It is a glorious winter morning, the kind that you no longer see in the world. The sky is light but you can see the moon and the stars. There is a special quality of winter morning that I miss: the air is cold but I am sleep warm. Everything feels clear, even my mind. Because the day has not yet started, it feels full of promises.
What I love most about such mornings is how the time unspools languidly, like it’s in no hurry to go anywhere. Like it would stay just like this, suspended, the sun half visible on the horizon.
Did you know we used to pray to the rising sun? When I was a girl, my mother would awaken me, so I could ask something for myself. My mother had coarse hands because of how hard she used to work. She was up with the sun and would stop only once it dipped back into its own bed in the evenings.
But she used them gently when she woke me in the mornings. She would caress my head and hum a song to wake me before handing me a plate of flowers so I could welcome the sun.
For the longest time I did not know I was a half orphan. I did not have a father. My mother was such an all-encompassing part of my life I didn’t know to miss his presence. My friend Lalita told me once that it was shameful I didn’t have a father. I did not understand why it was shameful. So, I asked her what a father was for. Lalita, whose father only hit her mother when he was angry, did not know what to say. Since she didn’t have an answer, I did not let the shame bother me.
But I told my mother and my mother who is the wisest person I know said, “Your father is the sun, bitiya.”
“The sun?” I asked with a gasp. “The one that is in the sky? The one I welcome every morning?”
My mother had offered me an immense kindness that day, teaching me such a valuable lesson: if the sun himself was my father, how could I ever feel like I was less than Lalita? Or anyone. She taught me that I was surrounded by forces that I may not understand but were very much available to me, if I only asked.
Life was not always easy for us. My mother wasn’t able to soothe all my tears or questions. There were some scars that only I could heal. But she gave me a system that I use even now, seventy years after her passing.
When I feel lonely, I speak to the sun. I no longer welcome him. I am old now so I bid it goodnight instead. I walk to the river, just a few minutes walk from my home, when I miss her. I lay down in the garden when I want to feel the warmth of my parents’ love for me, the sun warming my front and the earth supporting my back.
I love winters because the sun feels closer and warmer after the chilly night. Like it is saying hello to me.
Lalita, who stopped talking to me because I asked her why it was important to have a father, came back home after spending forty years raising her kids and husband.
The day she came, it was another winter morning. She wanted to apologize and when I asked her why, again she had no answer for me. But she was a guest, so she was welcomed into my home, where I collect rare flowers.
Rare flowers. Orphan girls.
My mother was not my womb mother but my love mother. She taught me everything but she didn’t teach me how cruel the world was to daughters and abandoned girls. So, I took it upon myself to become a maali to these flowers.
Lalita told me that day that she was a rare flower too because though her parents were alive, they had abandoned her the moment she was born. Then I told her something I tell all my flowers, “We stick together,” and welcomed her home.
If you are a rare flower too, I hope you find your people.
For Letter R, written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z
tales of Suchita 
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