My grandmother's garden

Nostalgia drives me on certain days, and almost like a homing pigeon, I know just where to go. I recall evenings on my terrace and the silhouettes of the Himalayan foothills shrouded in clouds on moonlit nights . The garden below, that both my grandparents lovingly tended to, it wasn’t much of an expanse just a stamp sized piece of green but to us it seemed like a verdant luxury.

Memories are both ambiguous and certain, and fused together they make for some vividly fuzzy scenes. I recall my grandfather walking on the grass bare feet, meditatively almost, soaking in the droplets of dew while his eyes remained closed.

My grandmother’s presence in the garden was much like her- quiet, nurturing and moving all about. Every morning she would be there, almost at the crack of dawn, or so it seemed to me. Walking about calmly, in her starched saree, looking ceremonious, collecting flowers in her wicker basket for her morning prayer. Around her, the garden was a heady mix of fragrance and mythology, and she’d narrate the tales as she went about collecting her flowers.

The onset of winter brought with it the flowering of Parijat or Shiuli as my Calcutta bred grandmother liked to call it. She would always come here first, it was supposedly Krishna’s favourite flowers. Unfailing my grandmother would say “Legend has it that the flowers shed with the rays of the sun, and are so prisitine that they could be picked from the ground and offered to the gods.” Whatever was left after offering to the gods, she would put in a glass bowl on our dining table.

Almost all flowers had some mythological significance in my grandmother’s garden The generously laden hibiscus trees occupied the two corners of the garden. “There are two kinds of flowers, one with five petals and one with twenty one petals, and oh! what a fine garland the buds make, they string them together during pujo , it is Ma Durga’s flower” my grandmother would tell me with a gleam in her eyes.

The otherwise nondescript shrub of kaner also got its due on Maha Shivratri , when my grandmother would piously pluck the yellow trumpets and ready her basket filling it with offerings to the gods. The white residue that was left behind formed the basis of many a scientific experiment by me.

None of this enthused me much though, I thought that only winning feature of the garden was the lone tree in our garden. In the northern corner of the house there was an old shehtoot tree , a massive one. To me that tree seemed so huge that I thought it pre dated all of us, and our house was possibly built around so as to accommodate the ample spread of it branches, but I learnt much later the it was grafted carefully by my grandfather and we only reaped the dividends. Come summer and the bounty of nature would rain upon us, it would be afternoons full of juicy scarlet and plum shehtoots. My grandparents were happy to share them with neighbours.

I recall the tree as my first foray into ill conceived commerce, when I thought of plans to sell the fruit. As my experience taught me -collecting the shehtoot was a task, we had to get to them before the birds or the bats, so while I hated it, I had to learn to share. Foraging taught me there’s nothing quite like the a delicate shehtoot plucked right off the branch when its ripe and plump. However, gardening and harvesting is nothing if not a lesson in patience, it meant taking a small handful, and my plans of plucking basketfuls of raw green shehtouts meant I got zero value! thereby bringing life to the old adage about greed

In our world there was very little the garden did not have, to us it symbolised life and its cyclical ways. My grandmother’s careful tending of her plants, as if tending life itself, her meticulous planning, when to grow her lily bulbs so that they would all flower at the same time in the year looking graceful. My grandfather’s would aid in sourcing saplings locally, buying was seen as excessive in our household.

I am sure my grandmother treated the plants as her children, feeling responsible for their being, whether it was her rudimentary ways of composting or putting kitchen seeds in egg trays and watching them sprout with a parents responsibility and pride. To me it seemed excessive, and I would wonder why the routine didn’t bore her. As an adult I understand her need for grounding.

I look back and I realise that possibly all my life lessons had their genesis in my grandmother’s garden. While nostalgia has its sense of familiarity, to me her garden still evokes a sense of wonder, amazement, almost like the cycle of life in the small ecosystem, that was my grandmother’s garden.