| Nibras Mirza | July 2026 | Flash Fiction |
I first saw the bonsai tree in their corridor. A rotund little green canopy and the sensual curve of its trunk that ran into the most chocolate crumble-like soil I had ever seen. From their dining room, my grandmother’s laugh spilled over.
“I knew you wouldn’t refuse. It’s just this one subject. Even so, it’ll be a bit of a bother.”
“Don’t fret, Hamida,” Amina aunty’s voice sounded light as fluff. “Riffat will teach her all the math in the world.”
“Yes, Tathi,” It was the familiar nasal tone of Riffat Di now. “It’s no big deal. She just needs a little tug.”
After a pause, I heard my grandmother.
“Thank God for neighbours like you.”
Standing in that corridor, I could tell my grandmother’s shy smile had inhabited that pause. Her shy smile that faltered towards the end and made her wrinkled lips quiver ever so slightly. I knew her eyes must have shone for a bit. I knew the tears would never fall.
An image flitted across my mind. A black and white picture from a general knowledge book. An Asian man pruning a miniature tree and a single fill-in-the-blank next to it: “The Japanese art of growing miniature trees is called _______.” Yes, that’s where I had seen this tree. I’d scored full marks in that subject last year. It didn’t scare me dumb.
Math was a different story. I sat in the math exams with an ache in my belly, a strong urge to puke and defecate at the same time. Write the cube root of 110592, solve a linear equation, show them you know how to multiply (a+7) with (a² + 3a + 5). Being slow at math was a dead giveaway: you were dumb. It didn’t help that those numbers looked like the most untrustworthy things in the world. And sure enough, no matter how much I practiced the day before the exam, they betrayed me.
Math smelled strong too. Like the cypress pods I used to dig my nails into. Even the teachers who taught it were angular, geometric and precise. The tight slap Zareen mam promptly deposited onto my cheek when I forgot to bring along my mental math book had been vector-sharp, its sting mathematically perfect. I liked English language teachers. They smelled of stories, paper and flowers. Of little bonsai trees.
“Oi, kiddo. Come on in. We don’t bite.”
Riffat Di’s head looked funny popping out from the dining room like that. A perfect sphere. She was about to teach me Math, make those numbers behave for me. Math had started to weave around her too. Tathi, she had called my grandmother. Beloved.
She popped back in without waiting for a reply. I stood there in the corridor, my eyes fixed on the tree. The warmth of their home washed over me. Everything was cozy: the honey-coloured walls, the thick maroon runners, the smell of noon chai and buttered bagels topped with sesame seeds. And that little tree with its rich chocolate soil somehow tied it all snugly together.
My grandparents’ house had once smelled like that. Now the terrazzo floors were covered with a thin green mat torn in various places. Something had turned the house inside out, and all the winter chill of Srinagar seeped into its walls. I imagined its warmth ascending to the skies like dancing golden threads.
***
“The heavens have a greed for offerings. That which they take, they never give back. If your mother were alive, you wouldn’t need a tutor!”
Grandma talked to the collard greens in the colander as I packed my books for tuition. She took a huge leaf, pinched it at the base and ran her fingers along the stem to the tip. A neat rip. A chick wobbled onto the verandah. She shooed him away, took a green leaf, tore it into bits and threw it on the ground. Three little chicks dashed to it. Tumbly, wobbly. I laughed.
“Tathi, stop being melodramatic. Ammi taught literature. I need help with Math. Poles apart.”
Tathi sighed, puckered her mouth. Wrinkles deepened around her lips. A meek ray of the weakening sun played in the depths of her eyes. I stole up to her and kissed her sunken cheek.
“Cutie pie!”
“Hai! For shame!” she said, biting her index finger between her teeth.
***
Riffat Di was friendly, chirpy and embarrassed of her gummy smile. I thought she was gorgeous. We fluttered through pages of surds, sets and mensuration as she checked my syllabus. I blushed a little. The girls at school would giggle because mensuration sounded like menstruation. Riffat Di didn’t flinch. She didn’t seem to notice the hidden allusion. Is that what it was like to be an adult? To get used to things?
It was an informal setting. We studied in her bedroom and sometimes in a downstairs room next to the back door that opened into the garden. Beside that door in the corner stood the shelf with the bonsai tree. Every day, I came in, glanced at the tree, but never went close, never dared to touch it.
As the spring months exploded in a burst of colour, we started studying in the corridor occasionally. Riffat Di would sit with her back to the screen door, and I sat facing her. Now factoring algebraic expressions, now distracted by a hoopoe flying into the garden, now catching a note of the roses on the breeze. My eyes found the little tree halfway through a tough equation. How pretty it was! Something about its existence comforted me. Its being there in the pot made my life better.
“Where are you? Lost in thought? C’mon now, your scores have been so much better in the last test. We’ve got to keep improving. No dilly-dallying.”
Her knotted brows made her look even more pretty.
“Do you want a two-minute break?”
I nodded.
“Alright. Take a break. I’ll be back.”
I used all these little breaks to take a good look at the tree. It reminded me of other worlds. Gardens in the middle of overgrown forests, tiny beings who lived in little houses that would fit into the palm of my hand, dwarves who offered magic solutions to the trickiest problems, fairies who showed up at just the right time, flowers of every colour, rare birds perched on elegant boughs, princes and princesses. A world glittering with hope, beauty and dreams come true. And fireflies. There had to be fireflies. A blend of longing mixed with too much Disney and Pixar consumption on the new cable TV we had installed to soften the blow of a home falling apart.
Maybe a little creature lived inside this little tree too. Maybe it was a secret portal to a different world.
My mid-term exams arrived with the coming of summer. After weeks of wanting to see and touch the tree, it suddenly evaporated from my mind. Two weeks of nausea and a feeling of my brain being churned in a blender from hell followed. Everything else was unimportant.
The result day started with a fresh, balmy morning. It also marked four months since I had started tuitions. A few hours later, I was strutting to Riffat Di’s house with a cousin in tow. I had scored well in the exams. A garden party was proposed. We were out among the bushes, trees and brambles, playing catch. I popped inside for a glass of water, and as I was coming back, my eyes flitted to the bonsai tree again. Something welled up inside me.
“Aunty,” I asked Amina aunty as she walked out with a tray full of glasses of lemonade.
“Yes, dear?”
“May I touch this tree?”
“Hai! Of course, you can! You don’t need to ask permission for such little things!”
What must have looked like a rather toothy grin spread across my face. Tenderly, afraid of disturbing the magical worlds it cradled inside, I touched the green canopy. It felt strange. I sniffed it. A plastic smell greeted me. It was a fake. The green canopy, the trunk and the chocolate crumble soil. It was all fake.
“Hey! C’mon out.” My cousin shouted. “There’s candy!”
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Nibras is an aspiring writer from Srinagar, J&K, India. She reconnected to her writing during the pandemic and currently writes literary fiction focused on her homeland, Kashmir.
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