One good day when I woke up, I saw one entire area of our backyard turned out to be white, white as snow. I could smell its aroma from the pavement around my grandpa’s house. It looked like a jasmine flower but with more petals. And I thought it would be great if I could form it into a flower crown and keep it on my head. I did it with the help of my elder sister, Nisha. A happy, successful morning went by with all the excitement of the adventure just to discover that my grandma was going to scold me, once she arrived home from the market. I was scolded for destroying the coffee beans. Can you imagine???
I tried my level best to explain to my grandma that I did not touch a single bean anywhere but only the flowers. But she adamantly kept arguing that I destroyed the coffee bean. I forgot the scolding I received and went to bed. It was not easy but I did it. While executing it I succeed in making grandma beg me for forgiveness. Strangely that did not solve my problem of being misunderstood. But that was more enjoyable than me going and apologizing to grannie.
After some days or weeks, grandma called me aside to the same place I was scolded for no good reason which I was avoiding, and showed me how a bean came out of the flower but it hardly made sense in my mind. All I could see were tin beans and some faded flowers. Years went by for that great enlightenment. One day, in a biology class they taught how the flowers turned to fruits and the bulb lit in my head, “oh, yeah, I have seen it”. I was excited to know what I once knew but did not realize and was overwhelmed thinking was grandma was trying to convey.
Being with grandparents was fun when one’s mother was facing a war in a foreign land. They would not scold us at all. My life, my rules. I remember, once crying because I was overwhelmed, nobody touched me, nobody pushed me, nobody avoided me, and they gave me even the window side, the side all usually fight for, in the school van, yet I cried for no reason. The teacher asked those kids, “what did you do to her?” And they replayed, “Nothing”. But the teacher did not believe them and at the end asked me, “Why are you crying?” the only answer that came out was, “Teacher, will my mummy come back alive? All are saying she won’t”. The teacher comforted me saying, “Your mommy will come back. We all are praying”.
That ride was a rollercoaster till one day my neighbor came with the newspaper, printed with my mom’s name on it among the people who started from Iraq. “My mom is coming.”, how could Malyala Manoramma lie?
