Chapter 9: Anand Ka Bagicha (Anand's Garden)

Anand Deshmukh was seventy-eight years old, and his knees were a disaster, and his allotment in Kothrud was the only place in the world where the disaster didn't matter.

The allotment — though "allotment" was too English a word for what it was; it was a community garden, a patch of red Deccan soil behind the Kothrud bus stop that had been divided into plots by the housing society in 1987 and had been tended by the same six families since, with occasional additions and subtractions as people moved, died, or lost interest — was Anand's religion. Not literally, because literally his religion was the Vitthal temple in Sadashiv Peth where he went every Thursday morning. But the garden was where he practiced the thing that religion promised and rarely delivered: the tangible evidence of patience rewarded. You plant a seed. You water it. You wait. Something grows. No faith required. Just soil, sun, time.

He was on his knees — the disaster knees, the knees that his wife Esha said would be the death of him and that his doctor said needed replacement and that Anand said were fine, just fine, in the particular tone of a seventy-eight-year-old Marathi man who has decided that his body is a democracy and his knees do not get a vote — pulling weeds from the base of the tomato plants when the gate opened and his former son-in-law walked in.

"Chirag," Anand said, not looking up. He'd been expecting this. Nandini had called yesterday — the conversation had been brief, the way conversations between Nandini and her father were always brief, because they communicated in a shorthand that had been developed over fifty-three years and required approximately one-tenth the words that normal people needed.

The conversation had been: "Baba, Chirag wants to come to the garden." And Anand had said: "Send him." And that was it.

Chirag stood at the gate. He was wearing clothes that Nandini must have given him — old clothes, gardening clothes, a faded kurta and track pants that looked like they'd been purchased in 2003 and stored in a cupboard for exactly this eventuality. He was holding a pair of gardening gloves. He looked — uncertain. The kind of uncertain that Anand hadn't seen on Chirag Joshi's face in thirty years, because Chirag Joshi had spent thirty years being the most certain man in every room, and the certainty had been his weapon and his shield and his disguise.

"Come in," Anand said. "Take the row by the brinjals. The weeds are winning."

Chirag came in. Knelt down. Started pulling weeds. Badly. The pulling was too aggressive — he was yanking rather than pulling, disturbing the roots of the brinjals in the process, treating the weeds like enemies to be conquered rather than inconveniences to be managed.

"Gently," Anand said. "They're weeds, not opponents. You don't defeat them. You remove them. There's a difference."

Chirag adjusted. The pulling became softer. The soil stopped flying. The brinjals stopped shaking. And for twenty minutes, the two men — the father-in-law who had once loved Chirag and then hated him and had now arrived at a place that was neither love nor hate but something more honest than both — weeded in silence.

The garden was beautiful. Not beautiful in the way that planned gardens are beautiful — not landscaped, not designed, not the product of someone's aesthetic vision. Beautiful in the way that working gardens are beautiful: messy, abundant, alive. Tomatoes on bamboo stakes. Brinjals — the small purple ones, the kind that Maharashtra specialises in. Methi, still green despite the November chill. Coriander, which grew whether you wanted it to or not and was therefore, in Anand's opinion, the most reliable crop in the world. And marigolds — orange marigolds along every border, the flowers that Indian gardens grow not for beauty but for function, because marigolds keep pests away, and beauty is a side effect.

"I used to garden," Chirag said. "When I was a boy. In Satara. My grandfather had a plot."

"I remember. You told me. When you were courting Nandini."

"Did I?"

"You told me many things when you were courting Nandini. You were very eager to impress."

"Was I?"

"You told me you liked poetry, which was a lie. You told me you cooked, which was a bigger lie. And you told me you gardened, which may or may not have been true but which I chose to believe because a man who gardens has at least some capacity for patience, and patience was the one quality I wanted for my daughter."

The silence that followed was the silence of two men processing a history that is too long and too complicated for a single conversation in a garden.

"I wasn't patient," Chirag said.

"No."

"I was — many things. But not patient."

"No."

"I hurt your daughter."

Anand sat back on his heels. His knees screamed — the particular scream of joints that have been in the same position for too long and are registering their complaint with the authority of body parts that have been ignored for a decade. He looked at Chirag. Really looked. Not the glance of a father-in-law at a former son-in-law, but the look of an old man at a younger man who is, finally, telling the truth.

"You did," Anand said. "And she survived. And she built a life. And she is, right now, the strongest person in this family, which is saying something because Esha once carried a sofa up two flights of stairs by herself and refused help because she said the sofa knew where it was going."

Chirag almost smiled. Almost.

"The question," Anand said, returning to the weeds, "is not whether you hurt her. The question is what you're going to do about it now."

"I'm seeing a therapist."

"Good."

"I've stopped drinking."

"Better."

"I'm reading — there are letters. From Ujwala. My first wife."

Anand's hands paused in the soil. He knew about Ujwala — everyone in the family knew about Ujwala, the way everyone in Indian families knows about the things that are never discussed: fully, completely, and in the corridors outside the rooms where the discussions aren't happening.

"Letters."

"She wrote them. Before she died. To a relative. They describe — they describe what I was. What I did."

"And you're reading them."

"One at a time. With the therapist."

Anand was quiet for a long time. He pulled a weed — slowly, carefully, the way he'd told Chirag to pull them. The weed came out cleanly, roots intact, the soil closing over the space it left behind.

"My father was a difficult man," Anand said. "He drank. He shouted. He made my mother small. I watched it, as a boy, and I swore I would be different. And I was different. I was gentle with Esha. I was patient with Nandini. But the thing I learned — the thing it took me sixty years to learn — is that being different from your father is not the same as being good. It's just the absence of bad. And the absence of bad is not goodness. Goodness is something you build. Actively. Daily. Like a garden."

He gestured at the plot — the tomatoes, the brinjals, the coriander, the marigolds. "This garden doesn't grow because I'm not destroying it. It grows because I'm tending it. Every day. Pulling the weeds. Watering. Being present. That's what goodness is. Not the absence of cruelty. The presence of care."

Chirag looked at the garden. Looked at the soil on his hands. Looked at the brinjals that were still standing because he'd learned, in twenty minutes, to pull weeds gently.

"I don't know how," he said. "To tend. To be present. I know how to control. I know how to manage. I know how to make things happen the way I want them to happen. But tending — the daily, patient, no-result-guaranteed tending — I don't know how to do that."

"You're doing it now."

"Pulling weeds?"

"Pulling weeds is tending. Sitting in a therapist's chair is tending. Reading your dead wife's letters is tending. You're learning. Late — very late — but learning."

They worked for another hour. The sun moved across the garden — the low November sun that gave more light than warmth, the sun that made shadows long and colours deep. Anand showed Chirag how to stake the tomatoes — looping the string loosely, giving the plant room to grow, supporting without constricting. He showed him how to check the methi for yellowing leaves — a sign of too much water, or not enough, and the diagnosis required looking, really looking, not assuming you knew.

"Nandini looks like you," Chirag said, at some point. "When she's gardening. She has the same — the same attention."

"She got that from her mother."

"I think she got it from both of you."

Anand stood up. His knees made a sound that was either mechanical failure or a strongly worded letter of resignation. He steadied himself on the bamboo stake. Looked at the garden. Looked at Chirag.

"Come back next week," he said. "The coriander needs harvesting and my knees aren't getting any younger."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm not sure about anything, Chirag. Except that gardens need tending and you need something to tend. So come back."

*

He came back. Every week. Tuesday mornings, after his therapy appointment and before lunch at Nandini's. The routine established itself with the quiet inevitability of a habit that serves a purpose — drive to Kothrud (auto, because Nandini still didn't trust him to drive and he'd stopped arguing because the arguing took more energy than the agreeing), walk to the garden, kneel in the soil, pull weeds, stake plants, harvest whatever was ready, talk to Anand or not talk to Anand, depending on whether the morning's therapy had left him emptied or filled.

They talked about the letters. Not all of them — not the worst ones, not the ones that Chirag was still processing with Dr. Kulkarni — but the edges. The parts where Ujwala had written about the garden at Bhor, the river, the peacocks. The parts that were beautiful, that reminded Chirag that the woman he'd married had been a person who noticed beauty, and that the fact that she'd stopped noticing — that the letters moved from descriptions of peacocks to descriptions of silence, from beauty to absence — was the measure of what he'd done.

"She liked marigolds," Chirag said one Tuesday, apropos of nothing.

"Most people do."

"She grew them on the balcony. In the flat. Little pots. I — I told her once that the pots were messy. That the soil got on the floor. She moved them inside, to the windowsill. Then I said they were blocking the light. She put them on the fire escape. Then the building society complained. So she threw them away."

He was staring at the marigolds in Anand's garden. The orange was vivid — almost aggressive, the particular orange that marigolds produce, the colour of temples and weddings and the specific Indian joy that has no English equivalent.

"She threw them away," he repeated. "Because I made it impossible for her to keep them. And I told myself it was about the soil and the light and the building society. But it wasn't. It was about control. I couldn't control the marigolds, so I made sure she couldn't have them."

Anand pulled a weed. Said nothing. Sometimes, in a garden, saying nothing is the most generous thing you can do.

"I want to grow marigolds," Chirag said. "Here. In your garden. If you'll let me."

"There are seeds in the shed. Orange or yellow?"

"Orange."

"Good choice. Plant them along the south border. They'll get the most sun there."

Chirag planted marigolds. On his knees in the Kothrud soil, with Anand's seeds and Anand's trowel and the November sun on his back, the man who had once made his first wife throw away her flowers planted new ones. Not for Ujwala — you cannot garden for the dead. But in memory. In acknowledgment. In the particular penance of a man who has finally understood what he destroyed and is trying, in the only language he's learning, to grow something back.

The marigolds would bloom in January. Chirag would come every week to water them. And Anand, who had been gardening for fifty years and knew that patience was the only skill that mattered, would watch from his plot and say nothing, because some things — some reckonings, some growths, some slow and painful and necessary transformations — don't need commentary.

They just need soil. And sun. And time.