Karuna Riazi’s A Bit of Earth (2023) opens with Maria Latif, newly arrived at an international airport (from Islamabad through Dubai, through Brussels, and to NY in the U.S.). Maria has made herself scarce, hidden under a pile of luggage in the luggage claims area. She is in her “tower of solitude” in the public space, and she does not want to be found. It is 4 a.m. local time, and yet, the airport is bustling. She is aware that adults are looking for her, but she does not feel like she has any responsibility to anyone.
She hails from privilege, but she is an orphan. Her globe-trotting parents passed on from an accident, and she has been brought stateside by her late parents’ college friends who want to give her a better life.
The narrative is interspersed with poetry. An opening poem titled “Arrivals” reads:
As it turns out, when you were always arriving
you were never actually leaving.
You never got a chance to stay.
Maria’s has been a peripatetic life, with rejection from adults who do not want to take her on as a “charity case.” Her aunt Ambreen Phuppo and her husband Hassa have just passed her own. Theirs has been an unsuccessful placement.
Maria is a prickly personality, astute in her observations, skeptical of adult motivations, and willful in her likes and dislikes. She often refuses food, perhaps as a form of control, and she does not have a sense of personal direction. Riazi writes:
Maria was born prickly, she was sure. Even her bones had sharp little spurs at the end, preparing for her to toss out her elbows and squat, unmovable and stony faced, in doorways for people to trip over and fume at.
In turns, she reads as angry and almost feral. At other times, her self-awareness and ability to advocate for herself read as positive. In a rough-and-tumble world, she has to protect her own interests.
She is taken in by Lindsay Clayborne, who lives on Long Island, NY, with her mother-in-law, Charlotte Clayborne, and whose husband Ethan is traveling. Lindsay is the second wife of Mr. Clayborne. She is a food writer who does not actually know her way around the kitchen. Maria is hypervigilant and untrusting around adults. She prefers her own company to those of others. She observes at one point the ways fear is experienced differently from those with social power (and privilege and wealth) vs. those without:
Being afraid was a luxury other girls kept tucked in their drawers, along with perfume from their mothers and prized necklaces from their fathers.
Being afraid was what they could unfold and shake out, as beautiful and delicate as a shawl to hang around their shoulders, for the mere occasion of a bug crawling across their hand or a sudden clap of thunder.
While Maria realizes that she cannot make her way into the world alone, she is too vulnerable to hurt than to put trust in others. She is also too proud to try to charm the adults. She is relying on human decency alone — such as it is. She slowly meets a neighborhood girl, Mahajabeen “Mimi” Rehman, who befriends her. She meets the troubled son, Colin, of Mr. Clayborne. And she discovers a locked garden, which she explores and starts to bring back to life.
In the poem, “The Garden,” Riazi writes:
In Lahore, she snuck through her aunt’s courtyard,
coaxing those giddy buds off their stems,
popping them into her pockets
where through the layers of cotton,
she could hear them
offering her tea
urging her to sit
suffusing her with the sensations of a world
that seemed too bright and beautiful to be true.
And
of course
Always was.
Per the tagline on the cover of the book, this walled garden is her “place to bloom.” In a transient and harsh world, the small sanctuaries make all the difference.
Karuna Riazi’s A Bit of Earth is a masterful retelling of The Secret Garden. It turns out that the heart and hearth of a family is a green space, a locked garden that is opened.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
