprise. Eager to show his appreciation for her fire-baked breads, he brought her Indian gooseberries from the trees outside his home. The small, green fruit made her face pucker dramatically, and she retorted that it would make the perfect remedy for her naughtier children at school. Meera discovered that the expert liked forest walks, animals and the feel of newsprint in his hands. He learned that he was deeply in love with her.

One day, when the sun burned a passionate, fiery gold, he nearly told her so himself.

Until he needed to be off to attend a distant cousin’s funeral in his hometown.

The expert promised himself that he would tell Meera when he returned in a week, although, somewhere deep inside, he feared that holding it off might inadvertently distance her from himself. Meera, silently heartbroken that the next couple of journeys to school wouldn’t be the same, made him promise that he would share some of her homemade bread with his family. He laughed that he’d be back before she knew it, with the most exquisite ornaments to decorate her unpresentable hair with.

She acquiesced. One week was nothing.

Yet, the days that followed were treacherously long and bleak.

Meera and her roommates walked a different route to the village school now that nobody could help them across the bridge. The trees around them appeared taller, darker. They loomed against the dim sky, swathing the ground in shadows of curling clouds and spindly branches. Maroon berries that had fallen off the trees lay forgotten on the dry path they walked, and the brown finches they were used to seeing chirped only from a distance.

It was why, on the day of the expert’s return, Meera woke up beaming.

She packed her sack as usual, but she also wore her prettiest tunic and sandals and—perhaps for the first time in a very long time—carried her heart on her sleeve. Sashaying with her immaculately-braided hair and scented headscarf, she got to the bridge before sunrise. She plopped down on the grass despite the morning dew and inhaled the musk of pine and fresh soil.

A chuckle, both joyous and anxious, escaped her as she tried to listen for the familiar sound of the expert crunching on his carrots.

Instead, the early insects chirped as the horizon broke and scattered the sky with pale oranges and soft lilacs. Meera slowly became aware of the bitter rush of the river next to her, and then her own breath.

Minutes passed.

Soon, it was an hour.

Just when Meera realized that it was time to head to the school, she heard the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps clambering up the hill. Her heart thudded in anticipation.

Meera found that it was only her roommates. She exhaled violently with heartbreak.

Wait.

Her roommates were wearing entirely unrecognizable faces: trembling lips, eyes as cold as stone, hair swept in all directions by the wind.

A sinister dread suddenly settled in Meera’s chest. It was dense, altogether suffocating. She instinctively gripped the grass around her to steady herself from collapsing at what she might hear.

Her roommates spoke in a flurry, the words getting mixed up and the rough wind carrying their voices away. But the message was clear.

The expert’s body had been found on a shallow bank near the end of the river.

The police had discovered him with flowers gripped in his hands, their petals scattered over his drenched body. The roommates cried that the expert must have done something irrational to have lost his balance, like stretch too far out to save the flowers from getting whipped away by the wind.

They sobbed that they had been spirit wildflowers of a pure, magical white, meant to be weaved by the man into his lover's hair on their wedding day.