A garden is a joy, but also a labor. It is no small thing to call forth life from the desert; do not imagine any but a witch could do it so well. Every day I draw flowers from sand, shrubs from sand; I turn sand to grass as rich as cream. The garden is miraculous. Before the sun has even risen, I have dug and planted, watered and pruned. I have clipped bushes into the forms of dancing animals, clawed muck from the verges of fountains until my nails are black. Still, there is something in this place that resists me.

When the visitors come, the fountains will surge with water. Delicate music will float from between the leaves of the climbing roses. But in the dark blue of early morning, chill and clear and watched over by a few, last, ailing stars, the garden is quiet, its scents subdued, every blossom holding its breath as if even this small bit of sweetness were too good for me. Land that scorns the one who watered it is cursed land indeed.

If you walk the paths of this garden, you will see that it holds marvels: blossoming castles, blooming clocks, flower-made parrots and peacocks and swans. Enough wondrous sights to last a thousand days and a day. When the visitors come they sigh and cheer and take photograph after photograph. They kiss their lovers beneath the floral arches and sip lemonade beneath umbrellas. They seldom bother to wonder how such a place can exist, how much water and magic and grinding of muscle it takes to make flowers grow where they have no business growing.

Between the visitors, among them, those of us who live here make our way. A battalion of women in clean, blue uniforms, we water and weed. We pick trash from the paths, bend tree limbs to pleasing shapes, spread gravel and seeds, and speak in low voices.

Even the birds here are meek. Deer mice move stealthily through the flowered cottages. Hares, seeking refuge from the burning sands of the desert, hide among the nodding leaves. Petal by petal, the ungenerous garden parcels out its glories to them; timidly, they accept, sheltering in the shadows of someone else’s paradise.

Mr. Qadir roams the garden whenever he pleases, usually when the sun is not too hot. He is the caliph of this little kingdom, and moves surrounded by a bevy of men who fulfill his orders and fetch his drinks. He points his finger, says more, faster, hurry up. The garden is shaped by his commands. Sometimes, his children trail in his wake, one girl, one boy with strident voices, who thrash the flower beds with sticks and set the songbirds flying.

Once, while I was planting candy-striped petunias beside the inflorescent castle, Mr. Qadir told them a story. A story he had read in a book, or perhaps seen in a movie. A story about a witch with a garden and a high wall, who grew plants so delicious that the neighbor woman pined for them almost to death, until her husband consented to scale the wall and steal some, and the witch punished them both. Mr. Qadir was not telling the story to me, but that did not stop me from hearing.

When he finished speaking, I said, “No one dies of longing. I’d have died long ago.”

He didn’t understand me, of course. He doesn’t speak Punjabi, and he has no magic to translate for him. But he laughed. “What is this one’s name?” he asked the men around him.

The men cast glances down the chain of command until they found the head gardener, who pronounced my name as though his tongue tripped on the word. Shruti, he said, which is the only name he knows for me. No witch would be foolish enough to reveal her true name to men like these.

“Well, Shruti,” said Mr. Qadir. “Whatever you’re saying, you sound very sure of yourself.” His children giggled. The men chanced a laugh. Mr. Qadir leaned against a statue of a giant cupcake and lazily watched the curve of my backside as I knelt to press another row of petunias into the earth.

He is not subtle with his looks, with his thoughts. But still he will not touch me, because he thinks I am beneath him. And I am. I am beneath him as the soil is beneath a tuft of grass. See what happens to the grass, when the soil is gone.

When I first came to the garden I came willingly, I admit it. In fact, I paid my own way here, paid a recruiter to get the job for me. This land is rich, its people rich; they have money to spare for every type of pleasure. I thought of all the money I would earn, the life I would be able to live when I returned home. Even a witch likes fine food and a soft bed. Even a witch wishes to care for her parents when they have grown old, to drape a chain of gold into the parting of her lover’s hair.

I don’t mind hard work if it buys such bliss. And I could see from the start that the garden would be hard work. When we arrived, the other women and I, only its skeleton could be seen, the stones and wires and arid ground on which the flowers would grow. I could see, too, that hard work alone would not be enough to perform this transformation. I knew my magic was worthy of the task. I thought the garden was worthy of my magic.

But soon, I learned the way of things. That the money was not so much as we had been promised. That we could not leave. In Mr. Qadir’s office sits an iron box with all our passports locked inside. They are thrown in like so many rags, as though they were worthless, when really, they are books of magic. Each one contains the story of a woman: where she was born, where she has been. A passport opens the doors between countries to let you fly across. And without one, in this country, they treat you like a slave. Without one you can only lie in bed in the sleeping quarters every night and long for home until you fall asleep.

You will say, “But surely an iron box is no impediment to a witch?” The witches among you will shake your heads at such ignorance. Iron is what remains when a star expires: metal from which all ardor has been drained; the deadest thing in the universe. We can no more charm iron than you can make a thigh bone dance.

Mr. Qadir doesn’t put the passports in an iron box because he is afraid of witches. He has never been denied anything, and so is not afraid of anything. He uses iron because it is strong, and cheap. He likes things that are strong and cheap. Surrounded by such things, he can believe he is the one with power, the one who makes the flowers grow.

When they think no one is watching, Mr. Qadir’s children roam the garden to see what havoc they can sow. They know the garden will be theirs one day. Everything they set their eyes upon becomes theirs, sooner or later. One day I find them crouched by a bend in the wall, clapping their hands and laughing madly. I approach as silently as a cloud, see before them a hare whose flanks are heaving with its panic, its ears laid flat against its skull. I push my way between them, gather it into my arms. Too sharp a fright can kill a hare, though it has not been touched. The children stare at me with their burning eyes, but they do not try to stop me, and I do not chastise them. Who can expect a bitter tree to yield anything but bitter fruit?

Like all witches, I am patient, but when my moment comes I strike. Early one morning I find Mr. Qadir sleeping in one of the garden’s cabanas. The glasses and plates scattered around him hint at a late-night party, but now he is alone, stretched out across the striped cushions of the benches, beneath drapes that swing softly in the breeze.

Quickly, I move through the garden. With my pruning shears I clip a handful of red-orange poppies, and a saw-toothed leaf from a palm tree. From a closet in the sleeping quarters, I bring the captured hare I have been feeding for weeks. He shudders in my arms, and I sing low to soothe him.

I stand beside Mr. Qadir, looking down at his face. He is dreaming that he is Saladin, commanding an army so vast it covers the desert. His scimitar glints in the sun, as bright as the blades of my shears.

You think you know where this story goes next. A witch, poised over a sleeping man with a blade in her hand—how many choices are there? That is because you are not a witch. Our imaginations are bountiful.

I wave the poppies across Mr. Qadir’s forehead until he sleeps like stone, and I do the same to the hare. I lay the animal beside Mr. Qadir, and I pull the saw-toothed palm leaf from my sleeve. I touch my finger to each spine along the leaf’s edge, and as I do, I say the names of my parents, the name of my hometown, the names of the children the other women have cried for in their sleep, all these many, many months. Last of all I say the name of my beloved, her arm around my waist, her laughter echoed in my own belly, until the palm leaf’s stickled edge glows bright with longing.

I draw the leaf across Mr. Qadir’s chest so carefully that he does not even feel it in his dreams. Where the leaf traces, the flesh parts. I slip my hand between his ribs and ease his heart from its seat; I do the same with my sleeping hare. And I exchange the hearts. This hare with the heart of a haughty man. This man with the heart of a terrified hare. I pinch their flesh shut again, stroke it with my fingers until it is knitted and whole. I walk back to the castle of flowers, cradling the hare in my arms. There I set him in the shade of a jacaranda tree, and go about my business.

Just as the first visitors begin to come through the gates, Mr. Qadir’s lackeys arrive. They seat themselves around him, staring at their shoes, and speak in whispers; they do not dare to wake him. If I am visible to them at all, I am only a worth-nothing woman, as dark as the dirt at their feet. I stay where I am, quietly clipping the topiary.

From the moment he wakes up, I can see the difference in Mr. Qadir. Even his foolish subordinates can see it, though they can’t fathom the reason. He clutches one of the striped pillows to his chest and glances about him in a haunted way, looking at the peonies and roses as though they were calling for his blood. What he would like is to go running across the rich green field of the lawn and secret himself away in the nook of a hedge or a floral cottage, his ears pressed back flat against his skull. Instead he sits, quivering. When one of the men leans in to ask him a question, he shrinks back as though he has been bitten. When his children approach from the edge of the lawn, screaming with laughter, he bolts from the cabana and lights out for his office: his warren, his haven. The children stand open-mouthed and watch him go. At their feet the hare, besotted with its newfound sense of power, stretches out defiantly in the middle of the lawn, daring anyone to try and stop it.

All day long, Mr. Qadir hides in his office with the door closed. He sends his lackeys away, confused and anxious. Evening comes, and still he does not emerge. In the garden, the other women are finishing their tasks. They walk back to the sleeping quarters, where they bathe in cold water, laugh or cry as they share their dinner, trade stories of what they will do if they ever get home.

I make my way to the office. I enter without knocking. Usually, this would earn me a sharp slap, but today Mr. Qadir sits quaking at his desk. The iron box is in its usual place, on the floor at his feet, still as death with our lives inside.

“Mr. Qadir,” I tell him, “we need those passports.” He still doesn’t understand my words, but he trembles at my tone, knows how to follow a pointing finger with his eyes. He opens the box and piles the passports into my arms, and then I leave him in his office again, where he sits curled in on himself, waiting for the next thing that will terrify him.

In the sleeping quarters, I slip those little books of magic into the hands of all the women as they lie and dream of home. I walk out across the garden, over grass blanched by moonlight. In the cool, white glow, the fearless hare still cavorts, springing like a mad thing across the lawn, feasting on flowers. I leave him to his pleasures and walk until I reach the exit.

As I push the gates wide and step back into the world, I hear behind me the sound of blossoms, weeping as they crumble into sand.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: K.T. Elms

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors