Gardens, when we travel

"I trust your Garden was willing to die ... I do not think that mine was—it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star—"

Emily Dickinson, in a letter to her Aunt Katie Sweetser, 1880

I stand perplexed, not knowing what to do with the few plants I had on the terrace of this house where I lived for some years now. So few, they somehow grew so beautifully in their respective containers without any special care. After a period of winter hibernation, most of them have come back with full vigor. During my short trips out of the city, some inevitably faded while others survived with incredible spirit. Time to leave the place once again, this time for a long time, may be. I say ‘may be’ because every time when I shifted out of this city in a definitive tone, I returned to it with equal speed. The city which saw more than half of my life’s doings…So, let me suffix it with a ‘may be’ this time, in all humility. 

There were gardens always, wherever I lived. On the terrace, in the balcony, and wherever one could have them in the kind of flats one got to live. Bamboos to jasmines to shoe flowers…from Kishan Garh to Munirka to Khel Gaon…

This time, I am left with a paarijaat - my ever-fresh crush, a basil plant which Daya Bai brought from her travels abroad, shoe flowers which I got from a nursery, krishna thulasi, which mother got from Kerala and the geraniums which have burst out of Neruda’s pages…and, some nameless plants with nameless little flowers which grew out of who knows from where…

The champa suffered a gradual death as my friend tried to transplant her from fantasy to reality. After a few days of struggle with the change of circumstances and rough handling, she gave up the fight. With the umbilical cord cut from the earth and the stems dried up, the golden flowers fell back into the womb and the honey bees moved onto the next flower. A bird alone sings her life story from the dark branch of the white floss silk tree outside the compound wall.

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The way my mother keeps her garden in Channanikkadu, my birthplace in Kerala, is something very special. She doesn’t plant much and she doesn’t plan much, she just lets the natural vegetation grow. Once in a while, she would get a sapling or a seed of a plant, the flower of which, the fruit of which, the leaves or the stem or the root of which, she must have found tempting. But, that kind of selection happens very rarely. Otherwise, it is all a wild growth…You open any outer window of the old little house in Channani, as the pet name of the place goes, it opens into the wild jungle!

Channanikkadu, I think, is derived from Chandana kadu, meaning the forest of sandal wood. This is the place where I was born and lived until the age of four before we traveled to Kozhikode as my parents got a transfer to work there. My earliest memory of my birthplace does not have a single sandalwood tree though. Instead, intense smelling jasmines in a breathtaking variety flowered and faded in me in a cyclical order. Central to our front yard and to our childhood memories was the paarijaat tree which stood like a small dotted green hill on which every rainfall brought down a thousand little stars of white fragrance….when we returned to Channani again after four years, the paarijaat welcomed us in youthful grandeur.

Few years later, our elder cousin who worked in the forest department gifted three sandalwood saplings to three of us youngsters and said, “They belong to the nation, you’re not allowed to cut them or sell them, understand?” We trembled in utter obedience of this national symbolism and we secretly watched them growing from afar, from under the generous shade of the paarijaat...

Bye for now, till we meet again and I shall take you to the black dog who loved white lilies.

Sreekala Sivasankaran