Kamala

My name is Kamala. My father named me after the flowers he'd grown in our terrace, in an aluminum bowl that my mother used for washing clothes. Kamala grows in mud water, usually pond water but my father, who loved plants and gardening, grew Kamala in our terrace. He took pride in every petal that unfolded and he loved to show it off to our guests. He was proud of the Kamala he grew in a bowl but never so of the child, his own. So when I returned home from literacy classes one day when I was 7 years old, he told me that I never needed to go back to study.

I cried, refused to eat for days, begged and pleaded to my mother to talk to my father to send me back to class. They didn't budge. I was 12 years old when I was married off to a 16 year old boy who lived in our neighborhood. My husband ran a small shop in Patan. He sold threads and buttons and scissors. 

I gave birth to my first child at home, a daughter, when I was 14 years old. I lost three of my children to unknown diseases before they even reached the age of 5. By the age of 26, I had 7 children. Only 4 of them survived. Some nights during those days, I woke up and stared at the wooden ceiling as my twin infants clung onto my breast for milk and I remember how I couldn’t cry. I felt a heavy lump on my chest and it hurt me in a way I couldn’t describe. It may have been possible that nobody actually asked me how I was feeling because if they had asked, how could I have not explained the pain that still hurts me today in my memories?

One day when my youngest twins were 4 years old, my husband came home tired after a long day's work, wiped the sweat off his forehead with his topi and said that someone had claimed the shop to be theirs and the shop was to be closed until the court cleared the case. Days turned into months and months into years and the court case went on. I struggled to send my children to school. One day my eldest daughter came home crying because the teacher spanked her for carrying the notebook that her siblings also used. She dropped out of school when she was 13 years old. 

Before my other children suffered and dropped out of school, I started looking for a job. I couldn’t read and write. I was good at housekeeping but back in those days, you had to have close ties with the elites and families closer to the royal families to be hired as a housemaid. I knew a tailor in Swotha who sewed clothes for the women working in rich people’s houses and through her, I landed my first job as a gardener. I walked for miles from Patan to Naxal everyday with my gardening tools that I borrowed from a friend's shop. 

My eldest daughter started accompanying me to my workplaces soon after I started working. We managed to find more houses to work as a gardener. We spent hours beautifying other people's gardens, growing scented flowers and trimming bushes and shrubs to their likings. We stared at the big houses from outside and imagined how their lives would be inside. We saw the light and shimmer of large chandeliers from outside, heard the clinking of dishes from the kitchen and smelt the aromas of chicken and mutton curries and pulao. 

Did I ever imagine that I would one day own a house of my own and live a life that I only saw from outside through window panes and screen doors? No. Never. 

My daughter had been insisting on cooking chicken in a curry style at home for a long time after one of the employers once offered her leftover chicken curry with rice. I had received a special dakshina for Dashain and on the day of tika, I cooked chicken in a curry style with chopped onions, tomatoes and ground ginger and garlic. We seldom bought chicken and even when we did, we never had all the ingredients to cook it in curry style so when my children saw chicken curry on top of rice on their plates for the first time, they devoured it in a few minutes. Even today when I close my eyes, I can see my children sitting in a circle devouring the food on their plates with red tika on their foreheads, wearing used clothes handed down by some of my generous employers. I think if I try harder, I can still catch the whiff of the chicken curry we ate during that Dashain. 

Eighty years ago, my father first grew lotus on our terrace. Today my eldest daughter runs one of the largest nurseries in Patan. In the center of her nursery, there is a small pond where she grows Kamala. 

Kamala grows in mud and water and despite its sufferings, it blossoms.