The garden of childhood

“You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home” 
― The Mermaid Chair

Isn't it amazing how sometimes all it takes is the sight or a whiff of a familiar, long forgotten memory to send you across thousands of miles and back a few decades into the home of your childhood?

Hibiscus, always brings back memories of my parents
doing their daily worship of Goddess Durga and Kali with these.

The other evening, as I sat in the drawing room, sipping a cup of green tea and staring at the heavy downpour that was lashing down from the heavens above, suddenly an old and familiar smell crept up to me. 

"Kamini" I yelled, jumping off my chair in a flash. "Can you smell Kamini?" I continued to yell. 

The husband has seen me worked up many a times in the past, but to give him credit, he still came in to see what the commotion was about.

"Kamini" I kept repeating as if it was self-explanatory; except I couldn't understand why he and I still weren't on the same page. 

"My Didu used to have Kamini flowers in her temple" I had finally managed to get a grip on my excitement and blurt out.

"Oh, it is a flower" he said, letting go of a sigh of obvious relief as the realisation of who what Kamini was, slowly dawned on him. "It seems to be coming from our garden" he said.

Star of the garden - a jasmine plant in bloom

I rushed to the balcony.

And lo and behold! 

There they were! 

Two ethereal and delicate lemon blossom like white flowers, blooming in a bush that my gardener had dismissively called a very common Murraya; when I insisted I wanted to have one planted. He and I had then come to a compromise of sorts; to plant it in a little corner of the balcony, post which I had completely forgotten about it until now. 

A little jasmine bush

Two little flowers whose fragrance transported me back to a garden from my childhood in an instant. 

That whiff of fragrance that had wafted into the room had suddenly brought back the memory of my widowed grandaunt; who we called Pujari Didu (loosely translated, priest grandma) as she was always praying in a little temple in the house where she spent almost all her time. She passed away a long time back and it has been a while since I thought of her. But that night, suddenly I was back to being a little girl in a small temple surrounded by those heavenly smelling Kamini flowers around me, sitting patiently and waiting for Pujari Didu to dole out the most amazing sabu-r khichuri** after she was through with offering it to all the gods she spent her time praying to.

** An absolutely divine (pun intended) kedgeree cooked with sago and lentils tempered with loads of ghee and coconut, usually served as an offering to the Gods on a religious occasion.

The exotic heady fragrance of an Arabian jasmine (Beli phool)

The Beli phool, remains one of my favourite flowers
as it always reminds me of my childhood home

And as I stood there, surrounded by memories, I looked at the little Arabian jasmine plants, the star jasmine creeper, the pink bougainvillea and red hibiscus plants I had recently planted in my balcony, and each of them reminded me of another garden from a while back...

No, not the humongous and stunning and perfect English garden with it's roses, lilacs, azaleas, daffodils, cherry blossoms or the apple, plum and damson trees that we left behind when we moved to Singapore.

Not that. 

These were memories of a much smaller, rambling, whimsical garden from long, long ago.

A garden of red and pink Hibiscus flowers which my Dad would pluck each morning for his daily Puja or my Maa would massage into our hair hoping we ended up with long, beautiful, black tresses as befitting a Bengali girl. 

A garden filled with the heady fragrance of the Madhu Malti (Rangoon creeper ) creeping all over the front porch and adding a dash of colour to the entrance of our tiny home. 

A happy garden blooming with Zinnias and roses and jasmine and Black eyed Susans. 

A garden filled with two large neem trees that scared me to death because I imagined ghosts and ghouls creeping out of them at night. 

A garden from which my sisters and I plucked lemons to make chilli lemonade on summer afternoons and where I sat on a branch of the frangipani tree and talked to myself when I had no one to play with (a very frequent occurrence, that).

A garden where okra and egg plants and ivy gourd and every other vegetable I hated, grew in abundance and where all of my Maa's struggle to get the perfect cabbages and cauliflowers never resulted in success.  

A garden where I followed my Maa every evening as she watered the plants, watching her face light up with excitement as she saw a new bud or the beginnings of a new fruit or vegetable. 

A garden in which unknown to me, I had started looking forward to mundane things as picking fresh spinach leaves or the sight of little bottle gourds sprouting on the creeper that had covered the fence or  something far more magical as waiting by the Sthal Padma (cotton rose) plant to catch a glimpse of it's flowers changing colours as the day went by.

And then, as I stood in the rain, taking in my little garden in the balcony, a happy thought suddenly struck me. 

I had in my own little way, in a tiny little balcony, ended up attempting to create a piece of my mother's garden. 

The garden I grew up in.

My childhood garden.