I saw him one morning when I went for a walk in the local park — staring into space while wielding his broom. “Look out!” cried a lady when he swept over her slippered feet, “if you only looked where you were sweeping, you’d clean the park more effectively.” She was right, for behind the gardener, the detritus of last evening’s play remained even though he had supposedly cleaned the area. He barely looked up and snarled, “just let me do my work!” Fifteen minutes later, ‘work’ done, I saw him sleeping on a bench. Two hours later, I happened to pass that way again. The man was still asleep.
At noon, he’d left. “These gardeners from the horticulture department are good for nothing,” said the lady whose feet he’d swept over, “this is how taxpayers money is spent…. Imagine!”
I imagined. And ended up feeling really angry at the poor show the gardener had put up. So I decided to keep a watch on him. The next two days, although I passed the park several times in the morning, he was nowhere to be found. On the third day, when I finally saw him again, I decided to have a little talk with him. How often he was supposed to work in this particular park, I asked. He moodily swept around my feet and replied: “there’s a lot of difference between what we are ‘supposed’ to do, and what we actually ‘manage’ to do!” I asked him to explain, and this is what he told me.
There were over 56 parks in Safdarjung Enclave, all maintained by the horticulture department. And for this purpose, there were only 20 gardeners. “Even if we work in two parks a day, we are not able to maintain most of these parks effectively!” said he. “Our work often involves hard physical labour, and we get tired cycling from park to park for work!” said he. A demoralising fact was that that they rarely got to work in the same park for enough time to make a difference to it. “For a gardener, the biggest motivation to work comes from seeing the fruit of his labour,” said he, “but I may spend one day in the heat planting a flowerbed in one park, and be reassigned to it after a fortnight! By that time, most likely, the plants I planted would be long gone!”
Maintaining colony parks, said he, was a tough job, especially as most of them were subjected to heavy use. “Children trample on plants, play cricket and destroy the grass. Older people organise religious gatherings under tents that completely ruin all the work that we gardeners do … and many residents, given half a chance, even throw their household garbage in the park!” he complained bitterly. The lack of civic sense, said he, was so monumental, that it was practically impossible for gardeners like him to even try keeping parks clean.
“Look!” said he, brandishing discarded plastic glasses, empty bags of chips and tetrapacks, “there are no dustbins here, and people just throw their rubbish anywhere they wish! How on earth can we even make a dent in maintaining such parks?”
By now my irritation had morphed into sympathy. I sympathetically asked him to work in the shade and went home. A little while later, I saw him asleep on his favourite bench again. “At least finish sweeping the park,” I pleaded. He balefully opened one eye and said, “after talking to you, I realised there’s so much work to do, that whether I do it or not will make no difference at all! So I may as well sleep.”
