He is green. She is red. They don't need to touch for their love to show itself through the contrast.
The garden holds them inside a great curling buta, its spiral arms wrapping around the two figures like a kept secret. Flowers crowd every inch of it: white blossom on the trees, blue dots scattered through the gold, red clusters pushing up from the ground. The garden is not decorative. It is conspiring. It is doing what gardens have always done for people who could not meet anywhere else.
Zariyfa remembers it plainly: couples used to meet in secret. Being seen together was not done. So they found gardens, and in gardens they found the only privacy available to them - and in that privacy they spoke in poems because ordinary words weren't enough for what they were carrying.
The two figures stand at a careful distance, their gazes doing the work that hands cannot. His posture leans almost imperceptibly toward her. Her expression holds something back. The buta that contains them is not just a decorative motif here - it is a room with no walls, a shelter that blooms rather than closes. A sanctuary, as all good hiding places should be.
Around them, the flowers are already opening. In the old tradition, a blooming garden at a wedding foretells the blooming of the house - children, abundance, years of it. The garden knows before the couple does.
The slight glance of the birds flying towards the end of the buta is but like this couple flying to their new home.
