The Language of Plants Was Shaped By a Colonial Past

I bring home a hibiscus shrub in late spring. My hands still moist from breaking and turning the soil in my yard, I phone my mother, eager to tell her I found a red hibiscus—the kind sacred to Goddess Kali, the kind whose abundant blooms brightened hedges in Bengal—in a department store in Northern California.

“Hibiscus is trouble,” Ma says bluntly. Midges, aphids, and other juice-sucking bugs will come to ruin the whole garden.

“But didn’t you have red hibiscus in your garden?” I ask. The flowers are clearly etched in my memory.

“Only red? Blue, gray, white. Blue was a rare find,” she replies. She sounds so happy, and I am stung by the thought that Ma is not indifferent to the loveliness of hibiscus—but that she is skeptical of my ability to tackle an unavoidable gardening crisis.

Her doubts latch onto me. Over the next few weeks, I water and fertilize my hibiscus, monitor its green buds several times a day while working from home, in the hopes of seeing them bloom. But there is no blossom. Buds start to drop off like flies. Dispirited, I pick up and force open the leathery shells. A few are shot through with a tinge of red, but most are hollow. Phantom buds. If I tell Ma, she gets to shrug and say, “What did I tell you?” So I search online and land on Quora threads discussing cures for diseased plants. I spray my hibiscus with a homemade concoction of garlic, dish soap, and mineral oil. It makes the plant reek of urine. Nothing else changes. I heap dollops of coffee grounds at its roots. No result, but I stubbornly persist, thinking the correct remedy must be a Quora thread or blog away. My hibiscus will produce thick blooms like the plants in my mother’s garden once did.

*

In my childhood I used to say that if I were to look after a garden, I would struggle to keep the cacti alive. It was my answer to anyone who admired the plants crowding the front and back yards of our house at the remote edges of Berhampur, a mofussil in Bengal, India. The house was a government-subsidized quarter that came with my father’s job posting. Although it was constructed in the 1960s, the quarter looked a lot like the colonial-style bungalows of the British administrative staff in the Indian subcontinent.

Our front yard, as I remember it, was hemmed by jhau shrubs and annual flowers. A fuchsia bougainvillea vine arched over the tall swinging metal gate of the veranda facing the front garden. The bougainvillea rained vibrant dry petals on the porch steps almost year-round. An eclectic mix of seasonal vegetables and fruits like pumpkin, gourd, and banana grew in the back uthan, plus myriad flowering plants—hibiscus, jasmine, and a selection of roses, including an exquisite velvety black rose. With the first rains, the syrupy scent of flowers, corrupted slightly by the pungent mustard-oil-cake fertilizer that brought forth the blooms, wafted from the garden. While studying, I habitually chewed the back of my HB pencil and watched the undulations of a pink-and-white plumeria through the window. My mind wandered to other places. When I was small, my dream was to live in an apartment smack in the middle of a big city. Looking out, I wanted to see streets packed with the glowing faces of strangers, not leaves and flower heads. I didn’t care to keep track of the blooming cycles of the plants in our yard, though I was used to seeing them thrive and, when they flowered, I did not find them charmless.

In my childhood I used to say that if I were to look after a garden, I would struggle to keep the cacti alive.

Visitors to the quarter, generally my father’s colleagues or my sister’s or my school friends and their parents, asked about our gardener—“Who is your mali?” “Me,” my mother, Kornika, said enthusiastically. People looked at her in disbelief. “Surely you have help.” Some insinuated half jokingly that my father—who was overwhelmed with the on-site posting—or my sister and I must lend her a hand. We flaunted our incompetence to disabuse people of their beliefs. My father didn’t take credit for my mother’s garden either. He didn’t have to. If he named a plant, an onlooker assumed he was deeply involved with its life. Ma, who was always gleaming in bright-colored sarees, all neat pleats in front of guests, gave them a tight-lipped smile. But nervous energy tugged at me. The briefest twitch of Ma’s facial muscles, the slightest change in her tone, was enough to intimate an imbalance.

Cleaning up after visitors, Ma angrily cataloged all the things she did to keep the house and the garden in order. “Toiling single-handedly from dawn to dusk will make me spit blood someday while the rest of you will sit there, watching me, legs crossed like babus,” she used to say. Baba would jolt up to give her a hand, carry the teacup saucers from the table to the sink, wash them, all so he could placate her. Afterward he would say something banal like, “You garden because you like. How does it matter what others think?”

I found Ma’s impassioned listing of chores excessive. I worried that her knifelike tongue would someday nick my placid, sensitive Baba. My greater concern during Ma and Baba’s arguments were his feelings. Baba’s troubles were not legible to me, and I was moved by what I could not see. Ma, on the other hand, was a transparent sheet. She made no efforts to hide her wounds from her daughters, and that transparency nullified them.

Still, the mistrust of Ma’s labor, how casually it was dismissed, shadowed my thinking. I saw her cook every meal on a slow electric heater stove, boil tumblers of hard water for the family to drink, help her two daughters with lessons, and spend every minute she could eke out in between in the garden. If her feet were free to move, they would do so in the direction of the garden. A picture of her squatted in the backyard, bent over some sapling or herbage, her lean, dark arms sticking out of a saclike cotton maxi, is fresh in my mind, although years of standing in the kitchen, yard work, and a few falls have since ruptured a disk, dislocated joints. Ma can no longer squat without feeling pain. But the image I carry of her is from another time, before age and labor gnawed away parts of her.

In those days, the more elaborate her garden grew, the more elided was the strenuousness of her efforts. “Boudi must have a lot of free time to do all this,” my father’s colleagues remarked while playing rounds of cards or carrom in our front veranda. “How come your nails don’t chip, sister-in-law?” asked our neighbors, sizing up Ma.

Ma answered in proverbs. Je raadhe, shey chul o badhe. The one who cooks also braids her hair. I saw her contest others’ opinions of her. I heard her object to anyone questioning the legitimacy of her claims as a gardener, but all I could think was I do not want to become my mother.

*

Kornika had not grown up gardening. She didn’t have the space to plant anything much until her husband was transferred to Berhampore and she quit her career as a schoolteacher in Calcutta to join him there. Following her husband was what was expected of her. Her daughters—one of them a couple of years old, another a newborn—needed their father.

But Ma was unwilling to make the family the sole axis around which her days spun. Remaining in charge of the garden must have felt like pushing back against the expectations of gendered labor. And, away from her extended family, without the familiar social and professional circles of Calcutta, she learned to speak the language of plants. Gardening was how she expressed herself. This self-expression was, of course, made possible by the layout of our quarter, a shadow of the Raj-era bungalows. Her plights—her feelings of isolation and frustration—were also a distorted reflection of what the wives of colonial officers, the memsahibs, suffered in provincial outposts. The language of plants that I once assumed was entirely hers, like the language in which I write, was shaped by a fraught colonial past.

“I was terrified to step into that quarter,” Ma says, her voice rising dramatically, when I ask her about the early days in Berhampur. “The front yard where you saw jhau hedges and bougainvillea was overrun with wild grass. Your father put me up there and left for work, and I, with two toddlers, could not hazard opening the doors for fear a snake, rat, or some other creature might lurk out of the shrubs.”

One of my earliest memories is Ma crying for help after seeing a crocodile in our yard and a neighbor rushing in and clarifying that it is a species of snake that looks like a crocodile. “Nothing to be so scared of, Boudi,” said the neighbor. “Only its spit is poisonous.”

Berhampur was not exactly a dark and menacing hinterland. It was our quarter—its design and location—that accounted for Ma’s experiences. The state government had built residential compounds for the employees of the electricity office in an empty, fallow stretch along a national highway, on the cusp between the town of Berhampur and a rural area. At some distance from the government properties were the houses of old landowning families, farmers, and milkmen, sweeping paddy fields and poultry farms. The quarter’s setting, like its layout, was a muffled echo of the residential compounds the British built in provincial India for military officers, factory managers, and civil servants.

Colonial bungalows of the British were typically one-story spacious buildings with verandas on three sides and sprawling plots intended for gardening. They evoked English countryside cottages, but mud huts with thatched roofs sitting in expansive uthans in rural Bengal supplied the blueprint. The civil servants and other officers occupying the bungalows were almost exclusively recruits from the British middle class at first, and, as Miki Desai and Madhavi Desai note in their essay on India’s imperial bungalows, “The entire set-up reflected the sheer contrast of lifestyle of the natives and the rulers.” Whereas the other dwellings were clusters of detached huts opening into shared communal spaces, the bungalow was a more sequestered construction. Even when its yard was not fenced off, the surrounding community could not access the space.

The colonial bungalows with their gardens helped carve the identity of the Raj-era administrative class. The English wives of the colonial officers—the memsahibs—played a “preeminent role in the garden history of India,” notes Eugenia W. Herbert. In her study on gardening and botanical explorations critical to British imperialism, Herbert observes that “with a house full of servants, husbands on tour or shut up in their offices, and children sent home to attend school from an appallingly early age, time and loneliness often hung heavy upon them [the memsahibs] . . . Gardening offered some diversion for those able to brave the heat.” Hoping to replicate home in India, notwithstanding the antagonistic climate, the women sometimes planted English flowers.

However, their lawns and gardens were mostly sustained by the labor of the less privileged class and caste. In fact, Edward Hamilton Aitken’s Behind the Bungalow, a popular Victorian-era book, advises memsahibs to leave gardening to the “malees” because “when you betake yourself to music or painting, carpentry or gardening, as a means of getting through the day, you are sapping your mental constitution and shortening your life.” The word mali—the way I understood it as a Bengali-speaking child—means gardener, but there is a reference to caste buried in the language. Aitken, himself a civil servant in India, says the “malee” was “a necessary part of the machinery by which our exile life is made to be the graceful thing it often is.” Nonetheless, with the expansion of colonial civil service, as Herbert notes, planters came to be “ranked virtually on a par with untouchables.” Looking back on the incredulity with which Ma’s self-identification as mali was met, I can only wonder if it had anything to do with a confusion about her caste origin. Her last name, a prominent marker of caste, had been overwritten by my father’s during their marriage.

*

Our quarter had three medium-sized rooms but two long verandas and three separate plots waiting to be cultivated. The yards were a source of concern for my parents, economic migrants for generations, who knew they would leave the compound sooner or later. “Maintaining a yard like that is no joke—it didn’t make financial sense,” recalls my mother. The officer who lived in the quarter before us neglected the surroundings and didn’t mind dodging knee-length grass whenever he stepped down the porch.

The colonial bungalows with their gardens helped carve the identity of the Raj-era administrative class.

Ma’s tryst with gardening began with attempts to clear the yard. She asked the man who delivered milk in the mornings to find someone who could help mow the grass. The milkman himself did the job. The first plants that entered our house were adenium and aglaonema, gifts to the family from my father’s colleagues. Soon after, Ma started visiting local nurseries, picked up perennial and seasonal flowers that thrived in Berhampur’s hot, scratchy weather. There was no question of accessing gardening magazines. Her sources of knowledge were the nursery workers and nursery owners.

Over the years, gardening went from being something functional to an aesthetic project that consumed Ma. She grafted varieties of hibiscus and rose, producing erratic crossbreeds, and grew bonsai trees. She planted in raised beds as well as in terra-cotta pots that she hand painted with fabric-dye colors.

The sun brightened our front yard in winter where Ma grew dahlias and chrysanthemums. Childhood photographs show my sister and me in Ma’s lap, three of us against a thicket of flowers and shrubs growing in the front garden, our eyes lowered to avoid the sting of the sun. Only a corner of the vaster backyard made it into our family album.

My sister and I cheekily called the garden Ma’s “obsession” since we imagined that the plants competed with us for her care. When we played in the paved section of the backyard, Ma warned us not to hurt the plants. She cooked up buckets of diluted mustard-oil-cake fertilizer and stocked cow dung manure there. If we complained of the stench, she asked us to look forward to flowers scenting the air in the coming months.

Ma was regularly at war with bands of monkeys, and she dragged my sister and me into the fight. On hot afternoons when our surroundings hushed and all we heard was the ticking of the Ajanta wall clock, if the old jamun and mango trees in the neighborhood started to shake, we knew black-footed monkeys were on their way. Ma hooted for them to leave: Hai, hai, hai. My sister and I banged the dining table from the safety of a veranda. But the monkeys were braver than us. They coolly yanked the foliage and mauled the flowers before stripping plants of produce. Resting atop our yard’s boundary wall, they took their time peeling and eating bananas, grooming each other. Ma ran out after they were gone and returned rapt in quiet fury, as though she, not her plants, had been assaulted. It alarmed us to see her on the verge of breaking. I resented the knowledge that she was as vulnerable as her plants.

There was a period when Ma woke up at daybreak to scoot away the goats that bit off flowers on the way to their grazing grounds. She caught “flower thieves” every now and then, people from the neighborhood who tore out all the hibiscus and marigold within their reach to use in household pujas without asking her. While arranging books in our backpacks for school, Ma complained about sighting yet another flower thief—so-and-so house’s son or father. I met my sister’s eyes, and we shook our heads sagely. We knew Ma would ask Baba to speak to the neighbors so they stopped stealing flowers, and Baba would throw his hands up. His impassivity would anger Ma.

“Is she mad or what?!” I exclaimed whenever a girl’s actions defied my understanding. It was a shorthand in our school parlance for the ridiculous, and that was how I saw Ma every time she spoke as though hostile forces surrounded her garden on all four sides. I had not yet known the kind of horrible loneliness that makes you feel cornered.

*

When I move to California for work, I am the same age my mother was when she quit her job to go to Berhampur. A colleague gifts me an orchid and I prop it up on a windowsill, water it regularly, but, as if aware of my apathy, the plant dies. “Did you touch the soil to check the moisture level before watering?” Ma asks on FaceTime. I didn’t. “But Sacramento is so hot and dry,” I tell her. “Oh, then, see what works for you,” she replies.

It is not until my social world shrinks during the pandemic and traveling home to India starts to feel like an impossibility that I grab a snake plant and a peace lily, both labeled “hardy,” from the racks at Ikea. I begin following Instagram pages and YouTube channels dedicated to home gardens.

“I knew you couldn’t kill a snake plant even if you tried,” my mother says with a laugh when I tell her how the plant has shot up a new leaf. Maybe it is the resilience of my impulse purchases or my attention to fundamentals like soil quality and moisture that make the plants survive. I go on to buy white and red cyclamen, a bright orange bromeliad, and cacti. A few months in, I consider growing flowers outdoors. I read blogs on garden design. A Mediterranean-style garden is a good fit for California weather, but, as it turns out, the only garden that appeals to me is the one that lives in my memory. Ma’s whims and instincts are my blueprint. When I spot a bougainvillea in a nursery, I cannot resist buying it. I get myself roses, jasmine, and hibiscus.

Planting familiar herbage in an unfamiliar place—that’s what the memsahibs did. Although I get my plants off the racks, don’t have the wherewithal or the naivete to introduce foreign species across oceans, I detect likeness in the behaviors of the homesick.

*

My hibiscus plant sheds buds until I consult Ma. She recommends I bring the plant to a shaded area and spray it with neem oil. “Send photo,” she texts when I tell her the plant has flowered. My father sees images of my garden and says, “You have become your mother’s daughter. What will you do once work-from-home ends?” My sister comments, “Don’t buy any more plants.”

When we left Berhampur, Ma knew she would never again have such a spacious yard. She was able to load only a few potted plants in the gaps between furniture in the moving truck. Some years later, we were visiting Berhampur and I passed by what used to be our home. Ma’s plants had either been cut off or simply died. The quarter had been repurposed into an office. The windows from which I stared at the plumeria, windows of my sister’s and my play den, were now counters through which customers could pay electric bills. Only the hardy bougainvillea lived on, its branches swooping down the bureaucratic signage at the entrance, heavy with fuchsia bracts, a shock of colors.

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