TinyLetter of the Month: Rohin Guha, “Gardening During Wartime”

Every month, Catapult features a TinyLetter writer, chats with them about their newsletter, and republishes one of their recent issues. This month we are featuring Rohin Guha, author of the TinyLetter Dispatches from Kulfi Island. He is a writer based in the suburbs of Detroit, currently hard at work on a book that “may or may not ever see the light of day,” and has written many wonderful essays including this one. He can usually be found tending his plants.

*

“Gardening During Wartime”

I don’t care for the pits, not usually. There is no romance in peeling the fruit of the date off the stone or having to spit it out in mid-chew. So after a very brief while, I amassed a few pits and I wrapped them in a damp paper towel and placed it all in a sealed Ziploc bag. Taking care to replace the paper towel when it got a little moldy, I found that over a month and a half later, half the pits had spawned roots and a few weeks after that, I placed one of them deep in the same planter that now harbors the avocado plant that I cultivated from a pit a couple years ago.

~

Trees are unicorns in New York City. Greenery, in general, is rare. In an earlier era in my life, I would find anything in my house—extra garlic bulbs, sprouting ginger roots—and plonk it down in soil. If it looked like it could root, I didn’t care what it was. I’d put it in a planter and water it. It was a time of my life where control was fleeting: I was spending more money to exist in New York than I was making; a culture of rejection at every level; perhaps I was just too much of a soft Midwesterner after all. I used to cry a whole lot in those days. I write about this a lot. Sometimes to the point where maybe I think about writing about something else, but I write about it because I want to remind myself that there was a moment that the only garden of peace I could cultivate were in tiny bowls and planters.

Not that life is all about happily ever afters wrapped in tiny pretty bows, but that garden is all around me. It was an era that wore me down to a nub, but growing things, anything, balanced me out.

~

I don’t know much about missiles. Or bombs. I don’t get drones either. I do get this idea of living and life, however. I do get that people probably don't like me and that’s okay; I do get that I probably don’t like people and that’s okay. I do get that our dislike of one another does not preclude our shared entitlement to the basic decencies of life: Air, food, health, happiness. God, is this too rose-colored?

I write a lot about the deer in my background. Sometimes they squat for a poop or they eat my mom’s irises and then I have to tap on the glass and then our eyes meet. I think they were snacking on daffodils from somewhere nearby recently and they've gone around the neighborhood—my backyard included—pooping. Now there are daffodils everywhere.

There’s that avocado plant in my bathroom: It spawned from a single pit from an avocado I ate one day two and a half years ago and now it’s three feet tall. All because I took a chance on it.

When I look at the way people talk about war—the people who have no material interest in war beyond the currency it generates for their preferred politician, I don’t understand how they compartmentalize the blasting of smithereens of life. Not human life, but all of it. The wildlife, the plants. Ecosystems change entirely through these methods of carnage. Plants and wildlife are flattened out; surviving humans are forced to construct a new way of living with the world around them nothing more than cinders. You can’t really rebuild rubbished-out forests, farms, and gardens with such ease.

“Well, we can’t really do anything about it,” is a tired incantation. We say it like a spell. We say it almost to console ourselves that we don’t need to do anything about it. When we say it, we are absolving ourselves. I can’t really do anything about the missile strikes; I’m off the hook!

~

Gardening is faithmaking when solidarity seems elusive—

Straight people are morbid to me in ways: Straight people are morbid to me in the ways that they can make a big deal about their babies on Facebook and remain quiet, unoutraged about the detainment and execution of their queer childless brothers and sisters around the world. A watchword that flies like hummingbirds in the face of an observation like this: “Of course I’m angry, but I can’t be angry about everything all the time!”

I’m off the hook!

White people are morbid to me in ways: White people are morbid to me in the ways that they can make a big deal about their babies on Facebook and remain quiet, unoutraged about the detainment and execution of their brown brothers and sisters around the world. A watchword that flies like hummingbirds in the face of an observation like this: “Of course I’m angry, but I can’t be angry about everything all the time!”

I’m off the hook!

Wealthy people are morbid to me in ways: Wealthy people are morbid to me in the ways that they can make a big deal about their babies on Facebook and remain quiet, unoutraged about the detainment and execution of their poorer brothers and sisters around the world. A watchword that flies like hummingbirds in the face of an observation like this: “Of course I’m angry, but I can’t be angry about everything all the time!”

I’m off the hook!

Gardening is faithmaking when solidarity seems elusive: Add water. Add light. Kill pests. Sing songs to your plants. Witness its evolution. There is no sturdier pact.

~

It does not escape me that while I am putting tiny thumb-sized succulents into wine glasses, there are people thousands of miles away who are attempting some semblance of a stable life—and that my passive participation in the world and economy around me comes at the cost of their elusive stability.

I don’t know how to provide that stability to them, yet.

I am finding that maintaining stability for myself has become a very aggressive pursuit these days. The confinement of a tiny succulent to the surface area provided by a wine glass feels manageable. It is an environment in which I can tend to these living things, increase their odds of flourishing. There is a proportional relationship between the increase surface area needed by a living thing and the relative decrease in control over that living thing's chances of survival one can manage.

I admire trees for how much they withstand, their resilience and ability to spread roots out forever; they don’t need caretakers, although people who give enough of a shit not to decimate entire forests once in a while would be nice!

~

I raise plants because I am selfish. Plants are living clocks, their evolution marking the passage of time. Even if the man-made world is falling into irreparable decay and there’s nobody left to trust, a pair of cheap wine glasses with succulents promise a reason to keep persevering.

You can make a promise with plants. I made a promise to an avocado pit so many years ago: “We’re in this together, bub.” Each you trim a little off the top of an avocado plant, there are nodes further down on the plant that get a little more active. Once in a while these nodes will spawn a new stem—and the rest of the plant will grow a little hardier.

“If you give us water and light, we’ll give you a reason to keep fighting.”

It took nearly three months, but one of those date pits finally spawned a plant; it stands at a mere three inches tall, but continues growing mightily. Another promise fulfilled. Did I mention there are lemon seeds I am now cultivating?

Plants are everywhere in the world and sympathetic to the well-being of all humans; plants won’t lie.

*

A chat with Rohin Guha:

When did you start writing a TinyLetter, and why? What do you especially like about the format?

I started back in late 2015. I had parted ways with a job and found that I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands as I planned my next full-time endeavor. I wanted to establish a practice of sending out one letter a day to anyone who would read it, each day leading up to my birthday that December. It was ambitious, but I did like that I wasn’t beholden to editors attempting to flatten my voice or shoehorn my aesthetic—especially editors who hadn’t taken a moment to learn about my voice as a writer.

I like the opt-in nature of the readership as well: The world of personal essays is overrun by a readership that often skims the headline and maybe the first graf. It’s a readership that often hastily jumps to social media to produce hot takes in a bid to be the first to have an counterargument—even if a counterargument is addressed in the original essay.

The opt-in readership allows folks who have a practice of digesting the entirety of these works to steep with the material—and then to actually reach out to you, to commiserate, to start a conversation. There are topics I’ve covered in this subscription-only format I wouldn’t really shop around to larger publications. While my readership is small with my TinyLetter, it’s an awesome one.

How do you think writing a regular newsletter helps your writing (or does it)?

It holds me accountable to keep sprucing up the architecture of my language—that is, how do I communicate ideas to people who care enough to read without becoming tedious or one-note? How do I do it in a way where this exercise is not only valuable for me, but ends up being worth my readers’ while as well? Beyond that, how do I do it in a way where I can keep playing with words, sentence structures, ideas—all without being (too) gratuitous?

What are some of your favorite TinyLetters?

“Grief Bacon” by Helena Fitzgerald and “Nota Bene” by Nandini Balial.

*

Know of a TinyLetter we should read and feature on Catapult Community? Leave a note in the comments!

• 0