Smell the roses

 The lessons that gardening teaches you 

The first time I became invested in plants was when I moved into my first home in Delhi. It was a tiny barsati in Defence Colony but it had a huge terrace which was crying out to be filled with beautiful blooms. So, during my first Delhi winter, I planted every colourful annual I could find in the local nursery and waited for them to bloom in spring. And bloom they certainly did, turning my terrace into a riot of colour that gave me much joy as I sat there every morning sipping my first cup of coffee. 

 

Since then, no matter where I moved, and however small my balcony or patch of green, I became obsessed with plants: potting them in colourful containers, making sure they had enough sun/shade, feeding them with fertilizer, and rotating them with the seasons. I have never ever had a garden of my own, but even small-scale gardening of the kind I do in my current Delhi apartment has taught me some important life lessons. 

 

First off, it has taught me patience. You can plant a seed and water it religiously, but it will only grow in its own time, it will bloom when it is ready, and it will wilt when its time is up. You can do your best by your plants, but you must work on their time scale not on yours. Nurture is all very well, but Nature is the master – and don’t you ever forget it.

 

Having a garden – or some plants on a balcony – makes you realize that beauty is transient. Nothing lasts forever. Flowers will bloom for a while and then die. Leaves will fall off your frangipani every year, leaving you bereft. But then, new leaves will sprout and your tree will grow fractionally taller and wider, and begin to bloom once again. There is nothing quite like plants to teach you about the cycle of life and how everything that lives in the present moment will perish sooner or later. But something as – or more – beautiful will take its place. And your mourning will soon give way to joy.

 

Plants also teach you about seasonality, a concept that we have forgotten in a world in which every vegetable and fruit is available around the year. But plant some strawberries in your pots and you can be sure that they will only give fruit during October-November or April-May. My shiuli bush (called Parijat in the north) always blooms around the time of Durga Puja, reminding me of my Calcutta days when its arrival heralded the return of the Devi to her ancestral home. 

 

They say that the ultimate unselfish act is to plant a tree under whose shade you can never hope to sit. Unfortunately, that privilege has never been granted to me, but I have nothing but admiration for those people of my age and older who plant little saplings in their garden, knowing that they will only bear fruits when their grandchildren are grown and they are gone forever from this world.

That is, in my mind, the best kind of legacy to leave behind: a plant that will survive for generations, a living reminder that you once existed and had love in your heart, not just for your family but for all of creation.

 

Home Truths

When you can’t venture out, you have to make your home your whole world

When your house becomes your entire world – because the world outside is off limits for you – how do you cope?

That’s the question that I have had to grapple with over the past few months as Covid-19 ensured that we hunkered down at home, for fear of contracting the infection. And even now, though the lockdown has been relaxed, I continue to cower in my flat. It’s not just that I am a coward who fears infection (though that is part of it); it’s also that I have several comorbidities that put me at particular danger of a bad outcome were I to get the disease.

So, as long as Coronavirus is out there, I am going to stay safely inside.

Which is why my world has contracted to my home. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, my home has expanded to become my entire world. Either way, I have to live my entire life within the confines of my apartment. And though it did feel a little claustrophobic at first, I have gradually found a way to make the space work for me and my quarantine partner (aka the husband).

The first thing I did was to make dedicated workspaces for both of us. After a little territorial jostling, we finally settled on a formula that worked. He has taken over the dining table to do his writing (in longhand) while I have annexed the sofa in the den to work on my laptop. One armchair in the living room, which gets the best light, has been designated as the spot from where he does his Zoom calls, webinars, and TV commentating. I make my video calls from the study, mostly because the wifi is strongest here. And over time we have learnt to treat these as sacrosanct spaces, where neither of us intrudes on the other.

The other area that I have spent reorganizing is the kitchen, where I now spend more time than I did before. The first thing I embarked on was a massive clear out, throwing out old expired bottles of sauces, spices past their sell-by date, and ingredients that I had no use for. Then, it was time to organize my drawers, putting stock cubes in one, curry pastes in another and so on. I ordered kitchen racks and spice jars online, cut out little paper labels and organized all my herbs and spices. I can’t begin to tell what a difference that made when I was cooking to have everything I needed within range and neatly labeled.

The lockdown also made me discover the virtues of an oven. For years, I had just treated it as a way of reheating food. But as the challenge of providing three meals a day took its toll on me, I needed to expand my repertoire from stir-fries and curries and do something more ambitious (by my standards, of course). So, back I went online to order some roasting pans and dishes in which I could make one-pot meals. And ever since they arrived, I have been making at least one meal in the oven every day. (It helps that you can just assemble everything, bung it in for an hour, and relax with a book or a nice glass of wine while dinner gets ready.)

But while I experiment with all kinds of cuisines – Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Chinese – I am never happier than when I am making the kind of comfort food that I grew up eating. So, rajma, kadi, alo wadi makes a regular appearance on my table. And out of respect for my husband’s Gujarati roots, I have also learnt to make dhokla and handvo, the tastes of his childhood.

The other area of the house that I am re-developing is my balcony. It always remained bare and empty because houseplants didn’t seem a good idea given how much we travelled. But now that I am stuck indoors, and the balcony is the only outdoors I have access to (so to speak), I am slowly greening it, so that I have something pretty to look at.

It started off with a few jasmine plants, which are already budding with the promise of fragrant flowers. When I was sure that they were flourishing I got a little more ambitious and bought some frangipani plants. My cousin, who has both a sprawling garden and a green thumb, sent me some basil and mint along with some flowering plants and creepers. And slowly but surely, my bare balcony is transforming into a green bower. It’s not quite Lodi Garden (ha!) but for now, it’s enough to keep me sane.

Talking of Lodi Garden, I still haven’t had the courage to head there for my usual evening walk. Instead, I have created a walking track within my house, which I use for an hour everyday. I start off from the bedroom, walk down the long corridor past the dining area to the den at the other end of the house, take a detour into the living room, then back to the long corridor which leads to the bedroom. Sometimes, just for a little variation, I take in a few turns of the front and back balcony as well. It is a bit tedious but it ensures that I keep to my 10,000-step count for the day and get enough active minutes.

And for the moment, at least, that’s quite enough.