4/30/21

New | Prose | Kalyani Raghunathan | Hole in the Hedge


                                                           

Until I returned to Delhi after five years away in idyllic upstate New York, I hadn’t fully appreciated the luxury of having grown up in a house with a garden. I should have known better, since as a very young child I have lived in the kind of house I live in now, one flat in a block of flats amid many other blocks of flats; no garden close by that was safe for a young girl to play in unsupervised or after dusk, not even the standard colony compound with a paved badminton court and central patch of compacted earth and a few straggly bushes, and certainly not a lawn and trees one could call one’s own. But the intervening years completely spoiled me.

My parents taught in Delhi University, and had generous vacations that lined up nicely with school holidays. As a result, we spent several weeks in the summer at my grandparents’ house down south. Theirs was a mid-sized bungalow on a mid-sized plot, but unlike some south Delhi homes the house was set back from the boundary wall and surrounded on three sides by a garden. Not much grass, the fiery red Andhra soil didn’t seem to acquiesce to such frivolities, and  there certainly wasn’t room for a lawn. It can best be described as a 100-metre long winding path through fairly dense, planned undergrowth, fruit trees scattered here and there, from which coconuts, custard apples and red fleshy pomelos were collected as they fell to the ground.  My grandmother also had an entire terrace filled with pots – maybe upwards of a hundred – many of them bougainvillea and cacti, the only plants that seemed to thrive in the harsh, direct sun. I was to learn later that my father had inherited his green thumb from my grandmother, or maybe they both acquired it independently, either way they both loved gardening.

At that young age, coming from our Delhi flat, my grandmother’s garden was simultaneously delightful and dangerous, but the danger was of the sort where you secretly hoped the worst would happen, at least once. The worst, in this case, was encountering a snake. Grass snakes were common and harmless, but I was told by my aunt that a cobra had once been spotted from the back door of the central bedroom of the house, the one that led down two steps into the back garden, close to the garage. A second cobra was later found on the vine growing above the little open-air grill-surrounded room attached to the back of the kitchen, where dirty plates lay stacked in a stone sink, waiting to be washed. We hadn’t been visiting on either occasion, but the possibilities were thrilling.

After snakebite, the second worst thing that could happen to a child that stepped unaccompanied into that back garden was also worth serious consideration - she could be kidnapped by the house help who lived for some years in a room alongside the garage. Or so we were told. I don’t know if this was really true, or whether it was a complete fabrication to keep us kids inside, but my grandmother told us in all seriousness that this household help was ‘cunning’ (her word for anyone she felt had an undisclosed agenda) and posed a threat to her small grandchildren.

The strategy for dealing with danger number one was fairly straightforward. We were taught that snakes felt vibrations, not voices, and so we stomped gaily through the garden, sometimes with a stick in hand for extra protection. My own personal strategy for dealing with danger number two - which even then I didn’t quite believe, but hey, who wants to take chances – was to avoid the garage area altogether. I would navigate the garden path three-quarters of the way from the front gate of the compound round to the diagonally opposite corner, just outside the window of the room my parents occupied on these vacations, then turn around and retrace my steps. Much to my relief – and secret disappointment – I never saw a snake. Nor was I ever kidnapped.

At that point, this house had two of the most fascinating things I had encountered in my short life – the wondrous garden, and a dog. On occasion, one of the several golden Labradors my grandparents owned during my visits to the house would accompany me into the garden, but that was usually in the evenings when my grandmother was watering the plants. At other times – especially through those hot summer afternoons when all the adults were sleeping – the garden was all mine.

I have an elder brother who was always with us on these occasions, so this might seem strange, but many of the games I played in my grandparent’s home as a child were solitary affairs. He was almost four years older, and a boy, so of course we had little in common. Thinking back to that adult-filled house with an old television that only played Sun TV, placed in front of an uncomfortable sofa covered in dark brown rexine that stuck to the backs of your legs, peeling off like a band-aid as you stood up, I cannot for the life of me remember what he did with his time. Sometimes we played Monopoly, sometimes we lay draped across adjacent chairs reading the P.G. Wodehouses we had had the foresight to bring with us, but most afternoons I was on my own, exploring.

One of those summers I had been reading something – Anne of Green Gables, perhaps – and was quite taken in by the story of the protagonist befriending trees. I made four quick friends that summer – young saplings scattered at different corners of the garden - I remember there was an Emily, and also an Elizabeth (my tree friends were modelled on the children from the books I read) and two others whose names I don’t recall. I must have been lonely, because I went to see them multiple times a day. I talked to them, I told one the stories I heard from the other, and as we were leaving, I bade them farewell, even dramatically squeezing out a solitary tear for the smallest and most fragile.

Around the time I turned four-and-a-half, we finally moved from our little flat to a larger one on the campus in Delhi where my father taught. It was well-proportioned; two bedrooms, a large living room and a small kitchen in the window on which a squirrel gave birth to tiny furry babies, year after year. But best of all, it was on the ground floor and surrounded by a small garden with a lawn. There were flowerbeds and vegetable beds, and a harshingar tree that dotted the grass with its little red-stemmed white flowers in September, heralding the end of the hot weather. I was shown how to string a thread through the stems and turn the flowers into a garland, a wonderfully painstaking activity that kept me busy for whole afternoons at a stretch, much to my parents’ relief.

There were other kids on campus and the college basketball court and football field to play in, but that garden, my first, gave me many hours of pleasure. I remember stealing a bit of chalk from the box my mother kept to draw out the patterns of the kurtas she stitched, going out to the patch of earth where the sweet pea vines with their purple, pink and white blossoms shielded me from view, and writing the lyrics to The Beatles’ Obladi Oblada on the wall of the house. I invented an ingenious real-life version of PacMan to be played along the grid created by the retaining walls of a row of flowerbeds. On the few occasions the school bus dropped us off early and no one was home to receive us, my brother reluctantly agreed to play this game with me – he would chase me down these walls, if he caught up to me I ‘died’, so I had to choose my turns wisely. My parents bought us a couple of those tiny plastic crazy balls that ricocheted alarmingly off surfaces, and I spent many hours alone on the lawn, pretending I ran a Ladies’ Crazy Ball Academy where I taught young girls like me how to catch and throw. I watched wriggling earthworms after the rains and marvelled at the little mounds of earth they left in their wake; I climbed the trees and rescued a ginger kitten; on one occasion I even bullied the neighbour’s daughter into licking a slug. My father warned us of hookworms, but I hated wearing shoes, so when standing in one place, I would instead dance from foot to foot, never pausing on one long enough for the dreaded worm to find purchase.

Now, surrounded by concrete and struggling to nurse back to life my three lonely potted plants, I find my thoughts turning to those gardens of my youth. Much as her garden was for my grandmother, that first garden was for me a welcome source of comfort, of solitude and quiet reflection. In fact, the most endearing memory I have of my own self, aged maybe seven or eight, was in my Hole in the Hedge. I discovered that the hedge surrounding our garden had been planted in two parallel rows, and at one spot there was a naturally-occurring space between the tiny branches, large enough for my little white cane chair and myself. On my left was one of the lanes leading out of the college campus and onto the Delhi ridge, on my right, the house, and unless someone knew exactly where to look, I was invisible. Lying as it did on the boundary between the world outside and my home, this no-man’s land was mine to lay claim to. Predictably, the first thing I did was to write up a rulebook – called the Hole in the Hedge (HH) rules – that delineated what was allowed in the HH and what not. No adults, obviously, not that an adult could have fit in that space anyway. I would take my journal in and write stories, or sing to myself, or listen to the conversations of people passing by, unaware they were being spied on. Once in a while my father would come out and knock on the ‘door’ to the HH headquarters, asking if I was ok and if I needed anything.

We moved out of that house when I was about fourteen, to a bungalow on campus that also had a large garden with a beautiful purple-flowered vine above the front door and a ber (wood-apple) tree whose fruit our cook would turn into a refreshing summer drink. A few years later, we moved again, to the last and largest home we’d occupy before my father retired, with lovely twelve-foot-deep verandas and a tecoma tree that dropped its yellow blossoms on my mother as she lay reading in the winter afternoon sun on a mat underneath.

I never did get to say goodbye to any of these homes. In between my leaving to get my terminal degree in the US and my return five years later, both my parents retired and had to give up their on-campus housing. From far away, while wrapping up my thesis and applying for jobs, I would listen with a heavy heart to my father’s stories of their search for a place to rent. Their options once again seemed limited to little concrete boxes, with small balconies and perhaps (if lucky) a terrace. After all, which Delhi resident lives in a house with a garden these days, except the uber-rich and government servants? After several months of back and forth, one of those concrete boxes was selected, and my parents packed up their belongings and moved them into their new accommodation.

Of course, there was no way to pack up our lovely garden, and the two hundred pots of chrysanthemums whose large heads I would cradle between my hands were finally uprooted, much like our family. But the first house with a garden that I ever lived in holds a special place in my memories, and within it, my little hole in the hedge remains very dear to me. Hidden from everyone, this in-between space was my little escape – where I could imagine away the outside world, and even the egregiousness of my parents always taking my brother’s side in domestic disputes seemed to fade. I could just be me in there, Queen of my Hole in the Hedge.

God knows we could all use a space like that this year.

 *Artwork by Edward Munch, Two Women in the Woods at Ekely (Wikimedia commons)

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