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.
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