Green Thumbs

The house she grew up in was a tall 3 storeyed yellow building bordering a park . The windows had green shutters and the front door which faced the east had a beautiful stained glass panel which caught the sunlight in the morning and painted beautiful patterns on the marble floor . There was a doughty old grandmother who ruled the house and a beautiful tall dark mother with long hair . There was a doll burnt in a bonfire of foreign vanitie, together with frilly fancy frocks ,by the father who suddenly went swadeshi .

All this suddenly vanished when the father took a bad business decision and the family was suddenly doomed - two children dying , the mother too, after a while from tuberculosis and the rest of the children parcelled out to relatives , as the father also passed away .

Now , in all of this , the girl had no chance to find out what affinity she had with nature and the earth especially .That came later , when she married the Man she went to college with, finding love and security and the comfort of a home she could call her own .

The first houses they lived in were apartments and it was only when she went to Jamshedpur , that the idea of a potted garden struck her and she discovered that she had green thumbs . The collection of plants then travelled with her wherever they went in the course of duty - the little cactus plant with hard thin bony stems and the loveliest tiny red flowers , the crotons , the curry leaf plant , the strange plant with the bloated stem sprouting deep pink flowers, the roses which bloomed in an almost rabid frenzy ,the bonsai bodhi ,innumerable plants and cuttings .

For some time when the Man was very very sick and there was tumult raging in the small secure haven she had created , with her husband and the two girls ,she put them on the back burner and when the Man died and she relocated to a small University town , she planted this cactus .

It blooms once a year in the height of summer and has a faint lingering fragrance that stays even when the flower has dried . There is something ephemeral and ghostly about its almost mystic beauty , its sudden appearance and its sudden departure .

( Photos - courtesy Manjari Chakravarti)

She has been gone these long ten years ,a time that seems to be so compressed as to be almost yesterday . Sometimes one turns to the phone to ask her a question or seek a frame of reference and then the sudden pang of realisation that she is not there any more ,is so sharp and sudden that it is almost like a physical pain , so pure is the agony .

And then suddenly something like this comes . It is physical - this feeling that she is reaching out to comfort and reassure and then one realises that this is the hardest thing to endure .