My Garden - Uma Gowrishankar

The more I gather details about my family history, the seven siblings of my mother’s grandmother and the seven siblings of my mother’s grand father, I find myself drawn deeper in the mire of relationships, loose ends that need to be routed to some path somewhere that I have to painstakingly unearth not through the easy means of calling up an uncle here, an aunt there. The uncovered  branches, the partial details, the contradictory references by two different people to certain details, the facts that had not been put to verification over all the years emerge tantalizingly before me as I hastily write down in my diary the questions that want to scale the gaps and crease out contradictions. It is then that I realize that I have to carry the darkness within me, write about them and accept that at no point in the chronicling will I have clarity over everything because I am dealing with history, history created through memory and partial remembering – partial because there are not people to narrate all the facets of the story, and partial also because we choose to forget certain things.

I presume there was not a dull moment in the lives of my mother and her siblings with the constant influx of brothers (?!), aunts and uncles into their Mylapore home that served as a hub for all those people coming from Mayavaram, Edakudi, Kumbakonam, Karur  and several other places in Thanjavur jilla where an uncle was a mirajdar,  an aunt had been taken as a bride from or where a cousin had been married into.

I can talk now, tell the story of my parents. I can write of the guilt I feel now of having been so absorbed in my own world that I never knew what my mother went through at the death of her parents, at the passing away of her younger brother and on losing another brother to schizophrenia. 

Looking back now, after nearly two decades, my mother then would have been as old as I am now. I pick my memory to reconstruct my mother’s life at that time.   I wade through the deep sea of childhood memories to cast light on the relationships in her life that mattered so much to her, at the losses that pained and paralysed her. 

Memories of my grandfather’s home concretize in my mind, the memories are that of a small and young girl. The memories of a twelve something girl is seen through the sensibility of the adult that I am now. This might be a step away from truth as my consciousness penetrates through a different time and this has made me in fact two different individuals – a child that saw and a woman that wants to immortalize her mother by fleshing her out in different relationships, in seeing her life crisscross several lives.

This exercise is also largely to exorcise the guilt I experience that I perceived my mother selfishly only in relation to me, in relation to my emotional wants and needs. The sun shone brightly on me, as a small and young girl,  through the  dappled leaves as I felt my mother’s care and love nourish me. But, the corner of my mind always registered her joys, her pains and her agonies. All this, I hope to establish by unearthing memories that I had not acknowledged before. 

So my exercise now is to hold the flashlight away from me, at all the people who were close to my mother, at my memory of the events that did not necessarily have to do with me, at the warm corners in my grandfather’s home where my mother grew and whose images I am certain she carried vividly till the day of her death.

My parijatham plant is recalcitrant, dragging its feet to put out the blossoms of the year. The plant reminds me so much of my son who is entering his teens; the plant too appears to be in young adulthood with its own character and preferences. The plant did not want to be huddled with marudhani on one side and the golden oleander on the other side. I did not want to pamper it, but somehow it was getting sullen and refused healthy growth. It was given its share of attention through the year from me and from my gardener, still the plant felt left behind.

One morning I found a flower, from far it appeared like a jasmine, but the translucent red stem reflected the sun. I knew it was a parijatham flower. I wondered where it came from, I knew my plant was sulking there was no way that it would put out such a beautiful flower, I looked up and saw that the flower had fallen from my neighbour’s garden. I groaned at the uncanny repetition of an incident from my childhood, except that I do not have my grandmother’s patience and compassion.

The next Sunday I waited for my gardener, told him about the flowers from my neighbour’s garden and expressed concern that the winter would pass by and our dear plant may forget that it can blossom. My gardener belongs to the breed that illustrious people like my grandmother come from. He asked me not to worry and told that there is still enough time left for the plant to bear flowers.

I wanted to take no chances, I told my gardener so. With his help I moved the plant to the centre of the terrace, moved the aloe vera and asparagus to keep it company. I put a tall bamboo stick in the middle of the pot, bunched the slouching branches, and fastened it to the stick.

My plant immediately cheered up, the leaves perked up; it enjoyed the attention it was receiving. It stood tall and beautiful. Within a few days my plant showed tells tale signs of budding, the shoots had a fuzz of life. The plant is in no hurry, it is taking its own time like my son who seems to be following his own clock. Being a worrying mother I try to urge him to take the world on, anxious that a winter will pass by. Nevertheless, like my parijatham plant in all its glory my son too will blossom. It is just that I have a world to learn from my grandmother and my gardener.

I visited the Raj Ghat with my husband and son on October 3rd. We handed over our slippers at the counter for safekeeping and paid one rupee for each pair. There were racks where you could leave your slippers without paying money. I observed that many opted to do that. Near the shoe rack, on a marble slab are inscribed Gandhi’s words. I read it aloud as my son listened. It said that every thought and action of ours should bring a change in the lives of the poorest of the poor. We went in and stood before the Samadhi. There were not too many visitors, there was a family standing before the samadhi and posing for a photograph, a group of men languidly stretched on the freshly watered lawn, a group of workers were dismantling the stage set for musicians and bhajan singers, rolls of white bedsheets and bolsters were heaped – the October sun on the white linen stung our eyes.

These were the many distractions that I had to tide over while I tried thinking what Gandhi means to me now and how I can take this man across to my 13 year old son. I did not want a history class with him. There were several one liners that I had directed at him during the times he got addicted to action movies and thought that power and strength were only of the physical kind. I used Mahatma Gandhi as an illustration of my point ‘True strength lies in forgiving and letting go’, ‘A great war can be won without raising your little finger’ - there were punch lines that I created and chanted like slogans when he got back home after boxing someone’s ears. I knew these were very simplistic and told myself several times that I would present the complexities involved in any struggle like the one Gandhi spearheaded, once my son grew up. So when my son got carried away with Sylvester Stallones and Arnold Scwhazeneggers I introduced him to Richard Attenborough’s movie ‘Gandhi’.

When I saw the film with my son I realised how much I had underestimated his power to critically reflect. When he saw the scene where Gandhi compels Kasturi ba to clean the toilet my son observed, “So Gandhi’s wife refused to support him.” He was upset that Kasturi ba had to be forced, Gandhi’s sudden burst of anger that was shown in the film went against his understanding of Gandhi. He at once saw that Gandhi was also coercing Kasturiba at a very subtle level by making her do what she loathed from the bottom of her heart. That made him uncomfortable about Gandhi.

On seeing the film he was surprised that freedom struggle involved so much blood shed despite the fact that Gandhi was involved in it. He had believed that Gandhi delivered the goods for Indians and that he carried on his frail shoulders the fate of our country. He learnt that Gandhi was not in total control and that there were forces that were beyond his control. And that non-violence and non cooperation did not always yield positive result.

As a sole historiographer of India’s struggle for freedom in my son’s home education process and in my keenness to use Gandhi for a personal agenda I had caused enough damage and have been unfair to true historical thinking.

I recollected that Mahatma Gandhi was like family to me when I was my son’s age. I grew up hearing how my grand father was a Gandhian, how my father’s cousin wore Khadi as a protest, my father waited as a young boy at the Kumbakonam railway station to see Gandhi who was travelling past the town. I was strongly advised to read Gandhi’s autobiography, large tracks of it was narrated as stories when I was barely a toddler – especially the episode of Gandhi refusing to take the help of his teacher to spell right as it amounted to cheating the School Inspector, and the story of Harish chandra came en route Gandhi. I grew to feel pride at the legacy of Nehru and Gandhi; my opinions of critical political events were influenced by this. I grew to believe that Hindu-Muslim conflict broke Gandhi and the Indo-China war ruined Nehru. A great sense of tragedy accompanied such knowledge. My understanding of colonial and post colonial history was embedded in the common sense discourse of the middle class Hindu milieu that I hail from. The trite history texts in fact remained independent of the rich narrative that I acquired otherwise. I did not have the tools to critically read these narratives till I came to college. The teenage phase of defiantly declaiming the past should not be accounted for.

At Raj Ghat I had read to my son Gandhi’s words with a voice filled with passion. As I stood on the lawns I told myself that I should not sell Gandhi, my son can find Gandhi on his own. So as we stepped out to wear our slippers I read the same words with a controlled voice and placed Gandhi for my son to analyse and understand in the way he deems fit. Two generations away, distanced by time and with the shadow cast by the specific historical period paling away, for an adolescent Gandhi is no more a name invoked by an anxious mother driving home a point about ahimsa. I have observed my son sift certain rudimentary tools to analyse historical events, I might offer him simple frames of class, caste and class to understand Gandhi. Any suggestions?