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From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
from The Gardener 85, by Rabindranath Tagore
It is said that on the first Sabzeruz, the Goddess of Flowers danced while the Lord of Dendro sang, and the first padisarahs sprang to life where she stepped. Their seeds carried on the wind, blossoming in flowerbeds and in the wild, forming a carpet of fuschia laid end-to-end across Sumeru. A tribute born at the intersection of the goddesses’ domains, Nabu Malikata’s gift to her dearest friend in a form that she would love best—one that could be enjoyed by her people as much as by herself.
Not a single descendant of those countless padisarahs remains today. And yet, the land created lovingly by the companion goddesses lives on; and so does the custom of giving flowers to one’s loved ones on the Sabzeruz—a transient yet exquisite gift, given freely by the earth.
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Kaveh wakes early, as the very first sunlight creeps through the bedroom curtains and falls across his face. It’s quiet and still, and the half of the bed next to him is cool and neatly made, as it has been for the last so-many weeks. It is the morning of the Sabzeruz—the first to be celebrated in five hundred years, Sumeru’s belated thanksgiving to its reinstated patron goddess.
It’s also a public holiday, as have been the three days before and will be the three days after. Kaveh does not remember the last time he has taken so much time off in one stretch. He would have gladly kept working through the holidays, if only to have something to do—but his clients had firmly refused, having plans of their own. Most had wanted finalised drafts before the holidays began, and so the last week had been a frantic blur, nights bleeding into days and coffee cups piling up on Kaveh’s work-desk while he brought plan after plan to completion, delivering them all in a memorable run through the city on the last evening of the working week. He’d slept through most of the first day of the holidays. Then on the second day he’d awoken, made himself breakfast, and quickly realised that he had no idea how to spend time in complete leisure, especially by himself.
The natural alternative to leisure had been doing the chores—and so Kaveh had spent his solitary holiday slowly cleaning and sprucing up the house, because it was Sabzeruz after all, and there was no harm in making the place look a little better before the festival. Tidying the interior hadn’t done as much to improve his mood as he had hoped. It was impossible to spend too much time inside without being overwhelmed by the silence, or feeling that the space was a little too large. Dusting the shelves felt worse, because that required taking down stacks and stacks of books and thinking about how heavy they must have been for one person to move across town into this place; or polishing ornaments one by one, examining their finer details and wondering what on earth could have prompted a person to buy them. They were each uglier than the last, and made Kaveh’s heart ache fondly.
The first evening, he’d gotten distracted trying to teach Mehrak musical chords so that he could play two dutars at the same time. It hadn’t gone very well. The strumming was too perfectly synchronised, and both instruments just sounded like Kaveh. He had given up, and turned his attention to the outdoor chores – shopping for groceries at the bazaar, cleaning the gutters, tilling a patch of the garden for the flowerbed he’d been thinking of for some time, and so on. Being out in the sun, where he could see and hear other people bustling about, felt much better.
Today, however, he can no longer put off cleaning the interior, because it is already Sabzeruz and he’ll have no excuse for having done all this cleaning if it remains only half-done. So he gets out of bed, makes himself some coffee and a bowl of fatteh for breakfast, gets dressed—a worn-out work shirt, a pair of pants with too-long legs that he rolls up to his knees—puts his hair up with his red hairclips, and gets down to work.
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Kaveh has only ever received flowers twice in his life, and both times he’s not certain whom they had been from, or if they had even been his. The first time had been bunches and bunches of mourning flowers pressed into his hands at his father’s funeral, from people he had met once and then never again. The second time had been a lone spray of Fontainian sunflowers that appeared mysteriously among his belongings at his graduation ceremony. He’s not even sure they had been for him – they could have ended up at his seat by accident, and there had truthfully been no one he could have hoped would leave him such a thing. They had been forlorn and a little bedraggled, but bright and yellow nevertheless; and in a heartbreakingly petty act of theft, he’d taken them back with him.
The reason he reminisces on this is because he can’t think of what to plant in his newly created flowerbed. Sumeru Roses were an option, but everybody and their mother had them in the front yard. Padisarahs would look lovely, but required too much maintenance for the lifestyle of forgetful scholars. He was technically spoilt for choice, given that hundreds of floral species bloomed in Sumeru and at least a dozen could be found between here and the next street; but the sentimentalist in him longs to plant something that held some significance, at least for the very first batch.
Belatedly, Kaveh realises he’s ended up outside again. He sighs, and casts around half-heartedly for a new excuse. The inside of the house, he supposes, is really a job for two people.
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Kaveh is standing in the entryway, contemplating the living room and deciding that the divans could really use a cushion cover change, when the front door-lock unexpectedly clicks behind him. Judging by the angle at which sunlight pours in through the upper windows, it’s not yet noon. Thieves don’t break in at this time.
“Surprise,” a dry voice cuts through Kaveh’s momentary confusion. “I’m home.”
Kaveh turns. Alhaitham closes the door behind him with a gentle kick, puts down his bags and drops his key into the bowl by the cloak-rack, determinedly facing forwards; one arm is tucked behind his back, concealing something from view. He looks windblown, hair curling in the way that it does when it changes climes, and his cheeks are pink-tinged, like he’s been out in cold weather. He doesn’t smile, but to a trained gaze, his eyes are alight with mischief.
A smirk begins to grow on Kaveh’s face, while his heart begins to fill from the bottom with warmth, rejuvenating and familiar. “So, you’re back early. Did you miss me that much?”
“Not in the slightest,” Alhaitham replies. “The sages wanted to get back to Sumeru by the Sabzeruz, to spend it with their families and suchlike. I could have stayed back by myself, but there was little of Fontaine left that I hadn’t seen already, and at any rate, I’d had enough of the food. So I opted to return.”
“And naturally, you’d rather walk in on me completely unannounced than send word ahead as is only decent,” Kaveh says. “Well, it serves you right, because I was making myself Fontainian cream stew for lunch. And there’s only enough for one.”
“Fontainian cream stew? On the Sabzeruz? How terribly unpatriotic. I can smell sabzi polo cooking from here, by the way.”
“And I can see those flowers you’re trying so hard to hide behind your back. I hope you kept them in water on the ship. The poor things must be starving.”
Alhaitham produces the sunflowers from behind his back and holds them out to Kaveh. They clearly haven’t been deprived of water for too long—the flowerheads are sprightly and golden-yellow, freshly cut from the Fontainian countryside. Each one is like a miniature sun; the whole bouquet like a densely-packed galaxy, a little cosmic cluster in Alhaitham’s hands.
“This is new,” Kaveh murmurs, taking the flowers, his hands resting over Alhaitham’s as he did so. “Are you going to make a habit out of bringing home flowers?”
“A sunflower is really a number of smaller flowers, arranged in an inflorescence,” Alhaitham replies. “Each flowerhead contains from between one to four thousand florets. Consider this a lifetime’s supply, instead of a repeat occurrence.”
“How very unromantic.”
“I think it’s merely efficient.”
Alhaitham tilts his head expectantly, and Kaveh kisses him on the cheek, his laughter fluttering the soft strands of hair that fall by Alhaitham’s ear. The silence no longer feels as haunting; the home is full again.
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“Everyone else is out on the streets, celebrating,” Alhaitham points out. “Are you sure you want to be indoors all day doing this?”
“As if you want to be out there in the midst of all those crowds,” Kaveh scoffs. “No, this is celebration enough for me. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, anyway. I can’t stand looking at these blank white walls.”
They’re in the entryway, front door and the living room windows thrown open so that the buzz of the city fills the whole house. The air is crisp with the smell of frying sweets, refreshed periodically by a cool spring breeze. Alhaitham sits cross-legged on the floor beside Kaveh, changed out of his travelling clothes into shorts and one of Kaveh's shirts, taken incorrigibly without permission. The sunflowers sit in one of Alhaitham’s innumerable vases on the coffee table, satiating their long-sustained thirst, and Kaveh has his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, painting sunflowers on the wall in broad brushstrokes.
He had begun by tracing outlines with a sepia pencil, large and sweeping, carefully placed to fill both sides of the entryway from end to end. Now he is in the process of colour-blocking, filling in the lines with flat colours using a broad brush. The paints he is using belong to a high-quality handmade set of acrylics he had purchased from an enterprising villager on one of his travels and never used, plagued by the amateur painter’s fear of being unable to do justice to them with a masterpiece good enough. Today, he had decided he no longer cared. After all, the first Sabzeruz calls for a little leap of faith over the boundaries of doubt.
“How very indulgent of us,” Alhaitham remarks in response. “It’s Nahida’s birthday, and we’re here painting flowers for ourselves. Not that she’d know.”
“She may as well know!” Kaveh exclaims. “You really ought to invite her home so she can see these. It’s been months since you resigned as Acting Grand Sage, and never once did you call her home for dinner. Where are your manners?”
“If she came over, your secret would be up. She’d hardly imagine that I painted these flowers.”
“She can read minds, Haitham. Obviously she already knows.”
With the door wide open like this, and with how Kaveh greeted neighbours in the front garden, and Alhaitham brought home takeout for two, and they walked arm in arm back from the tavern on weekend nights, their secret could hardly be called a secret any more. It was common knowledge now, that the Akademiya-built house on the bend of Treasures Street was really a home for two.
Kaveh steps back, satisfied with the way the textured yellow paint of the petals glimmers when it catches the light. Perhaps they could do with a touch of red. Turning aside, he nudges Alhaitham’s exposed knee with his foot. “Make yourself useful. Do you see the green paint in the box over there? Come here and paint the grass with me.”
“I don’t know how to paint,” Alhaitham says, lazily reaching for the bottle without shifting from his position.
“You’re a scribe, aren’t you? If you can hold a pen, you can swing a brush. Come on, I can’t do everything by myself.”
Kaveh watches with amusement as Alhaitham uncorks the bottle, pours some of the emerald paint out onto an empty palette and makes slow swirls in it with a brush, curious in spite of himself. He raises the brush and, with a thoughtfulness that outweighs the simplicity of his task, makes a deliberate stroke of green on the bottom of the wall.
“Very good,” Kaveh tells him. “Now do some more. I want the entire bottom third of the walls in green. Don’t forget to add some light and shade; yellow where the sun would touch the blades, and blue for the shadows where it can’t reach. I’ll show you how.”
“Where is the sun supposed to be?”
“Where the sunflowers are facing.”
Alhaitham looks at the half-painted flowers on the wall and traces their gaze towards the open door, where Kaveh stands above him, soaked in the sunlight streaming in. His eyes are bright while he surveys his handiwork, golden hair falling from his careless updo, expression caught in that unconscious half-smile that lingers naturally on his face without his knowing.
“I see,” Alhaitham says.
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The mural is finished by evening. It’s a simple piece of work; a field of sunflowers against a cornflower-blue sky on either side of the entryway, in youthful contrast with the serious decor in the rest of the house. Kaveh sits on one of the living-room divans, watching the paint dry. One hand holds a cup of coffee, and the other cards absently through Alhaitham's hair; the latter is stretched out across the rest of the divan, sound asleep with his head in Kaveh's lap, the exhaustion of the journey having finally caught up with him. Outside, the last snatches of laughter and song carry high on the wind, while late birds fly home against a pastel-pink sky.
Theirs has been a peaceful Sabzeruz, perhaps the quietest of any celebrated on Treasures Street. It is also their first, and by strange and delightful fortunes, somehow their first together.
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A single sunflower seed is planted in a flowerbed, where it will mature in the coming seasons into a tall, cheerful signpost by a front door. One for every Sabzeruz I spend with you, in our home. Each flowerhead gives thousands of seeds. May our fields bloom in abundance.
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The Lord of Dendro in her boundless wisdom once wove a language out of flowers, the subjects of her beloved companion’s dominion. Every flower was ascribed a meaning, including all those found in Sumeru’s meadows and those that blossomed abroad. Records of it are scarce, and perhaps known only to the most eccentric or thorough of scholars. There are notes on yellowing paper hidden between the pages of textbooks, inscribed with a precise and elegant hand. The Fontainois sunflower: unwavering faith, unconditional love.