BLOOM

It is a dazzling, glorious day! Snow has finally melted in Wisconsin. Hopefully, there will not be any more snowfall, though I cannot guarantee that. I remember once, on May 1^st, we were coming back from a road-trip after enjoying the Florida sun, and it was snowing heavily when we entered the Wisconsin border. On the same day that water falls from the sky as rain on the plains, it falls from the same sky as snow on the mountains. The outside appearance can never tell us which song the heart is singing inside.

Through the limbs of all the bare trees that have grown gnarled and twisted after a long winter, sunrays are filtering through the glass windowpanes. I go outside to find my crabapple tree bursting with buds. These are not flower-buds; these are buds for the leaves. Green buds also protrude from the old red-oak tree. After the death of winter, life is flowing again in all the trees’ veins – a life that is full of immense potential – a life that is full of love.

Today, a pomegranate flower has also bloomed inside my house.

When children are small, parents dream of a life for their children with similar potential. When they see friends’, relatives’, and their neighbors’ kids, parents’ dreams start spreading like the branches of trees, and the fierce competition starts. Back home in the Bangladeshi and Indian middle-class families, if the kids do not become doctors or engineers, society considers it as the parents’ failure. Even the scarecrow knows what will be the future of a boy or girl who has studied Bengali literature! He or she is for sure not going to get a job in this competitive world. In the USA, there is not much pressure on the kids from parents about what are they going to study. But there are other kinds of pressures. Societal and parental pressure on different things is an age-old magnet that attracts our everyday existence.

I go out for a walk, as it is a gorgeous day. Just a few houses from ours, I see the LGBT pride flag flying from one of the houses. This rainbow flag is for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. As Madison is quite a progressive city, people have the courage to hoist a pride flag. But in our country, to talk about the LGBT community is an unpardonable crime. People cannot open their mouths. Lives are spent in silence.

This can also be said for much of the USA. I listen to stories from my American friends, who tell me about LGBT youths who have left their homes – about mothers who have not accepted their children, or fathers who have turned the other way. Those who are members of the LGBT community are more prone to clinical depression.

Perhaps those who face the most discrimination are transgender children. They face alienation from their peers, and family. To feel comfortable in their own skin, they often have to take hormone injections and undergo surgery, although oftentimes these measures are too expensive for many kids. Transgender children in our society face constant struggles, oftentimes for the rest of their lives. There’s so much stigma surrounding the topic, and even those who show support worry about discussing it.  “If my kid had cancer instead of this, I could at least tell people. People would understand, they could comfort me,” the parents say. When even the parents talk like that, what will the ever gossiping neighbors think?

The suicide rates of transgender kids are the highest amongst children in the USA. The other day Ananya was telling me about a high school kid from her school only…

Sunshine is slipping through the buds of the leaves, like satin silk. The immense potential they have.