land of the free home of the brave album

Our front yard, as I remember it, was hemmed by jhau shrubs and annual flowers. Although it was constructed in the 1960s, the quarter looked a lot like the colonial-style bungalows of the British administrative staff in the Indian subcontinent.

The house was a government-subsidized quarter that came with my father’s job posting. It was my answer to anyone who admired the plants crowding the front and back yards of our house at the remote edges of Berhampur, a mofussil in Bengal, India. In my childhood I used to say that if I were to look after a garden, I would struggle to keep the cacti alive. My hibiscus will produce thick blooms like the plants in my mother’s garden once did. No result, but I stubbornly persist, thinking the correct remedy must be a Quora thread or blog away. I heap dollops of coffee grounds at its roots. I spray my hibiscus with a homemade concoction of garlic, dish soap, and mineral oil. If I tell Ma, she gets to shrug and say, “What did I tell you?” So I search online and land on Quora threads discussing cures for diseased plants. A few are shot through with a tinge of red, but most are hollow. Dispirited, I pick up and force open the leathery shells. Over the next few weeks, I water and fertilize my hibiscus, monitor its green buds several times a day while working from home, in the hopes of seeing them bloom. She sounds so happy, and I am stung by the thought that Ma is not indifferent to the loveliness of hibiscus-but that she is skeptical of my ability to tackle an unavoidable gardening crisis. The flowers are clearly etched in my memory.

“But didn’t you have red hibiscus in your garden?” I ask. Midges, aphids, and other juice-sucking bugs will come to ruin the whole garden. My hands still moist from breaking and turning the soil in my yard, I phone my mother, eager to tell her I found a red hibiscus-the kind sacred to Goddess Kali, the kind whose abundant blooms brightened hedges in Bengal-in a department store in Northern California.

I bring home a hibiscus shrub in late spring.

Land of the free home of the brave album