Two lotus flowers on a lower back

The seeds came from your aunt in Hanoi, wrapped in newspaper that still smelled of diesel. She had written on the paper in biro: plant them in mud, not water, they like to be ignored. You took that as a joke until the first pale leaves lifted through the surface in May, flat as coins, then folded upward as if someone had told them the news.

By August the big bloom had come, pink-white and heavy, and the children from the ground floor waited at the railings each morning to see if it had opened overnight. You kept a notebook of the weather and the water level. In September the wind came off the ridge and snapped the stem clean, and you carried the flower up eleven flights in a washing-up bowl, because it was the only thing you had that was still worth carrying.

The next morning there was a smaller bud on the water beside the broken stalk, already pushing up through the mud as though it had been waiting underneath for its turn. Mr Okafor saw it first and said nothing, just leaned on the railing with his tea going cold. You wrote the date in the notebook and underlined it twice.