Spring: Magnolias
My neighborhood is quiet and has a smattering of bars, a couple of them new and trying to attract a younger clientele, but most of them Irish pubs catering to the dwindling but still vocal population of recently arrived Irish immigrants who have settled in among the predominantly South Asian and Latino families in the neighborhood. Sometimes in my building I hear Gaelic, and it’s nice to know that I know what a dying language sounds like. I asked my neighbor why so many Irish people had moved to this particular stretch of streets in the past few years and she shrugged. “I knew somebody who had lived here, and she knew somebody, and his grandmother had moved here in the fifties. Then the young people all wanted to move to Brooklyn. Now all the young people want to go back to Ireland.”
Most of my neighborhood is mid-density: blocks of row houses, multifamily homes, and six-unit apartment complexes. In the summer, the concrete all around amplifies the heat island effect—the asphalt compresses under your feet when the days get to be in the nineties. But a few of the blocks in the historic district cool down under the shade of enormous oak trees. There’s one stretch that suddenly transforms from tree-lined blocks to a desolate parking lot under the shadow of the LIRR and Amtrak rumbling above. In the near distance you can see the outline of the big box stores that have proliferated, and a little further than that, the city skyline looming above us all—one of the supers in my building always says the city is creeping closer and closer every day, as if we don’t already live within its chokehold. This is a street that’s only used to make turns onto other streets, and foot traffic is mostly limited to people hanging out and drinking forties on the curb. It’s covered in the detritus of city living: stained mattresses, punctured bicycle tires, bedbug-ridden furniture. The asphalt is bejeweled with broken beer bottles and chicken bones.
I never thought to avoid this stretch. I believed it was because I liked the emptiness of it, liked that no one was watching me move my body through the world. It reminded me of the iron triangle at Willets Point under the shadow of Shea Stadium, where my father would take me to get our car fixed with stolen parts in a part of the city that lacked running water until a decade ago. The streets were unpaved, and dogs ran around sniffing at the sandwiches vendors sold out of coolers tied to handtrucks. On one of my late-afternoon walks, I realized that besides the privacy, what kept me and the drunk men on the corner coming back to this particular spot was the scent of the magnolia trees hanging heavy in the air. I stopped and examined a fence I had never bothered to look at before. Between the wires, I saw rows and rows of flowers. I didn’t know their names because I had never grown up with a garden; I didn’t know anything about plants besides the ones you could get at the deli. That little garden was what made that garbage-lined street smell so good.
Five years later, I pulled bullet casings and glass shards out of a little plot of land that I was stewarding. After that first encounter with the garden, I googled it. The official neighborhood lore, which I learned about from a homemade documentary on the internet, says that it was an empty, trash-filled lot in the seventies, kind of like the street it abuts now. It was started, like all good things in cities, by just some guy. He lived in the neighboring apartment building and simply got sick of seeing discarded toilets from his window and began to clean up his view. His neighbors, also sick of toilets and other detritus on their streets, joined him. There were no permits, no permission from a city that had abandoned this part of its innards and was undergoing a project of deliberate decline and divestment, cutting back the parts it deemed unsalvageable so something new could be built in its place.
The neighbors moved the toilets and the mattresses on their own, dug up the land, and divided it among themselves. They planted flowers and vegetables. They did not test the soil. The lot’s history was as a dumping ground and the area’s heavy industrial uses; the test results would likely have been bad. Most of the soil in New York is full of heavy metals—it needs to be replaced if you’re going to eat anything that grows in it. I think of this as I press my foot into a pitchfork, pulling out dead roots and turning over dry fine dust. I have brought my young daughter with me, and I do my best to stop her from shoving handfuls of soil into her mouth. She pats the ground. I mix in compost from the pile at the back, decomposed remnants of family meals eaten in apartments overlooking us, and turn the soil over again. I pick out a solid mango pit and toss it back into the pile.
I read somewhere once that the olfactory sense is the strongest trigger of memory. I research flowers that will grow in this climate. I plan to train jasmine to climb up the trellis, so the afternoons will bring back some old memories of Karachi and trips to LA. I never knew it could grow in zone 7, New York’s designated growing zone for centuries, which is most definitely shifting into zone 8 territory as the earth heats up.
There is a five-year waiting list to get a spot in this garden, once a toilet graveyard. It’s bursting. Nicotiana, agrostemma, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots, feverfew, snapdragons, pansies. I’m learning. There is a contentious plan to build another apartment building in the empty lot across the street. I keep digging.
Summer: Mulberries
The house we lived in when we arrived in Queens was a tiny dutch colonial that my uncles bought together on a block with other houses that looked almost identical. All the homes were small and dark, the rooms barely large enough for two or three people at a time. Ours had two bedrooms on the first floor—which my uncles, their wives, and their young children occupied—a bathroom, a windowless living room, a kitchen with cracked tiles, and a small dining room. When my grandparents were in New York, they stayed in the living room, my grandmother watching television and knitting all day. The upstairs attic had been renovated, and this is where my parents and siblings and I lived, in a cramped room split into two.
At first the neighborhood consisted of working-class white ethnics, mostly Greeks and Italians, with some Armenians down the block. The reaction to our large family was mixed. Some welcomed us immediately, recognizing in us themselves and their own families, escaping war, exile, economic collapse. They sent their kids over to play and practice English with us. Others regarded us with apprehension, sometimes outward hostility. When we left, the block was still home to the old school Greeks and Italians but also Cypriots, Afghans, Jordanians, Koreans, and us. The mothers found common ground in the relief that someone else was watching their kids. The dads found a mutual interest in ignoring their families and procuring illegal fireworks that they set up in the weeks leading up to the fourth of July. They set them off in the street after long days and before night shifts, squatting down to light the wicks, half-drunk except the more devout Muslims among them, the kids their rapt audience. They watched as we raced after the little soldier figurines that parachuted down on us as the explosion reached its pinnacle, a miniature reenactment of occupations they had barely escaped.
The tiny yards on the block were packed with pergolas that creaked under the weight of fat grapes, built with lumber from the Home Depot and old string or wire by the old Italian or Greek men who sat around under them smoking cigars and crushing the grapes for homemade wine. Gallon milk bottles were sawed in half and turned into herb containers. A few blocks away, a Chinese family raised chickens in the patch of grass outside their run down house, the thin fence the only protection separating the livestock from the avenue.
The chickens, like the family, were only there for a few years. In general East Asian families were treated with the most mistrust, moving in under the scrutiny of narrowed eyes and moving out once the tension became unbearable and someone somewhere else could offer a room or a house, or once the parents earned enough to move to Long Island. I once overheard two Italian neighborhood dads, fathers of kids I spent afternoons playing with on the block, sitting on plastic lawn chairs in front of their house as they lazily looked after us. The dads were more prone to gossip than their wives, who were too busy raising kids and worrying about money to care about what the neighbors were doing. They were talking about how the neighborhood had changed, and the topic quickly moved to the Korean family that had moved in across the street. “When one of them moves in, all of them move in. Look at them. They’re like cockroaches. I bet there’s 10 of them in that house.” The other one turned to look at me and said nothing. I thought about the twelve of us squeezed into our tiny wood-paneled rooms. I felt my back straighten and my body become rigid, the same physical response I had every time my mother took us to the library past the handball courts where the teenagers hung out, jeering at my mother in her shalwar kameez. “Hey lady, why are you wearing those pajamas outside?” They usually stayed behind the fence but sometimes they followed us for a block, snickering to each other. My mother always seemed not to notice, but well into adulthood, my body tensed up every time we reached that corner.
Nothing much grew at our house except patches of grass. I spent most of my time alone in the side yard that shared a broken down fence with the delivery dock of a bagel place, a liquor store, and one of the last few kosher delis in the neighborhood. The lot was only active during the very early morning hours, when box trucks unloaded glass bottles of gin, detergent in tiny cardboard boxes, and quarts of milk in crates. Otherwise it remained empty, except during the intermittent smoke breaks taken by deli staff in their stained white uniforms. The deli guys kept a couple of milk crates to perch on, where they spent their time between customers gossiping, gambling, or sitting in silence. The other crates got tossed to the edge of the lot. I scavenged it for things I could use to fill my time in the side yard, constructing a new world made from garbage, a world in which I could always keep myself safe. I used whatever I could find: flattened cardboard boxes, bricks that mysteriously ended up mixed in with food packaging, empty bottles. I dragged the crates over to our yard and stood on them to stack the bricks on the rotted fence posts, building traps against the white teenagers who occasionally menaced our family.
The stench of spilled milk curdling in the sun hung around the lot year round. In the lonely summers, it mixed with the smell of fermenting fruit from the mulberry tree that straddled the parking lot and our yard, fat dark berries I picked off the branches, standing on stacks of stinking milk crates. I loved holding them in my mouth like an animal holding a kill in its back teeth, loved rolling them on the surface of my tongue. I bit down gently to feel their purple and red flesh slowly burst under the pressure of my molars. I was holding mulberries in my cheeks when I shook one of the rotting wooden beams that had once been a fence post, testing it for its durability, forgetting that I had left half a brick teetering on top the week earlier, an alarm against an unsuspecting trespasser. The brick landed on my skull. The berries burst on my tongue as I held my hands to my head, running in circles as blood pooled around my temples. Iron and sweet ripe rot filled my nostrils and my mouth.
The mulberry tree growing from behind the fence that divides plots from the garbage covered street spent this summer shedding its fruit all over the pavement path in the garden. My neighbors took turns washing the seeds off the cement, desiccated by the summer sun and city boots pulverizing them into the ground, leaving streaks of purple stains in their wake, until the tree was struck by lightning during a summer storm and came crashing to the ground. I ran my tongue over my teeth as I climbed over broken branches and mounds of fermenting fruit on my way to examine how my plot had fared after the storm, the ghost of metal in my mouth. The bachelors buttons had been bent backward by the force of the rain or the wind, but otherwise everything was fine, lush even.
Fall: Ginkgos
In October, the fan-shaped leaves of gingko trees are starting to turn yellow, and female ginkgos are dropping their fetid seeds all over New York City sidewalks. People describe the smell as that of rancid butter; to me it smells like vomit and New York in autumn. Unusually hardy, these trees were a popular choice for dense cities. It is reported that after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, several ginkgo trees still stood in the aftermath of the explosion, their trunks scorched but otherwise alive, still stinking up the place to this day. This characteristic made them a natural choice for New York City sidewalks—10 percent of all trees in Manhattan are ginkgos, the stench of their smashed fruit a signal of cooler days and longer nights. As a child, and even now into my adulthood, I could not identify a maple or a birch or a cedar tree, but we all knew the ginkgo. Ginkgo stinko, we’d say, jumping over sidewalk squares, trying to avoid getting juices of smashed vomit-tinged seeds on the soles of our sneakers.
I come to the garden less often, letting the plot fend for itself save for intermittent watering. A deep fog has descended over my mind that my usual dose of Wellbutrin can’t cut through. It is a few hours after I’ve learned of the murder of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume in Plainfield, Illinois. Wadea and his mother were stabbed by their landlord, who burst into their home screaming “You Muslims must die.” The news says that the landlord was driven to commit this heinous crime because of what was going on in Gaza, “what was going on” meaning the real-time genocide of Palestinians streaming across phones and televisions. Wadea was another child casualty among hundreds of child casualties across the ocean. The U.S. president releases a statement: “This horrific act of hate has no place in America,” meaning that maybe it does have a place in places that aren’t America. The distinction between here and there. I think about Wadea; I think about the photo the news is using, the contours of his slightly bewildered face and his rumpled shirt, his hand on the plastic top hat that says happy birthday perched on his head, the TV behind him streaming a birthday YouTube video, the freestanding wooden sign in the living room that simply says “home.” I left my apartment because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about this picture, and felt the immediate need to at least momentarily leave my own home, its cocoon-like comfort suddenly stifling and hellish, felt the need to be outside in the world to remember that it was real and not actually collapsing around me as I sat on my couch on my phone, fixated on the horror I held in my hand.
I walk out the door with no intended route but find myself making my way to the garden. On my way there the effluvium of female ginkgos lingers in the air. I think about hopscotching over the crushed orange fruit and the phrase ginkgo stinko is stuck in my head, the language and rituals of children. I repeat it over and over silently and once in a while in a whisper as I make my way through my neighborhood to my little plot, a meaningless mantra. I walk past the park where kids of varying ages are playing soccer together, cursing at each other, their soft flesh flexing beneath their skin. I pass by the same drunk man who always sits on the parapet dividing the park from the street, the same parapet that runs to the garden. He sits under a rosebush, a variety with tiny tightly closed buds. We say hello and he takes a swig from a can of beer, two empties sitting next to him. I make my way up steep stone stairs. I need to check that life is still possible, that many things will still grow wild, that the soil can still smell like rain from the day before, that the once cheery and now dead zinnias can be replaced by moody and dramatic dahlias, that the marigolds still bloom despite the chill in the air, that the weeds that have overtaken the wildflowers haven’t succeeded in choking the life completely out of them, that despite my neglect in fostering it, life still finds a way, that the sweet smell of decay and rot is part of its eventual return.
The sage is shedding its leaves, and the parsley has bolted. The basil somehow survived the cold in its terra-cotta pot. The tomato plants are dried up, but it doesn’t really matter, I was going to pull them up anyway. The cactus dahlias are holding on, big showy red bursts blooming against a backdrop of muted brown and green. The zinnias are strangled by the vines of the morning glories, demure purple blooms belying their invasive and suffocating nature. I always wonder why anyone would grow them on purpose.
I untangle the vines as gently as I can from the few remaining flowers. I cut back the parsley, and the familiar motion of clipping herbs reminds me of the container garden my mother kept on the balcony of our cramped apartment. In the middle of making dinner, she’d send us out to clip cilantro or mint, and then chop it up fine. She grew rosemary and lavender too, for the way they smelled, and buried our tiny teeth in the soil when they fell out of our mouths. She sat out there with my father on plastic lawn chairs, he smoking, she ripping cilantro leaves from stems, idly chatting and surveying the neighborhood.
This was our only outdoor space. The building had a yard, but we weren’t allowed to use it. Our Italian landlord had a wild garden back there where he grew enormous tromboncino squash and flowers that I never learned the names of. He gave the particularly big squash to us, and we were always impressed and honored that he’d give up what looked like the kind of vegetable that would win a prize at a county fair for its sheer size, though none of us had ever been to a county fair or any other place where a vegetable would be judged for any quality. It wasn’t until adulthood that I learned that the biggest squash is usually the worst-tasting. My mother always made tori out of it, coaxing out its vegetal flavor, topping it generously with cilantro and mint.
These were our meals in the apartment we lived in when my brother was beaten by a group of six boys on his way home from school in the fall of 2001, when our neighbors slapped a sticker of a gun that said terrorist hunting pass 9/11/01 to their car, when someone spray-painted a swastika to our front door. When the landlord died, his son took over the property and paved over his father’s garden, opting to trade squash for a slab of easily maintainable concrete. The balcony sagged from years of neglect. Finally the Department of Buildings declared it a hazard and ordered the landlord’s son to fix it. Instead he put a padlock on the door, and my mother’s tiny garden wilted away.
Winter: Roses
In the earliest photos of me, I am standing in a garden in Karachi, or at least what looks like a garden. The backdrop is often a hedge, or a burst of bougainvillea, or roses climbing above my tiny head. Photos of my parents show them standing among oleander or in front of a jacaranda tree. In the single photo I have of my maternal great grandmother, she is sitting in a white wicker chair somewhere in India, the leaves of banana trees bending at her side like deferential courtiers.
When we move to New York, my mother mourns the rose gardens, the smell of night-blooming jasmine signaling the arriving reprieve of cooler evenings. Walking down the block, she stops in front of a house guarded by stone lions, a massive rose bush growing from behind the fence, curling up and over it. She stops. We wait for her. She buries her nose into the flower and breathes deeply. We see curtains moving in the window behind the bush and she remembers where she is. The curtain is quickly pulled close. Everyone, including the unseen person in the window, is embarrassed.
I try to recall the places in the photographs from my earliest memories, but nothing comes back to me. All I remember from that time is the itch of grass on the sides of my feet, exposed in plastic sandals. In more recent photos we receive from relatives, the land looks barren and dry, and nothing grows behind them. When I returned to Karachi as an adult, the smell of burning garbage lingered everywhere.
In December the roses are still in bloom all over my neighborhood. They grow over the sides of apartment buildings and in miniscule front yards of multi-family houses, climbing trellises set up on small patches of grass on the edges of sidewalks. They continue to grow in the bush that hangs over the parapet, the spot my drunk neighbor has mostly abandoned as the days have grown shorter, leaving beer cans behind to confirm his presence.
Roses are regarded as a fussy plant. Those that survive tend to thrive, a quality that may have influenced the decision to name them the official flower of both the state of New York and the borough of Queens. Still, their presence at this time of year surprises me. I don’t know if they have always been here in the winter and I’m just now noticing them or if their presence is due to New York’s shift into a subtropical climate. It hasn’t snowed meaningfully in two years.
A fellow gardener tells me that a woman had planted large pink orbs two decades ago. She had died, but the roses still lived on. In the early winter, new buds were still perceptible. A miracle, technically, but is something a miracle if what it presages is horrifying?
In December I do not go to the garden. It's not that I stop going, exactly. I just find myself elsewhere. Over the past two months, two months since Wadea’s murder, Gaza has been decimated by American funded bombs. The goal is total annihilation. The world watches. I watch. In December I don’t look at the roses in the garden. I spend time with my neighbors, trying to push our Congresswoman to stop funding the destruction of homes and schools and bodies and lives in our names. We march. We write. We hold vigils. Bring white roses, my neighbors tell me. White roses for Gaza.
White roses become a symbol for Palestine following in the lineage of the White Rose Society, a World War II-era resistance group founded by students at the University of Munich at the height of Nazi occupation. The group was small, composed of one professor and five students, among them siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. Their main act of opposition was producing and distributing leaflets and pamphlets that called to attention the mass execution and ongoing genocide of Jewish people across Europe at the hands of Nazi Germany. The pamphlets urged everyday Germans to question their allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi government. Hans and fellow dissenter Alex Schmorell wrote that the white rose was “intended to represent purity and innocence in the face of evil.” Both Hans and Sophie had been former members of the Hitler Youth, Sophie an eager participant whose infatuation faded when her brother was arrested for his increased disillusionment with the program. The White Rose Society existed from June of 1942 to February of 1943. On February 21st, 1943, both Hans and Sophie, along with fellow White Rose member Christoph Probst, were convicted of treason and executed by guillotine the same day. Their legacy lives on in the face of injustice, beckoning everyday people to reject violence undertaken in their names by increasingly tyrannical governments.
In December it doesn’t snow, but the sidewalks are covered in white rose petals.
The new year arrives and with it comes the cold. The garden is officially closed, muted by a cover of wet and heavy snow. I settle into the rhythms of winter just as the temperature abruptly rises. Snow gives way to rain, constant torrential rain. In the break between storms, I see crocuses popping up in the park across the street from my apartment.
The same day, a 25-year-old airman puts on his fatigues and sets himself on fire outside the front gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. Aaron Bushnell wrote a will in which he left his cat in the care of his neighbors, apologized to his friends and family, and requested that his ashes be scattered in a liberated Palestine. He records his self-immolation. In the video, he says that he will no longer be complicit in genocide. The recording cuts off with his last words. “Free Palestine!” echoes as a secret service agent points a gun at his burning body. Aaron is venerated across the world. Like Sophie Scholl, he grew up on lies and died for truth.
There are more vigils. Sidewalks are covered in petals, white and red. Alongside the roses are poppies, used to commemorate American war veterans and also a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
The first meeting of the 2024 garden season is held in the community room of the large apartment complex across the street, the same one from where the founders had surveyed the former toilet graveyard, now desecrated by bloom.
I sketch outlines of my plot. I remember it’s not just about the vegetables. I decide I will not grow any tomatoes. Just wildflowers and roses. Just something beautiful.
