abhisheK mehta

a stationary liFe

My uncle’s car stopped in front of our house and he began unloading the pots from the back seat, disturbing the night only as much as was necessary.

A week ago at his retirement party, he’d remarked how plants are an easy gift; such passive life, it almost doesn’t exist when you don’t look at it. Then sometimes it doesn’t exist even when you do, and whoever is around when that happens has to suffer the concentrated weight of a life, an elephant foot on the chest when a moment ago, all that was above it was a clear sky. He’d gotten so many, he was giving some to us. My mother never said no to plants, she always had a sunny corner in the house spare, as if it was a thing she lost too many of on a regular basis. Walking up the stairs, the sound of gritty dirt under our shoes, crusty sighs of worlds collapsing under the weight of people moving around the props of a stationary life.

My mother made us lemonade and we drank looking in different directions, complicit in something we weren’t quite sure was bad yet. When his car left in the otherwise silent night, we went to sleep, the pots bunched up in one corner where we didn’t know what they talked about in the moonlight, if time for them existed constantly or fell in leaves, sudden and collected. Next day we each, separately, walked into them, as if misdirected down a corridor, not wanting to admit we were lost.