Nurture Everything You Do Like a Mother
My mother was a professional nurse. Sefali Ghosh was her maiden name. After marriage her surname changed to Dutta.
Sefali also happens to be the name of a flower found in India. It blooms every autumn.
Thus, every autumn, I go into a different frame of mind, sometimes a difficult one…
It feels like I am revisiting my childhood, with glimpses of my mother, who left happily for heaven…not knowing what she was leaving behind.
That year too autumn was memorable…
There was festivity all around. I took her for a ride around the city. Being a person who knew how bodies work, and diseases spread, she probably knew about her illness — she had a heart with erratic beats.
As we toured through the city, through its lanes and bylanes, watching people, trees and cars — the usual city-scape — she had mentioned it might be her last drive through the city with me.
I laughed, dismissing her intuition.
But she was a nurse. She knew it… Just like she knew my eyes were teary as she said those words to me.
She knew I was trying to be brave. Her brave boy.
She climbed the stairway to heaven easily. Without making a groan. She slept peacefully, and didn’t wake up the next day.
The next year, I planted a sefali or shiuli tree on our small piece of land. It was located by the car shed, beside the patio.
The summer that followed was a full grown horrid Indian summer.
The sun blazed hot and cruel. I realised I had to save the sefali tree...
Every morning, before the sun turned into a scorching red ball of fire, I woke up, and watered the tree.
And every time I did that, I just prayed with all my heart that it survived the summer — a sultry boring lifeless summer.
I took care of the shiuli tree with all I had… If its leaves turned a bit yellow, I would check the soil, rake it, apply manure and water. In the evening, I’d go near the tree and touch its little branches and leaves.
I became the perfect gardener…caressing it, loving it.
Not forgetting, though, the other trees in the garden. I took care of all of them with care. But the shiuli tree was always close under my scanner.
Once I found a worm crawling on it. I picked up the worm, and threw it far away. But before that, I took a snapshot of it, and searched the internet to find its genus and species.
On learning more about it, I worked like a medic to save the tree from the onslaught of similar worms and pests.
I realised then that I had not just become a gardener, I had also become a nurse… A nurse to a tree. The shiuli tree.
Season after season I took care of it. In the monsoon, when it rained for hours each day, I built a small makeshift channel to prevent the area from getting waterlogged, as accumulation of water can weaken a tree at its roots.
My roles kept changing — I now became a construction worker and sewage cleaner.
Then the monsoon passed, giving way to a delightful autumn.
For the first few days of the season, all the other trees in the garden bore flowers…but the shiuli tree had none.
I got worried, and talked to my wife. She came to the small garden along with my son.
We checked for buds. The tree had grown taller and greener, but there were no buds!
That’s when my son exclaimed: ‘Butterflies!’
It struck us that we needed butterflies, to carry the pollen across, and make the tree bloom.
Therein began the search for trees that attract butterflies. We found some, brought back bits of them with us, and planted them in our garden.
This time I felt like a priest…purifying the earth, and praying with all my heart that the trees attracted birds, bees and butterflies.
This would help them grow faster, and bring beauty back to the shiuli tree.
They all arrived — the butterflies, the birds and the bees. The smell of flowers enveloped my senses with joy.
I felt I had become the garden itself… It was immersed in me and I was immersed in it.
But only the shiuli tree was left to bloom… I waited... We all waited.
Then, one fine morning, as I went near the tree I found them —
Those white shiuli blossoms with an orange core waving to me from the branches of the tree… They had almost bloomed overnight!
I called my wife and son. We three stood under the tree. The air around it had that unmistakable fragrance of shiuli blossoms.
At that moment, my experience was more than that of a nurse or a gardener or a priest... My experience was that of a caring nurturing mother — my mother.
Motherhood is an indescribable experience. But a phenomenon that you needn’t be a mother to experience. It can also be experienced when you decide to imbibe the nurturing, care-giving, and all-inclusive qualities a mother has.
Spirituality’s essence is to bring out motherhood in each one of us… Because it is only the unconditional and protective qualities of a mother that can save humanity and the universe as a whole.
Pink Pinjra is a platform to share transformational experiences, just like the author Moinak Dutta has through this post… We invite you too to come forward and share your life-changing moments with us, and in the process help many accelerate their journeys of self development and empowerment!
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