Roses, roses.

Roses are difficult to grow, they say. So it was only after a lot of googling that I finally got the courage to invest in a few rose plants last month:

Of course, they all look lovely to start with - one can't help but buy the plants with the prettiest blooms (and the most scented - which, oddly enough, is a hard quality to come by - a lot of roses these days look lovely but have no scent at all!) but the thought that's niggled my mind was what these beauties would look like after they'd been in in my hands for a few months!

All these blooms have now wilted, withered, been snipped off (at just the right point - which is just above the first five-leafed stem beneath a bloom) and made their way to the composter. I studied those shorn tips for quite a while, and quite nervously, but have finally been rewarded with two little buds appearing on two of the plants! I suppose only children and garden-lovers will understand that wild joy that comes with getting a stick in the earth to grow into something! I am both child and gardener, and am doubly joyful - or perhaps it's just pre-menopausal hormonal fluctuations that makes my heart flutter so!

I can't wait for them to blossom, and share my new home-grown blooms with you.

Earth galore!

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging for a while, is my latest addiction:  gardening! After wasting a lot of time and energy looking for a new place to live, I decided to give the old place a second chance - and turned my attention to the common garden surrounding our flats. The building association does as little as it can, so the garden has been left to its own devices for the last few years, and the crazy cat lady whose home and clothes reek of eau de piss continues to live undisturbed (but that's another story)!

The garden was the more pleasant task to take upon myself, and so I have been digging, weeding, pruning, and repotting with much joy for the past two months, never mind the mosquito bites and undeserved attacks by the roses and bouganvilleas.

It's a medium-sized garden all the way around the building, so I've been tackling it a bit at a time. Here's some pictures from one corner that is more or less "done":

Before .. 

While it looked nice and green, most of that was weeds. There were some crocuses and lilies struggling in a corner, two resilient but not very nurtured dracaena (that's druh-SEE-na, on the left, with reddish leaves), and a lovely jasmine creeper my mom had donated a while back.

After clearing all the weeds (this is an on-going process, as I refused to use weed-killer, and obviously didn't get all the roots on the first round), and rescuing all the bulbs, I made little round plots for the bigger plants and invested in some ridiculously expensive fake plastic picket fencing and some delightful bright kalanchoe (kal-an-KO-hee). The crocus and lily bulbs were replanted in front of them.

 I found some lovely monstera (the big green leaves) growing neglected in a broken pot, and shifted them here.  The jasmine creeper started blooming madly within a week of all the attention!

The gentleman in the next picture is Mr. Arasu, my mom's gardener, without whom this garden would never have made it! We make a good team, and his knees are much better than mine, so he does all the digging and groundwork. He's ex-Lalbagh, and has years of experience (except with his pruning, which horrifies me), and gets very sad every time I ask him to uproot anything that clearly isn't a weed. Those are scented geranium (pelargonium) in his hands - they went upstairs to the terrace, to flank the benches there, where our senior citizens like to sit every evening.

The neighbours often asked what happened to the "lawn":  I guess green weeds look nicer than plain brown earth - but with Bangalore's water problems there's no way I'm putting a lawn - weed or grass - back in. So this is what I did instead, and we all love it:

I'm now keeping my eyes open for more discarded tiles, and also got my mind set on some lovely river pebbles I saw at a local nursery, so I can extend the pathway further down.

If you're wondering what's filling up the plot at the base of the jasmine, it's eucalyptus bark, which makes good mulch (unlike eucalyptus leaves, which have too much oil). We have two gorgeous eucalyptus trees growing outside our compound, so I get a regular supply dropped off daily: crunch it up and fill the plots with it - mulch that keeps the water in for longer, and also discourages insects and weeds.

But now the sun has peeped out - it's been a drizzly day - and I must take advantage of this to head back downstairs and do some potting!

Unrequited.

The moon is like a woman this evening, beautifully incomplete. 
She is just a smudge of white in a sky of blue and grey and
eucalyptus treetops.  Below her, predators soar and swoop, and I,
I who am in love with these bad boys of the sky, I walk, and I sing
love songs to the kites as they fly.  I sing and I think they hear me,
four of them, because they come to where I am and fly only above me,
lower and lower, leaving the rest of the sky to the rest of their family,
other kites, and to more distant relatives:  bright green parakeets
on double dates, shrieking in delight as they hurry towards
the setting sun, crows crossing over, pigeons going nowhere.

I sing the higher harmony of Beatles’ songs, although I am an alto
and a smoker, because I think that the kites may hear better
a higher pitch that is closer to their own tremulous whistle.
I can see their claws, and the rips in their feathered profiles,
 leftovers from their victories and defeats.  I lose myself
in them, in their dark silhouettes, in every turn of their heads
and subtle shift of their tail feathers.  I cannot believe that
they are only scouting for food to snatch from my hands,
because I am here every evening, holding a lighter, a phone,
a pencil or a notebook, sometimes lifting a cigarette or
a bottle of water to my lips, and they have never swooped down
for these.  I know they can’t understand the words I sing, but
 I like to think that they can sense the feelings:  awe, wonder,
infatuation, envy.

Above us, she shines, but dimly.  It is not her time yet.  She peeps
out from behind grey muslin cloud every now and then, flashing
for a few moments the brilliant beauty she is not yet ready to share.
Across the sky, the sun is sinking.  Some days he goes down
with a roar, setting fire to the clouds around him, turning
green treetops to glowing embers.  Today though, he settles down
so quietly I do not notice he is going until I hear the call
 to maghrib* prayer.  I think he has understood her need to sing
this evening, and he knows that she will not sing as long as
he stands before her, she cannot reveal her song to a sky
that is not yet quite hers, and so he exits silently and with grace.

The kites have flown away, back to their rain trees, all but one,
who sits on top of a fir tree like a dark Christmas angel.  I gaze
up at him, forgetting to sing my own songs, hoping that
he sees me and feels me, but he never once turns his head
in my direction.  It is not me or my song that he waits for,
I realise.  He too has been waiting for her.  

I sigh and tear my eyes away from him to lift them even higher,
up to her.  The sun has gone and a wind breathes gently
close to her so that the clouds drift away from her face,
and it is such a beautiful face to see it makes my heart ache.
I look back at the kite, and I know he sees her too.  And in
that moment I think that he knows I know, because the next second
he is gone, like every bad boy after a sharing too unexpectedly intimate.  

A tiny bat scuttles across the twilight, and above her, the moon
takes a deep breath.  I feel that she does not need my audience tonight,
so I turn and head downstairs.  Tomorrow will do.  I will be back,
and so will she, and so will my dark angel.

* maghrib - at sunset, the fourth of five daily prayers asked of Muslims by God

A lesson in self esteem!

And this lesson comes to us from a tiny cabbage-coloured bird - my pet budgie Gobi (which is Urdu for "cabbage", by the way). She is about four inches long, and stands about three inches high. She knows what she likes, and what she dislikes. She hates being cuddled, but loves sitting on my shoulder and stretching out to touch her beak to my nose (er .. we call it "nosies") while I mumble sweet nothings to her.

Today my dad decided to record her usual array of non-stop twitter-chirp-whistle, and when I listened to the recording this evening I discovered that she's obviously being paying attention to what I say, because in the middle of all the jibberish she suddenly says, quite clear, "Gobi such a sweet bird!"

I think it's amazing, and extra lovely that she chose what she must have felt was the best thing to echo! Obviously, she doesn't speak English .. but I'm assuming she has picked up on the tone or emotion of my voice and decided that these are the words that make her feel most loved.

My niece Reshma was so impressed that she has decided to follow in Gobi's footsteps (clawhops, actually) and I think that's an excellent idea for us all. It's quite easy. Tomorrow morning when you get up, go to the bathroom mirror, smile at yourself and say, "(insert your name here) such a sweet bird!"

What a wonderful way to start the day. Let me know how it goes!