ISSUE 44

Venkat nudged his granddaughter in her sleep with his small wicker basket. Though dawn had not yet broken, even through her somnolence, Ritu surmised that it was important to him that she wake up. He shuffled slowly, leaning on a walking stick. His left leg was elephantised, the legacy of an era where hardiness and your mother’s prayers decided what you survived since no one had access to medicines anyway. In the mornings, it still ached, and he had taken to rambling through the house for relief. In the time she took to rub her eyes and join him, he was on the porch. He stood there for a moment, staring into the dark. She wondered if he was confused and was about to put her hand on his elbow to lead him gently back inside with the condescension that only grandchildren can righteously offer, when he gesticulated with his walking stick towards a gnarled tree in the middle of the garden.

Ritu peered through the veil of sleep in her eyes and gasped. Illuminated by the arc of the streetlight, the parijat’s bonsai-like canopy was glistening with dew-laden orange stemmed white flowers, many of them spilling over to form a feathery carpet on the ground. Just behind it was a precipitation of deep red from the hibiscus. Frangipani blanketed the earth near the front gate and dainty moringa blossoms dotted the far corner like a powdery summer snowfall.

Venkat paused to allow her to take it in and then extended his basket to her.

‘I woke you because my leg is bad today. I can’t bend,’ he whispered.

Ritu nodded.

‘Don’t pluck any, only gather the ones on the ground. They are perfectly good before they are trampled upon.’

Ritu felt a twinge of compassion for her grandfather who irritated her when he bumped into things as he shuffled about, waking her before she would have liked. She looked up at him and smiled, patting him on the arm, taking his little wicker basket from him.

Ritu spent the pre-dawn hour scooping up handfuls of fallen blossoms until the light broke over the terraces of the cityscape. She sat on her haunches on the margin of packed earth that served as their playground, pocked with scuff marks from badminton and hand-scooped craters for their marbles. She scooted around the broad flanks of the tree trunks normally reserved for hide and seek. When she was done, she handed the overflowing basket to her grandfather, who had been standing leaning on his cane, watching her, pointing out blossoms she had missed here and there. He thanked her by ruffling her hair and shuffled off to sprinkle them upon his array of gods. They would be as delighted as he was at the bounty this morning.

Ritu’s sleep had evaporated like the dew by now, so she sat back on the porch watching until the trickle of the newly-awakened turned into a monstrous throng, trampling what was left of the arboreal offering. Ritu noted the various kinds of flower crushers like a witness memorising their faces for a line up: the milkmen, the newspaper delivery boy, the garbage man, other grandparents on their morning walks, uncles on their runs, mothers urging dawdling school children along, office goers on their sprint for the commute, domestic help arriving – cleaning boys, cooks, maids and drivers. This is where her grandmother found her when she came around the compound to find out why Ritu’s bed was empty.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought for once you had gone for a morning walk. What are you doing here?’

Ritu gesticulated towards the street.

‘Just.’

‘How long have you been awake?’

Ritu shrugged.

Grandmother raised her eyebrows in that way that denoted something significant had been said, but that she wasn’t going to ask any questions.

‘Come, come have a cup of tea,’ she said, turning to go back into the house.

Venkat discovered that his basket became fuller faster with the help of an apprentice blossom picker, so he began to make it somewhat of a morning ritual. Thankfully, he restricted the venture to the weekends, allowing Ritu her lie in on school days that she was already reluctant to trudge through.

They lived in a six-hundred-square-foot studio apartment on the ground floor located at the back of an ancient walk up on one of the older by-lanes of the city. In an increasingly vertical city, Venkat had rare access to the ground. When he had first moved here, he didn’t have much choice, taking a one-room tenement that was the most affordable. So, he was glad because there was a small corner of it that he could turn into the lush village he had left behind. When he stepped off the porch, his toes touched the earth, except in the rains when the earth rose and touched him back in a surge of filthy flood water. That was just once a year so it was a small price to pay, to his mind, and he tried to perambulate the building barefoot as often as he could. Ritu could never understand this, being an immovable earth girl herself, wanting to know the land would remain firm where she had last left it, unwilling to be conversant with a ground that constantly threatened to move beneath her feet. Yet, the more she hung out with him, the more she saw where he came from. She watched him go hither and thither with a glee that quite escaped him during the long, dull hours of the day, when he was submissive to the will of wife and sons and helpers in a domain that he seemed to have bequeathed in his retirement to the purposeful and agile.

A compound wall cordoned off the corner plot rendering it free of comings and goings. A lesser man would have taken advantage of weak tenancy laws and expanded the house with an encroaching portico, adding a sunroom. It certainly would have made their lives easier. Ritu and her grandmother currently slept on mattresses on the floor, Venkat’s two sons slept in the kitchen, and he took the one divan in the living room.

Ritu had come to live with them because her parents, Venkat’s daughter and her husband, thought it would be easier for her to walk to a local school while they sorted out their messy living and income arrangements. They had recently made an unplanned repatriation back to the country. Their son was in boarding school and they needed to focus on the toddler, who was a handful. Ritu, uprooted from a completely different culture, felt interrupted. Venkat could see her struggling, to make friends, normalise her accent, wear a uniform, settle into the unfamiliar noise of her classroom. Ritu’s mind remained as unsettled as the unpacked boxes that now occupied her parents, but that detail, Venkat saw, escaped them.

As Venkat watched her, it brought back memories of his own migration, now over half a century ago, from the village where he had been local heavyweight champion in the kushti pits. He had been somewhat of a hero to all the girls around and was getting quite a reputation. His worried parents had bundled him off with his elder brother to focus on less feisty things. The only baggage Venkat had packed had been his exercise kit, the nal, gar nal, gada and mugdar, weights made of blocks of wood and stone that he swung over his shoulder and lifted as he did squats to firm up his muscles. While passing the accountancy exams, through marriage, the birth of his children, retirement, he clung to his routine. After his stroke, he had been unable to so much as punch a sandbag. Venkat had painstakingly rebuilt his stamina with surya namaskars, of which he now managed a slow 108 in the early part of every day on the terrace, taking up to six hours to complete them, ignoring the housewives who would come to gossip as they dried their karuvadam and saris, or the children playing catch in circles around him. He was still not his old self, probably never would be, but he satisfied himself that his body hadn’t bested him yet.

Now a patriarch, the memories of wrestling, of crowds at the pit, of the adrenaline rush of victory and ambition seemed of another life. They had abruptly fallen away when he had been set on that train to find an unknown future that he didn’t want. He had seethed within, a bundle of rage, confusion, sorrow, and fear trying to show that he didn’t care. He saw all of that in Ritu now. He didn’t think he could hand her his weights, still occupying prized space behind the cupboard, but he could hand her the next best thing: friendship, that he hadn’t realised soothed him, or that he had missed, until the fierce monsoon had broken over his head. He had rushed about, then, trying to find a suitably large canopy to shelter under – it had been instinct to duck under the nearest tree – but here, he couldn’t find one. There were only spindly poles and eaves on gated buildings. He stood under one and watched the black coated men around him open their sombre black umbrellas under a bleak grey sky. As he stood there for the better part of the hour waiting for the torrential downpour to subside, he realised that these city folks, they locked their trees safely away in parks, neatly labelled them and paid money to bring their children to gawk at them on Sundays. He noticed the numbers on each tree and marvelled that they could be counted at all. ‘Hey, you, tree number 2223!’ he imagined himself saying to the tamarind in his father’s backyard. He had been in equal parts horrified and filled with mirth and laughed uproariously to himself as he walked home in the incessant downpour. It was then that he vowed to bring it all, fruit, seed, berry, sap, leaf, fragrance, shade, and wood, to imbed across the city, interlopers to the registry of trees.

The trees around him – those in their compounds, on their raintree and areca palm-lined lanes, or the laburnum and bauhinia, the silk cotton, and the Indian coral of the broader city – had served as markers of familiarity, fragments of home, when everything around him was so unfamiliar. He had uprooted saplings, gently wrapped their roots with some earth from home in a damp cloth and placed them in a woven plastic basket among the pickles and the masalas, murukkus and barfis. The trips home were expensive and arduous and therefore infrequent. They involved balancing precariously on top of piled up luggage in the general compartment with forty other people jostling for breathing room. Venkat would fall asleep clutching the bag of saplings until his stop arrived. Unable to make more than a trip or two home a year, Venkat would eagerly jam up to ten saplings into the bag. Some of them, weary of the heat, succumbed to the journey. Others suffocated in alien soil. A few took to their new homes but gave up to pollution or disease. For every set of ten that he imported, one or two survived. In the city, he would cradle the sapling carefully with him on his lap in a BEST bus, hopping off when he found a street that looked like it could do with some shade. He went at it with a manic zeal, determined to convert the city into his village, transplanting it sapling by sapling, feeling a little more at home as he went from street to street where one of his many children now lived, or had died. The city was taking shape in a map of lamina and frond. Now, Venkat, so alienated, had found kinship, camaraderie, and shelter. Those he nourished, nourished him in return. The secret city within the city, Venkat had jangled the keys to his paradise in his pocket. He thought it was time now that his granddaughter should have them.

At first, Ritu surrendered her weekend mornings begrudgingly but soon, the blossom picking gave her cause to wake up. They had to communicate without waking others and crafted a nebulous language that was a clumsy mix of eye contact, gestures, fragments of words, and whispers. Bud by bud, Venkat opened her up to an uprootedness of his own and their connectedness to the wider world without. He muttered the names of leaves and seeds at her. She knew the gulmohar by its pod long before its head burst into flame. She smelled the peak of summer by the burst of the crepe myrtle and watched for the latak chandani of spring. When she spotted a silk cotton tree that was not planted in a park, tucked away in a small space between a lamppost and a shop, she knew to thank her grandfather for it. She saw cobblers tie their tents to the base of fortuitous Indian corals and cassias. In the rain, she ducked under the bountiful rain trees lining roads that she imagined were once barren. She began to take bus rides to nowhere in particular, discovering anew, lanes and gullies, parks, and avenues, lush and verdant, pennons of a village by the banks of the Kaveri here by the shores of the Arabian sea.

Ritu moved on through high school, discovered boys, religion, fashion, went back home to live with her parents, was admitted to boarding school, then went away to college in America. She fell in love, married, had children, and returned only on those brief summer vacations which were filled with too many relatives and too much politesse. Venkat was left guarding the protectorate of blossoms that was falling every day to the real-estate lobby and the greed of municipal corporators. Walk ups were sold for phenomenal prices to architects that promised to provide space for two cars where previously one tree stood. As trunks were felled around him, Venkat set into a decline that merged the hope of a long-gone home with the futility of this receding life. His leg hurt him more and more and he could not be trusted to wander on his own. He took to sitting on his porch waving his walking stick and shouting expletives at thieves who had come to steal his jamun, his mango, his jackfruit, his drumstick. All coaxing failed to get him indoors. He believed the thieves would return the moment his back was turned, and he was right. Shortly after the watchman of the arboretum passed, the building was signed over to developers. They kept one or two of the twenty-three trees within the compound. As the builder said, you can always buy your papayas and mangos at the market, no?

The bus broke down on the highway that edged past the locality her grandfather once used to live in. Ritu was on vacation with her oldest, now a disgruntled teenager herself, sulky, ill-mannered, closed off, head buried in her phone, hard to get through to. They were on their way back from visiting an aunt who lived at the other end of town. Uncles had died, family had disintegrated with time and multiple migrations, friends had moved away, ties had become obsolete. Courtesy maintained a few tenuous relationships. As the passengers piled out of the bus, the clouds split in a thunderous crack. Flimsy umbrellas doubled up against the wind. Ritu grabbed her daughter’s hand and made a dash for the nearest green awning. She dived under a giant pink trumpet, encircled by its protective dry orbit. A familiarity of feeling long dormant crept up in her. She looked up at the boughs, waving in the breeze, and sensed a gently mocking mirth, a crinkled gaze, a benign presence she had let slip from memory. She put out her hand and felt the beating heart beneath its rough, worn casing. She looked at her daughter, caught her eye, and smiled.

‘How would you like in on a secret project when we get back?’ Ritu asked.

Her daughter, dodging droplets, looked mystified, but nodded. They held hands and waited for the storm to pass.

Here and there, scattered somewhere within the bark and bloom of the crusted-over metropolis, the keeper of the city within the city lived on.