Mucking About!

It is just a few days to my mother’s 83^rd birthday. For the last three years she has spent her time between her bed and a wheel chair. Seeing her now, so helpless and weak, it is hard to believe how active and enterprising she used to be when we were young.

When I was around 6 years old, we moved into the ground floor of one of the lecturer’s quarters in IIT Powai, Bombay. There was ample space around the house, so my mother got a man to put a fence of wooden posts and barbed wire around it and proceeded to grow a vegetable garden. Initially, a man was hired to clear the space and dig the ground. In one corner of the garden she got him to dig a compost pit. But after that we were on our own. She would work in the garden a little bit every day and little by little it began to take shape. Of course, my brother and I got involved in this interesting enterprise. Initially we had to pick up the stones that she dug out from the ground and carry them to a pile in a corner. As the beds began to take shape, she would let me rake and break up the clods of earth with a fork and then showed me how to use a small digging trowel to make rows in the bed to plant seeds. My brother was still too small to do any real ‘work’, but pottered around alongside us.

My mother believed in using natural fertilizers and there was an abundance of it all around us. There were cows, buffaloes, donkeys and goats wandering about the IIT campus in plenty. Since she couldn’t possibly go around collecting the stuff herself, my brother and I were recruited for this important job. We were too young to know enough to be embarrassed by this assignment and, fascinated by the different types of droppings left by the various animals, we willingly agreed to go. Armed with a bucket, a trowel and a dustpan, we set off in search of the desired commodity. Every time we spotted a dark pile on the ground, we’d rush to it with cries of glee, shouting “cow!” “goat!” “donkey!”, scoop it up triumphantly and put it in the bucket. When there was enough in the bucket and it was too heavy for one small child to carry, the two of us would take the handle together, and singing, “Jack and Jill went up the hill” at the top of our voices, march back home with our precious booty.

We were soon spotted by other kids playing around in the vicinity. Noticing that we seemed to be having fun, they came up to investigate and quickly got involved in the project. Spreading out with eyes glued to the ground, they would shout whenever they saw a pile. Soon, it developed into a “Who can spot the dung first” competition. We showed them how to identify the different kinds of droppings – the large, flat cowpats, the lumps of donkey dung and the black marble-like goat droppings. What a jolly game this was! The bucket was full in no time and the band of us made our way back to our house, arranging to meet again the next day.

The following day so many of our friends turned up, that my mother had to find us another bucket. She didn’t complain. She mixed some of the manure into the soil in the beds she was preparing and then added the rest to the compost pit. As we brought her more manure, she filled the pit gradually, interspersing it with layers of soil, leaves, grass and kitchen waste, until in a few short days it was full. She then covered it with earth and we forgot about it for a few months. When enough time had elapsed, she dug it out and used it in the garden.

My mother did all the real work of building and planting our garden, but we got to help water the growing seedlings with a watering can and watch with fascination as they sprouted leaves and grew bigger and bigger. Soon I graduated from the trowel to the spade and then the pick and did some real, hard digging and gardening. It was fun to wander in the garden every day and see how the plants were doing. I soon learnt to identify the various kinds of plants by the leaves. We grew spinach, ladies fingers, brinjal and tomatoes, as well as coriander, mint and green chillies. Just outside the kitchen window, my mother planted a curry leaf tree. On our verandah grill climbed vines of marrow, cucumber and ridge gourd.

Very soon, the vegetable garden began to yield and we would go out in the mornings to pick the ladies fingers or cut some spinach leaves, green chillies and coriander or mint leaves. Eating fresh vegetables from our own garden was a wonderful privilege. We happily ate everything that grew and it never occurred to us to fuss or complain that we didn’t like a certain vegetable. My mother planted pumpkin seeds, which she saved from the vegetable we bought from the market. We loved the preparation she would make with the tender leaves and flowers of the pumpkin creeper. She would exchange notes with other garden enthusiasts on the campus and would often return home happily carrying some seeds or sapling they had given her.

My mother learnt that chicken manure was an excellent fertilizer, and banana plants love it.  So one day she and my Dad went to a farm exhibition and returned home with eight White Leghorn chicks. They built a large cage in the garden against our verandah and covered the floor with sawdust. The cage had a door through which we could enter. My Dad made a large sieve with wood and wire mesh. Every few days, we would rake up the sawdust, sieve it, spread it back on the floor, and add the chicken muck to the compost heap. This also became one of my regular chores.

Soon there were a couple of banana plants and a few papaya plants growing in our garden. We kept one male and one female papaya tree and removed the others. The banana was of the “Elchi” variety – small, yellow and thin-skinned. But the bunch that grew in our garden had about a hundred fat and delicious fruit, larger than any we had ever seen in the markets. My dad cut the bunch of bananas and hung it from the ceiling in our dining room and as they ripened, we ate them and gave them away to friends and neighbours. We got a lot of delicious papayas too, and during the days when seedless papayas were unknown, we were delighted to find ours had hardly any seeds.

Sadly, we moved to Delhi when I was 10 years old and we moved house so many times, that my mother never got up the energy or time to start another kitchen garden. Most of the time we lived in flats on the first or second floor. Finally when we moved to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, she was much older and had learnt Russian and was spending her free time doing translation. We had a patch of garden in front of the house, but by then we had a gardener coming once a week to weed and clean and plant and dig when necessary. We grew mainly flowers and our role was reduced to just watering the plants every day.

However, this part of my childhood is forever etched in my mind because of the kind of life my parents gave us. One of my main regrets is that we were not able to do this for our children, since our circumstances were so different. However, if and when we are fortunate enough to have grandchildren, I am very keen that we should be able to offer them similar experiences, because I know that this is the stuff treasured childhood memories are made of.