Hoping for the best

It rained sheets last week, or perhaps it was the week before, when Delhi’s roads and Gurugram’s underpasses flooded. We were not in Delhi on the occasion — fortunately, as it turned out, because the house was under watery siege as well. There was water pouring into the bedroom, the living room had rain streaking in almost as though there were no walls, and the staff blamed it on clogged drains on the roof thanks to the gardening ministrations of my wife.

For those who don’t know her well, an introduction is in order. My wife is given to moods. Some years ago, it used to be cooking. The cook wasn’t allowed into the kitchen and I was forbidden from showing off my limited repertoire. She’d bake bread when it was cheaper to buy it off the shelf. If we were expecting dinner, well, we’d have to wait while she experimented with desserts that required fussing and wasn’t intended for eating — by us, at any rate. If she’d decided on fish head curry, too bad if it made us gag — you either ate it, or you listened to her tirade for the length of a week.

She’s been off her cooking obsession for some time now, replacing it with other compulsive interests. Yoga, which she decided to do at odd times throughout the day, was abandoned some years ago. She bought herself a nifty sewing machine, but that toy no longer occupies her. She’s dallied with book clubs and film clubs. Somewhere in the course of seeking new excitements, she found herself drawn to a gardening group. She enrolled for courses, hooked up with adenium lovers, joined a cacti group, a kitchen garden club gave her a runners-up trophy, and some other horticultural outfit has been teaching her to turn waste into compost. 

Peels, skins, seeds, residue, pulp and other discardable organic matters are no longer thrown out of our house. Instead, they’re patiently cut up into small bits using a pair of scissors, or sliced up using a knife. They make a perfectly pretty salad — for worms and other wriggly things. Bowls in the kitchen are piled high with offerings that are added to bins and baskets on the terrace, leading to an ever-present odour so foul, we are forced to walk around with a handkerchief pressed to our noses — but complain we cannot, for we’re helping her save the planet, even if it isn’t exactly worth living on. Thanks to the errant services of a gardener, they end up clogging drains, leading to waterlogging and the flooding of our home. 

At dawn and at dusk, my wife is to be found potting, repotting, pruning and doing the zillions of things that go into caring for plants. We no longer have meals together because she’s too busy growing what we might eat. She’s on the roof on moonless nights and on moonlit ones, shovelling soil in the middle of the afternoon. She croons to her “babies” and neighbourhood kids probably point to her as the loony one in our lane. Buzzing with energy, she won’t sleep at night, rearranging her wardrobe, washing already washed clothes, and forwarding WhatsApp messages till she’s exhausted. No wonder she dozes off every time we try to engage her in a conversation that isn’t about seeds or saplings. Yesterday, she fell asleep at the wheel, having decided to drive against my better judgement, narrowly missing another speeding car. So far, we’ve survived her cooking, but will we survive her gardening?