I was introduced to Indian poets and authors while in school. I read Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, contemporary poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Keki N Daruwala, Dom Moraes before I got to read serious Indian novelists. R K Narayan and Anita Desai were exceptions though, I soaked myself in Narayan’s novels ‘The Guide’, ‘Bachelor of Arts’, ‘The Financial Expert’. I started reading Anita Desai a little later; while other Indian novelists like Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Manohar Malgoankar and Kamala Markandeya had to wait till I began college. New Century Bookhouse located in Mount Road, published books written by Russian authors. They undertook translations of Russian writers in Tamil, writings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin were translated in Tamil for propaganda of Marxist ideology. The books were dirt cheap, booklets with collected essays of Marxist thinkers could be bought for a song. One could buy the Tamil translation of ‘Das Kapital’ for twenty rupees, and small booklets cost ten rupees. Since profit did not drive the publication of books in New Century Bookhouse, books written by great authors like Tolstoy, Pushkin, Maxim Gorky, were affordable. I bought hardbound volumes of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, ‘Anna Karenina’ , and Gorky’s ‘Mother’ from New Century Bookhouse and those were the first of my collection of books. I was about fifteen when I read ‘Anna Karenina’. I remember reading the book during a summer break from school. I became engrossed in the plot of the story, the diverse threads of the plot kept me hooked, the characters cohabited with me through the long hours that I read the book every day. Anna reminded me of strong women characters from the novels I had read, especially Catherine of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Maggie Tulliver of ‘Mill On The Floss’. Like them I found Anna Karenina sensual, restless, agonized by a world that she found inadequate, searching for a dream that vanished like vapour. These three women die in the end - that was not the only fate they share; though they were diverse people living through circumstances very different, they were like sisters because they dared to embrace the forbidden, fatally. I had never enjoyed historical fiction, and that was why I could never proceed beyond a few chapters of’ ‘War and Peace’. I could complete reading Maxim Gorky’s ‘Mother’ though I found it dreary and uninspiring. I found ‘Mother’ dated, working in a specific socio-political context that I could not relate to. I was near eighteen when I started reading Dostoevsky, I was overwhelmed by intense energy that his novels ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Brothers Karamazov’ and ‘Idiot’ represented. Though writing in mid 19th century, I found Dostoevsky a modernist in terms of his thinking, themes and style. His novels were a psychological probe into the human soul, his brooding characters were tormented by existential angst and spiritual turmoil – they anticipated Freud, Jung, Kafka, Milan Kundera in my reading oeuvre. 
This post is inspired by Beth’s ‘How We Read’. It took me back to the time when reading seemed to be the only thing I did, especially back to my college days. I decided to do my grad program in English Literature so that I could read more and more books. I was so naïve about the courses offered in a University, more so I was fed up and impatient with Science, Math, History, Geography, the tests and exams that came in my way of reading. Reading as an activity began when I was nine /ten, late when compared with reading habits of children of this generation. (There are many reasons for that, and it will require a post by itself.) I started with comics, the Amar Chitra Kathas. These were many comics bound together into several volumes that my mother borrowed from the library of the school that she worked as a teacher. When I was nine or ten there was only Higginbothams in Madras and the only book that my father bought with great attention was the Oxford English Dictionary which was thumbed well by everyone in the family. Landmark with its children’s section for books came a generation later. After Amar Chitra Kathas, I moved to Enid Blytons (Famous Five, Secret Seven, Malory Tower) , Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Perry Masons, Hadley Chase. These books were the only ones circulated in School Library and the Local Lending Library. I was then in Grades 6 and 7, I finished a book in a couple of hours, and I had to wait a week to take another book. Few of my friends, all avid readers, exchanged their books for mine, and I finished about seven books a week and the school library could not keep up with our thirst for more. Despite this frenzied reading along with school work, I felt inadequate. It was then, sometime when I was in Grade 8 that my mother introduced me to Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’. I acquired a new meaning to reading. For one, I realized that I could not tumble through this book the way I did with the earlier ones. It seemed like I was reading a different language, the story belonged to a different world. There were large parts that I did not understand; still the world the book represented seduced me in a puzzling manner. When I finished the book, I knew I could not go back to the type of books I had been reading earlier. My mother gauged that the transition to serious reading was tumultuous though I didn’t accept it. She recommended that I read Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, she kept harping on the surprise element in the story that would box me. She regretted having introduced me first to Jane Austen, ‘Rebecca’ she felt might have provided a smooth transition. My mother personally was very fond of the book, she had seen the movie as well. I wanted to read other books of Daphne Du Maurier, but the school library did not have any. I decided to try the other classics in the library. Through the next two years I lived my life out of the bookshelf that my friends seldom visited. I read Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’, more of Jane Austen – ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Northanger Abbey’, ‘Persuasion’, Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, George Eliot’s novels. I had completed the entire major women novelist from the shelf. I kept away from Dickens, Thackeray, Thomas Hardy – they seemed formidable and for another day.
My Queen of Sheba vine, commonly called the Zimbabwe creeper, whose Botanical name is Podranea brycei, faded away gradually, the leaves first wilted, the stem then began brittle, the last to go was the hardy pink flowers. The creeper had been among the earliest plants that I brought to my garden from the Horticulture Society. Without any fuss it established itself in my garden , bearing flowers almost through the year. I had trained the shrub on a trellis very close to my dining room from where I step out into the terrace. So every day as I sat to sip my tea at the table, my eyes rested on the flowers and the creeper that had a certain poise as it grew on one side of the trellis while the large part of the trellis was occupied by the Rangoon creeper/ Madhu Malathi.
The cascade of pink flowers that hung at the end of the stems soothed me on tumultuous days, lending a permanent pink foliage to my garden. The flowers were trumpet shaped with a pale throat that had tender down of hairs. The flowers exhibited a strong and calming presence, it resisted an existence independent of the vine. I had tried floating the flowers on water, though the flowers remained fresh for a couple of days, they appeared listless. I stopped moving the flowers away from the vine since then.
I had been away at Hosur for a couple of days; before I left, I had watered the plants and stayed at the garden for more than an hour pruning away the dried jasmines and ixoras, training the vethalai kodi onto the sunshade and wondering why the water in the pot of tuber roses took inordinately long time to drain away. My Queen of Sheba vine had never at any point been a cause of concern. On days that I missed watering the plants for a day, when other plants drooped their leaves, Podranea brycei’s pinnate leaves stood fresh.
Although the pink presence of the flower permeated my consciousness, I never had to spend time near the vine, it found its way even when it was a young plant, it never was lost like my clittoria vine that hung helplessly sending out tendrils in search of support even when I dedicated an exclusive frame for it.
The jasmine vines needed a separate trellis, Indian spinach hounded other plants from its trellis, Madhu Malathi sulked and produced odourless flowers when I had it along with Kodi sampangi though the latter was companionable and not aggressive at all. For sometime Madhu Malathi had been sharing the trellis with Queen of Sheba vine, the latter kept its place to one side while Madhu Malathi has been spilling all over and like a spoilt child hadn’t cared to put out a single bunch of flower though all the Madhu Malathis in the city have filled the nights with their strong fragrance. But I always have a brood of these difficult and rebellious plants, I love them nonetheless.
The Queen was doing perfect when I left for Hosur, regally reigning from her corner of the garden. My domestic help watered the plants when I was away and my gardener came the Sunday that I was away and might have seen the plant dying. He left the plant after clearing away the dried leaves from the pot. He had dug and loosened the soil. I haven’t met him since, and I have seen the plant slowly dying away. I have no clue why it died. I will wait for him to do the honours for the queen. He will clear the pot and keep the pot away with the soil in memory of the plant. The corner that the vine occupied all these days in my mind will remain empty, losing a plant that has been part of my life is much like losing a very dear one.
Paata Shaala - The Lessons Learnt Under The Sky
I have to buy a couple of new plants for my garden. My rose bushes are not doing too well, the vethalai kodi (betel vine) wilted in the summer heat and the curry plant has contracted a strange disease, it puts out dull coloured berries that turn stone hard and there are fewer and fewer healthy looking leaves. So rose plants, vethalai creeper and a curry plant are a must buys.
I burnt my heart the first year that I created my terrace garden by growing many hibiscus plants, I had the red hibiscus – single-petalled and the muti-petalled, pink and white hibiscus, several hybrid varieties that put out yellow, orange and lilac coloured flowers. They were a treat for butterflies and the bees, but my gardener and I had to wage a perennial war against the two formidable pests that commonly assail hibiscus plants – aphids and white flies. We combated these insects by hosing water, scraping them away from the stem, pinching away the infected leaves, and spraying insecticide as the last option. Though the plants put out many flowers, they succumbed gradually over a period of one year, to the insects that attacked again and again. I had ten varieties of hibiscus plants and not one survived at the end of the year.
I mourned for my hibiscus plants for over a year and sought solace in my jasmines and ixoras that proved to be quite hardy, there was not a colourless, fragranceless day the whole of last year.
Now, a little over a year since the hibiscus debacle, I am emerging a confident gardener. Also, hardcore pragmatism towards gardening has rubbed off on me from my gardener. He has taught me the correct way to tend plants, protect them from pests, fight the pests that attack the plants and if they die, not to mourn. If he were to mourn for one year over every plant that died, he would have had to swap professions.
Now, do not mistake my gardener to be unfeeling. He fiercely protects and tends plants till they die on their own. He will stand by the dying plants, infuse energy and life into every fibre of their existence to make them live a day longer.
I know that when I buy a new curry plant, the old one will stay, pathetically sticking its arms and berries out. The plant will be tended till the day it dies. Similarly my entire lack luster rose plants will get to stay, pruned and tended carefully week after week as long as they live.
Also, when saplings of basil, sungu pushpam (Clittoria vine) and pasala keerai ( Indian spinach) germinate on their own in pots assigned to other plants, my gardener lets these little intruders stay on. An errant sungu pushpam creeper will cling its dainty tendril all over the thorny stems of the rose bush to merrily put out purple flowers. The rose bush gracefully looks on like a perfect host. And here my plant activist will indulge the camaraderie between the two plants.
Since my gardener does not have the heart to move out a single plant I have half a dozen basil plants, many pasala kodi creepers, four pots of chrysanthemums, innumerable clittoria vines being buddy with temple tree, oleander and ixora plants. I wonder what to do with these multiple plants, should I gift them away? Receiving plants as gifts is too much a responsibility, can’t put plants away as you would the books that are gifted to you. I care too much for my friends to burden them with such a responsibility. So all the plants get to stay and my over crowded terrace turns a veritable haven for butterflies, dragon flies, honey bees, bumble bees, squirrels, pigeons and crows.
I am growing a mustard plant, when I sowed the seeds they germinated like a rash, many in number. But only one has survived and is doing well. The plant is on the verge of putting out flowers, and as I wait for the first blossom of yellow flowers I visualize the golden hued mustard field where Kajol runs into Shah Rukh’s arms. And, I also long to cook sarson – ka - saag that I once ate with makai roti in Dhaaba Express. I have not confessed this fetish to my gardener and he for sure is seeing something else in my mustard plant. He holds his hands at the level of his hips and says that the plant will grow as tall as that. I look at the farmer from Dindigal in my gardener and wonder if he has plans of harvesting mustard seeds from my lone plant! There is no way that he is going to allow me to cut the leaves to prepare sarson-ke-saag whose recipe I have spent a good part of Sunday searching on the net.
