The Blind Florist

Pabna, 1920

The flower shop was small. But into that smallness, it seemed as though all the colours of the world had gathered and settled. Red roses, white lilies, yellow sunflowers. Each bloom speaking its own quiet language. Whoever walked down that lane, even once, would find their eyes drawn helplessly toward it. The heaviness inside them would lift, just a little. They would think: how beautifully the Creator has adorned this world.

But it was not merely the colour. Everything about this shop stirred a strange, serene calmness in the heart. Passers-by on Pabna’s narrow roads would pause, even for a moment, to look. Something in them would soften. However low the spirit, it would ease. They would think: the One who made these flowers, how wondrously He has made them. How generously He has poured colour into them and set an example before us. If only people could be as pure and as beautiful as flowers.

Two people worked in this little flower shop. An old mother and her blind daughter. There was also a boy, the son, who spent his days at the neighbourhood doctor’s medicine shop. The family was very poor, yet one could tell that however little they earned, it was enough for them. Perhaps they had simply accepted that their circumstances would never change, exactly the way the girl had accepted that no proposal of marriage would ever come for her.

The sound of her footsteps was different, slightly sharper and more hurried than those of the people who usually walked that lane.

Sandals on wet earth. A child dragging its feet. Then the small pause of hesitation people made when they realised the girl behind the cart could not see them. Golap sensed she was someone from the Zamindar’s house; even the servants there had a way of walking that felt heavy with importance.

“The Zamindar’s mother has sent me,” the woman said, her voice stiff. “She needs flowers for a wedding. She wants only white flowers. Everything must be white.”

Golap turned toward the voice. “White tuberose, then. Or jasmine. We have both.” She reached into the cart, her fingers moving through the stems with the ease of long practice, past the rough-edged marigolds, past the roses still heavy with morning water, until she found the tuberose. She lifted a bunch and held it forward.

Just then the sky split open.

The thunder came without warning. The woman let out a short cry.

Golap flinched. The tuberose left her hand; she felt it go, felt the air where it had been, and then heard it hit the cart’s edge and scatter across the mud below.

Silence.

The woman’s face twisted into a look of pure disgust. Her eyes narrowed into thin, sharp slits, and her lips curled back as if she had stepped in something foul. There was no pity in her expression, only a cold, hard anger that made her features look like carved stone.

“Look what you’ve done!” she snapped. “If you can’t do your job properly, why are you even standing here?”

“I am sorry,” Golap said quickly. She was already crouching, her hands pressing into the mud, searching. A stem. Another. The third had rolled somewhere she could not reach.

The woman let out a sharp, annoyed huff and stared down at the ruined petals with her hands on her hips. “Now look at that,” she muttered, her eyes hard and cold. “The flowers are in the mud now.”

Golap’s mother appeared from the back of the shop. “Please forgive her, Begum Saheba. She cannot see. Please forgive her.” She paused. “I will replace them. No charge.”

The woman said nothing more. Golap heard the sandals move away, the child’s feet scuffing after. She stayed crouched for a moment, fingers still in the mud, the ruined tuberose in her palm.

She set them aside and stood.

Around her, the lane settled back into its wet quiet. Red roses, white lilies, yellow sunflowers sat in their baskets exactly as she had arranged them before dawn, each in its place, each known to her by its stem’s thickness and its particular scent. The shop was hers in a way the visible world was not. She reached out and straightened a rose that had leaned in the wind.

It held.

* * *

The world, for Golap, was different. She could not see, but she understood in her heart that flowers were among the most beautiful things on this earth. The life and the gentle loveliness that the Creator had woven into each petal, one did not need light in one’s eyes to perceive it. Perhaps no one understood this truth better than this blind girl. And so her blindness had never once stood between her and that enchanted world of flowers.

During the wedding season, the shop would be crowded with buyers. People came to begin new chapters of their lives. Some came to decorate their homes. Some to fill bridal chambers with bright, fragrant blooms for the newly-weds. Others came to drape entire houses and carriages in garlands and bouquets.

All this joy and ceremony, Golap could only hear. She could not see it. She had been born blind. The boundless beauty of flowers lay always beyond the reach of her sight. But what of that? She felt the existence of each flower through her touch and through its scent. She tended every bloom with a fierce tenderness, as though they were her own children.

* * *

By evening the rain had thinned to a mist. Golap was at the stove, stirring lentils, when she heard her brother’s footsteps on the path outside, heavier than usual. He came in without a word. Set his bag down. Washed his hands at the basin.

Their mother looked up from her corner. “Eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You said that yesterday.”

He sat. Golap brought him a glass of water without being asked and placed it where his hand would find it. He did not thank her. She did not expect him to.

“What did he say today?” their mother asked carefully, fanning him.

A long pause. “The usual. That I miscounted the stock. That he can’t trust someone who miscounts.” His voice was flat, the flatness of something said too many times. “He stood in front of the other boy and said it. The one who started last month.”

Their mother made a soft sound.

“I have been in that pharmacy for four years,” he said. “Four years.” He picked up the glass and set it down without drinking. “What does he think? Because I am a clerk he can say anything?”

Golap stirred the thin, watered-down lentils. The flame was low; she turned it lower still, her heart heavy with his words.

“Eat,” she said finally. “The lentils and chira are ready.”

Her brother looked down at his bowl. He mixed the flattened rice into the liquid and frowned. “Why are the lentils so watery today?”

Golap lowered her head, her fingers twisting the edge of her sari. She had no answer.

Their mother sighed from the corner of the room, her voice weary. “Everything is so costly now,” she said softly. “A handful of grain costs what a sack once did. We must make do with what we have.”

Her brother did not argue. He only sighed, a sound of pure exhaustion, and began to eat with his hand. Golap sat in the shadows, listening to the soft sound of him eating, and said nothing more.

* * *

Today, outside, a heavy rain was falling. The drops fell in rhythm, like a composer’s masterpiece. She sat listening to its tap-tap, its soft patter, and ran her fingers over the flowers around her. She straightened one, then another, but they leaned again the moment she let go. Her thumb found a fallen petal on the counter, still soft, still red, but no one had come for it. She tucked it into her palm. The rain poured on.

She sighed softly; with the rain pouring down and the wedding season over, she knew the shop would be empty today.

These days, very few people came to the shop at all. Sometimes a man buying flowers for his wife, or someone with a gift to give. Nothing more. Business was low.

At home, things were desperately tight.

The rice tin emptied faster than it filled. Her brother went out each morning in the same pair of worn shoes, the soles thinning with each passing day.

Their mother wandered the edges of the fields, gathering wild greens or whatever the season would give. Some days, that was all they had. Other days, they made do with panta bhat and a pinch of salt, eaten in quiet.

Her brother was being made to suffer at the doctor’s pharmacy. The doctor humiliated him often. But what could any of them do? The household needed to be fed. There were murmurs in Pabna’s fields and lanes of some movement against the British, but where was the time for poor people to trouble themselves with such things?

She sat still, yet her mind slipped from one worry to the next, as if carried by the downpour.

Suddenly, the sound of a motorcar reached her ears, followed by the heavy fall of footsteps. Someone was coming. A man, she was certain. Only a man made a sound like that in those shoes.

Footsteps. Heavy, measured. Leather against wet earth.

Golap straightened.

The sound came closer. Firm and unhurried.

She reached for her large dupatta and drew it low across her face, tucking the edge beneath her chin, and came out of the house.

She stepped forward, just to the edge of the cart, and stopped.

The footsteps stopped too.

By the time the footsteps stopped at the front of the shop, she had already stepped back, just beyond the line where the light fell. She was a girl from a Muslim home, after all. She did not show herself to just anyone, and neither did she wish to. She and her mother ran this shop from behind the strictest purdah.

She moved forward slowly, folding into herself. Her voice was unsteady when she spoke. “Yes? What can I get you?”

At precisely that moment, a violent bolt of lightning ripped across the sky.

The sudden brightness and force of the sound made her flinch back a step. And in that instant, just that one careless instant, her dupatta slipped from her face. In the brief flash of the lightning, her calm, pale face was perhaps visible for a single moment. Then she gathered herself and pulled the cloth quickly back across her features.

The rain poured on.

The man carried the scent of an expensive, distinguished perfume. She recognised it. Once before, a wealthy man had come to commission wedding flowers for his daughter, and he had worn exactly such a fragrance. The memory of it had remained with her. Now, again, that same scent reached her and stirred something. This was the same quality, though different, less sweet, more still.

“Yes,” she said. “Which flower would you like?”

The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Red roses.”

She moved to the roses without answering. Her hands were steady as she worked. She gathered a bunch, half a dozen, their stems cool and wet from the rain, and brought them forward. She reached toward the direction of his voice and carefully placed them on the small wooden cart.

“How much?” he asked.

Before Golap could even open her mouth to answer, her mother came rushing out of the house, moving fast toward the cart.

“Six annas, Saheb,” her mother said breathlessly, stepping in front of Golap.

The man did not say a word. Golap heard the faint clink of coins and the rustle of paper as he handed the money over.

Her mother came. Money changed hands. The footsteps left. Then the roaring sound of the motor.

The perfume remained for a long time after, hanging in the damp air of the shop, particular and unmistakeable, like a question she had not been asked yet.

* * *