My grandmother pressed chinar leaves in the Quran, which everyone said was disrespectful and no one dared tell her. She had a system. Spring leaves in the early surahs, green as a promise. Autumn leaves toward the back, red and gold, the colour a leaf turns only when it has decided to fall.
When she was dying she asked me to find the reddest one. It took me an hour. The book was heavy with sixty years of leaves and I did not know which pages held what, so I turned them slowly, and out of the pages fell a life I had never been told.
A leaf with a date. A leaf with a single letter, F. A leaf so thin the light came through it, marked only with the word waited.
He was not my grandfather. That much I worked out from the dates, which stopped the year before her marriage and never resumed. Firdous, she said, when I put the reddest leaf in her hand, and it was the first and last time I heard the name. He gave me the first one, she said. Spring. He said, keep it and you keep the day. So I kept the day. Then I kept the autumn too, when he went, because you cannot keep only the good half of a person. You keep the falling or you keep nothing.
I asked where he had gone. Not died, she said. Just gone. Across the line that came down through the mountains that year, the line that turned neighbours into news, and cut a valley into two aches facing each other. He was on the wrong side of a border that had not existed when he first handed me a leaf and told me to keep the day.
So she had. Sixty years of days, pressed flat, kept green and kept red, in the one book she knew no one would ever throw away.
She died before dawn with the leaf in her hand. I did not take it back. I buried the reddest leaf with her and kept the book, and every autumn now I walk under the chinars when they turn, and the whole city goes the colour of that last leaf, a red so total it feels less like dying than like being kept.
I press one every year. Green in spring, red in autumn. I do not have a Firdous. But I have learned from her that you keep the day regardless, in case the person you are keeping it for is only gone, and not lost, and might yet cross back over.