I remember my two plants in Pune, India, that never came out of their owner-induced coma. The Gerbera only opened up its nursery-gifted buds and died just after I sprayed water on its pink flowers and relished the clichéd shot of a greenhorn photographer. And the Monkey’s Puzzle, too small to trouble any of our forefathers, had its claws constantly turning brown one after the other before the entire plant morphed into a sad puzzle of dead or wilted branches.
I must be a bad copy of my father, I used to think.
Baba had a way with plants. Like a creative chef who arranged his craft well, one season he would make concentric circles in the garden and the another, rectangles, to arrange his seasonal plants. His most debatable design was a closed semicircle, like the shape of a ‘D’, which mother had serious trouble digesting. He would painstakingly arrange the little saplings of according to their size and colour, spending a great deal of time looking at them, caressing them, watering them and tying them to bamboo sticks with fibre ripped from banana stems.
Every winter, our backyard (not the front as one might think) filled with marigold, rose, zinnia, dahlia, calendula, dianthus, petunia and many more. For us, the ability to regurgitate these exotic names in front of the class mates was as much a matter of pride as the partial ownership of the plants themselves.
We saw father toil in his modest garden, carefully preparing the soil, tossing it up with his self-cooked compost and fertilizers, making little holes in the amorphous grey mix to bury the seeds in. Squatting beside him under a lukewarm sun casting golden shafts of light as fat as the gaps between the large teak leaves, watching him go about doing everything methodically was our easiest family activity! Of course, we contributed too. Either by occasionally watering the bed, or — if we had a passionate ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ race with the cousins — trampling all over it, even though the hardest slaps were reserved for rendering this service.
Though we loved the flowers and therefore, almost loved the plants, we showed our love in ways slightly different than his. We would break off a slender stem from a wild shrub and subject his plants to the same treatment that George Washington did to his father’s cherry tree. We would swing the stem so fast that it neatly cut through the leaves, or even the tender shoots. The challenge was the neatness of the cut, and we strove to achieve perfection at the cost of swollen, broken skins.
My weird love for plants didn’t die entirely even under the suffocating weight of a software coolie’s (as an engineering professor would lovingly call us) job. So I tried my hand at a little garden of my own in the dreary city-concrete of Pune and Ahmedabad, only managing to produce stunted, stooping plants that eventually died a slow, painful death. I either baked them in the sun, made a soup of their soil, never really figuring what these little bastards wanted.
I rebooted my efforts after coming to Bhubaneswar, a sweltering city in Eastern India. However, I quickly — and quite depressingly — realized that the flat I had booked with so much hope for a better life had its face permanently turned away from the sun. Nothing grew in balconies, except for the damned mealy bug, a soft-bodied parasite that proliferated with an unknown vengeance.
Desperate to grow at least some greenery around me, I started to look for plants that grew in the shade, and got repeatedly ripped off by unscrupulous nursery owners, one of whom once passed off nothing less than a cactus as a shade-lover. Frustrated, I began with a borrowed money plant and a few others from friends and relatives, learning the tricks by rotting and potting. Most died. Some lived to spin an additional leaf. A few grew wildly. Few got crippled, and yet some others froze in their first leaves. It was a mixed result and I was still sad that I had no flowers. All flowering plants craved for the sun and gave up.
My desperate attempt at ‘shade flowers’ took me finally to orchids, an entirely different ball game which I didn’t know then. I kept watching Youtube videos and kept buying them until I realized the hard way that none of the predominantly American lessons on Youtube applied to my city. However, I refused to give up, even though dying orchids kept burning a rapidly expanding hole in my pocket.
Eventually, my plant collection, including the orchids, which started with just one, grew to ten, to fifty, to a hundred and to over one hundred fifty now! So much so that the kids who came to play in our house have made a competition out of counting the pots. Before I realized, I had almost everything in my medium-size apartment that my father had in his asbestos-roofed outhouse. Shovels, fertilizers, sprays, organic manure, a bunch of insecticides, neem oil, little packets of compost, mustard cakes and more. My plants are still humble collection; there is no garden, but it makes me happy. While my parents think this is too much domestic responsibility for their troubled ‘double-kid-son’, the wife, kind-hearted otherwise, now considers the entire house to have been taken over by this non-human species (and once went as far as calling their collective presence akin to that of a ‘souten’, a nomenclature Indian wives have historically reserved for the most despised).
Some well-wishers have incorrectly attributed the obsession to the luxury of me being a teacher, and yet some others have found the occasional water dripping from my balcony an invasion of their privacy and security.
The plants, however, have only grown. They surreptitiously encroach upon many things; the kitchen sill, the utility slab, the corridor, the clothesline. Some are gifted, some are plucked from the roadside. Some are collected by the son who, at best, has a sinusoidal love for them. Some are even ripped from the barks of trees in jungles that I rather frequently go to. A few have now crossed the four walls of my house and found happy homes elsewhere. They have been carried in the train too, neatly packed and watered, by none other than my father, the man who taught me everything about plants.
‘They grow so well in your house,’ he tells me one day. ‘My leaves are not even half as green. Teach me what you do.’
I am suddenly rendered speechless. I am reminded of his passion in his younger days and his angry slaps on my guilty cheeks. And now, he just hands out my biggest award and doesn’t even realize! Because he’s the man who has given me the lasting love of plants through his genes. So much so that I can’t stop acquiring more even if the house is overflowing with them.
Yes, I am guilty of the colourful crime. More guilty than charged.
