Her Secret Garden
A grandmother. A library crowded with books and a garden that she loves. The story of a woman who is at peace with the life she has.
“It’s been a long time,” she says.
The books that line the shelves have gathered dust. She tuts and pulls out her own handkerchief. Starts wiping the dust off the book spines, apologizes to the collections of paper, ink, thread and glue for leaving them alone for too long, uncared for during her sudden bout of illness. She tosses the handkerchief on the nearby wooden table and stands looking at her books. Tilts her head and tries to bend over to see the books on the bottom shelves, even though her rheumatism doesn’t allow it.
The library is huge. It makes up for what the rest of the house doesn’t have. Grand wooden shelves stretch all the way towards the low ceiling. The top shelves are all empty because she cannot reach out or climb up the ladder anymore. The ceiling fans look as if they have been fished out of the renaissance. Antique lamps she’s hounded out from thrift shops stand on every footstool. Dim yellow lighting — she’s always loved it, preferred it over the bright white light her husband revered. Now that he was gone, she got the yellow lights re-installed five years ago.
Beside the library lies the bedroom. It’s neat and tidy, sparse but for the one-person iron-railing bed, a bedside table and a small metal cupboard with a mirror. The bed is beside the wide window so that she can see the stars when she lies down to sleep at night and catch a glimpse of the garden first thing after waking up in the morning.
The kitchen is a dark-lit place, shelves racked from top to bottom with spices in small containers, labelled with their names in her physician’s scrawl. Her hand has grown even more unsteady through the years and she often feels nostalgic when she looks at her earlier writing, although her patients couldn’t understand what she wrote even then. A thick wad of paper is stacked in a corner, her recipes lovingly written on the pages and additional tips scrawled in the margins. One thing she loves almost as much as she does her books is cooking. Though reading always comes first.
The hall too has minimal furniture. A sofa, a wooden coffee table and a rocking chair she never sits in. A rolled-up carpet in one corner in case guests arrive. Again, a wide window that overlooks the garden.
There is a large banyan tree outside in the backyard. She sometimes sits in its shade on the circular platform around the tree and reads. She has the entire place to herself. Sometimes she shares the space with a daring squirrel, venturing close in hopes of a morsel of food and always with the birds, chirping from their hidden spots in the tree’s canopy. At times she reads out to them. She believes animals can understand humans even though they do not know our language.
Intertwined twigs cover the arch of the rusty iron gate to the house. The sweet-smelling madhumalti is finally blooming now that the summer has gone and the rains have come. Pretty red and white flowers and leaves of lush green droop over the gate and the wall. The mogra bushes next to the gate exude a bewitching fragrance. The flowers started to disappear with the end of summer and now the last of the mogra flowers peek over the wall.
The neighbours bring over dabbas of food almost once a week. She is known to be generous at heart and that is probably why she is everyone’s favourite. Not to mention, she is also everyone’s favourite cook in the neighbourhood. She hands out the pickles she makes to the ones she knows well and even the ones she does not know. Once you have tasted her pickles, you will never stoop down as low as to go for the store-bought ones. I promise.
She is a no-nonsense woman. She does not hesitate to talk about her late husband, even though most of the neighbourhood and her own relatives beat around the bush. She does not fear to be honest, sometimes brutally so, but the one person she cannot help but indulge is her granddaughter. My parents complain that she dotes on me too much.
“It’s been a long time,” she says again to her books and picks her all-time-favourite one to take to the porch. She sits there for an hour or two and manages to reach through almost one-third of the book. The plot is predictable because she has read it a million times; but there is a different joy in rereading, a comfort and a feeling of familiarity. Monsoon has arrived, the season of nostalgia. The trees have become a vibrant green in the ghats; all the waterfalls in the countryside have begun to cascade in their full force, and the river that carves a path through the city has once again filled to its brim.
She has taken to sitting in the porch for hours on end, slipping a cardigan over her sari when the wind gets too cold. When it gets dark, she retreats to the kitchen and cooks herself a good meal. She believes in three things: her books, her food and her garden. These are the things she takes the most pride in.
Tonight it’s a dish from her native hometown, the place she left to come to this quiet city with her husband half a century ago. She stirs the mango curry with a large ladle. Monsoon has arrived but she has stubbornly held on to the last alphonso mangoes of the season. She inhales the aroma of the mustard-coloured curry and turns off the gas. She shuts the lid over the kadhai and glances at the clock.
Half-an-hour until dinner.
She tiptoes over to the library. She picks up the book from the table from its upside down position, pages separated on both sides like a fan and spine bent backwards. As much as she dislikes people who dog-ear pages and burn their old textbooks, this was one habit she could not get rid of. It was a recipe for cracked book spines, which she would mend herself.
She takes up her spot at the comfortable chair by the window and opens the book to the page she was reading. The Secret Garden. She is on the chapter where the robin leads Mary to the door. No matter how many times she has read this part, it always gives her the goosebumps. It rains outside and the banyan roots sway with the wind. How many seasons has she seen through this window, how many books has she read on this very same chair! Many do not understand her love for the solitude she has found in this home, least of all her son, who keeps urging her to shift to the bigger city we live in. They do not understand that her books and herself, of course, and the occasional squirrel or bulbul are the greatest companions she has ever had.
She sleeps on a hard bed with a thin pillow and roams about in a house with minimal furniture, but at the end of the day she is happy, and that’s what matters the most. They do not know that the silent solidarity that her books and her simple house and garden offer her are the biggest comfort of all. Perhaps this is her very own secret garden.
About the Story
I knew I wanted to start this story with a dialogue. It randomly came to my mind — “It’s been a long time,” and then I wondered, what if my main character was saying this not to a person, but to an inanimate object? Books? I did not think further. I started writing and it was decided that my main character was to be an old Indian woman who preferred her books over human company.
I kept adding clues about the kind of person she was: a retired doctor; messy handwriting. A woman who loves to read and to cook. An honest-to-a-fault person, someone who dotes on her granddaughter. A woman happy with the quiet life she has built for herself.
About halfway through the story I knew that the narrator should be the granddaughter, talking sometimes admiringly and sometimes lovingly about her Aaji. A girl who understands her grandmother so well that she knows exactly how she spends her day and can describe it even if she isn’t there. A girl who acknowledges her way of life, and accepts it.
I’m not sure why I wrote this story. There is no moral, really, except that you should try to understand a person’s choices and leave them to live their life the way they want to. Another theme could be that being alone is not so bad. It’s fun in its own way. But I won’t say more. I’ll leave you to think about the story and analyze it in your own way.
In a way the main character of this story is the person I would want to become when I grow old. Honest. Independent. Happy. A huge library, wide windows, good food and a small garden. A banyan tree and a sheltered porch. Thousands and thousands of books. If I had to describe my sort of heaven this would probably be it. You could say that this story is a love letter to the books I have read and loved, to my grandmother’s cooking and her recipes, and to a garden that perennially smells of the sweetest flowers there are.
