Yellow Roses

The framed black and white photograph of their wedding day had been a gift from Hayat’s father.  He insisted.  He paid for the feast, for the lace for her dress, for the gold rings and for the flowers throughout the celebration.  The picture hung in her room for the whole of her life, and while she got older and older, the photo of her young self moved further and further away.

The beginning of the wedding day had not gone so well.

Hayat remembered an anxious morning with her sisters and her female cousins fussing around her, painting her face and hands, curling her hair and giggling.  And she remembered a sense of doubt.  What if she didn’t love Abdul in the way that she should or in the way that others told her she would in time?  What if she didn’t even like him?

The wedding party finally left the house for the ceremony, and she and her mother were the last ones to leave.  She hated seeing that room for one last time as a single girl, knowing she would only ever visit it again as a married woman.  And when Hayat’s mother started crying, it did nothing to ease the uncertainty.

“Why are you crying mother?” she asked, but her mother didn’t reply.

When the ceremony finally started, she could see that Abdul looked as scared as she was and this, strangely, helped her to relax and enjoy the attention of the day.  If he was nervous too, then at least they had one thing in common.  It turned out that the feast was delicious.  Everyone complimented her on the lace of her dress and both the quality and variety of the flowers.  Especially the yellow roses, everyone loved the yellow roses.  And by the time the sun set on the wedding party, she was laughing and dancing and happy.

Hayat and Abdul lived.  They saved money.  They had children who were taught well, and they danced at other people’s weddings.  Everyone complimented Hayat because her oldest son completed university, and they said that Abdul’s shop was the best in the village.  Sometimes, if he had time and a little extra money, Abdul would buy yellow flowers for his wife.  Not always roses, if they couldn’t be found in the market, but yellow ones all the same.

Hayat looked forward to her son’s wedding day, although she also feared it might never happen.  Lorni had made so many new friends at the university, and now that he worked in the city, his parents hardly ever saw him at all. When he did come back to the village, he brought Hayat items that she didn’t need for the kitchen, and spoke confidently about politics in his new found accent.  Lorni disagreed with his father’s ideas and Hayat was starting to feel that they, how could she put this, that they were starting to embarrass their eldest son.

He visited less and less now and she noticed it more and more.  Hayat worried about all of her children, but it was Lorni she feared for most of all.  He was never going to be happy, she knew that about her son.  He was never going to be at peace.  He had no sense of acceptance, that this life was the way life should be.  And his search would only yield rotten fruit.  Lorni’s modern ideas didn’t frighten her at all, she wasn’t as provincial as her eldest son believed, but it was his sadness that concerned her.  He never showed joy, only anger and dissatisfaction and cynicism.  Abdul worried about his son too, but Hayat fretted.

Lorni had been an unhappy baby.  Hayat remembered that he didn’t like to be held, he preferred to lie on the bed un-cradled and un-soothed.  She and Abdul, like all first time parents, followed the commands and instructions of all other parents before them, but nothing ever worked for Lorni.  He simply cried.  In the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening, but especially during the night-time, he cried.  The more they tried to comfort him the more distressed he became.  Hayat could still see the unsatisfied baby in her fully grown man child, and she worried all the more for him.  She worried, in particular, that she would never dance at his wedding or buy a black and white framed photograph of his wedding day.  She worried that he would never find anyone, to buy yellow flowers for.