As the New Year approaches, and with it new hopes and resolutions, magazines and websites are brimming with “how-to” articles packed with advice: how to make our resolutions and stick with them, how to maximise happiness, how to make the most of each day. Rather than offering sage advice, today’s column brings you a story…of Susheela and her garden.
When Susheela’s husband told her that they would be moving from Edison to Highland Park, she wept. Edison had finally begun to feel like home, with friends and familiar grocery stores; it was the home where she had planted a bite-sized garden just last spring with her beloved basil, tomatoes and mint. She’d always had a green thumb; before she got married to her non-resident Indian husband and moved to New Jersey, she had created a small balcony garden with hanging bowls of flowers, clay pots, and a birdhouse in her parents’ tiny apartment in India. She dreaded the thought of moving again; that the new house in Highland Park had a bigger garden brought her no joy. Instead, she only saw overrun weeds, untrimmed hedges and the last tenant’s broken grill, while a nameless violin played mournfully on, somewhere beyond the aching blue zig-zag of rooftops. But once they were settled in, she noticed the next-door neighbour’s flowery garden, and the neighbour, with her boxful of garden equipment and bags of compost. And so she turned her attention back to her own space which, she realised, was suitable for creating the perfect vegetable garden with tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and edible flowers. Three-foot-wide beds, the rows running from east to west, with the tallest plants on the north end to catch the sun.
That next-door neighbour was Maggie, an older American woman with whom Susheela soon began to develop an affectionate bond and uncover uncanny similarities. They could each smell rivers from afar, feel in their hearts the gentle lap of its waves. As Susheela got to work on her new garden, clearing up the weeds, trimming the hedges, loosening the soil, building raised beds, and planting cucumber, basil and cilantro seeds, Maggie was impressed with how Susheela meticulously plotted her gardens on pen and paper first—the overall layout, rectangles for the beds, circles for the pots. She had grown mostly flowers until then, so she learned from Susheela how to start vegetable seeds indoors before transplanting them. On her part, Susheela learned more about flowers and fertilizers from Maggie, while also admiring the older woman’s cheerfulness, maturity and musical skills—for, you see, it was Maggie who played the violin. They had been homemakers thus far; together, they now decided to start a gardening business which would help clients in their borough, especially those with demanding careers and little time, plan their gardens, prepare the soil, plant seasonal seeds and offer services such as watering and weekly weeding. In the process, not just their own gardens but those of others, too, flowered.
Is Susheela’s garden a metaphor for women’s friendships across real and imagined divides? Is it a blueprint for successful living, even if not successful entrepreneurship, which begins with what one loves? Susheela, incidentally, was a character in my collection of short stories called Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel. A generous reviewer wrote in the New York Journal of Books that my female characters “seized the trajectory of the road and navigated it on their own terms,” and that, “as a body of work, they examine what it means for a 21st century woman to travel.” Susheela was a traditional woman who accompanied her husband to America after an arranged marriage. Beyond a treatise on women’s independence, a linear narrative of how a cultivator comes into her own—she became who she already was, and had been—it might be interesting to also think about the cultivated garden. A famous song by Ramprasad Sen—Bengalis call this Shyamasangeet, songs for Kali—says mon re, krishi kaaj janona (o heart, learn the work of farmers, the art of cultivation.) Susheela tries to practice this art, literally and figuratively, despite all her challenges. She meticulously cultivates and nurtures her garden: water, weed, plant new seeds. The blooms, the fragrance, follow.
Dr Debotri Dhar is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the -University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.