My husband’s aunt Kakakka turned 90 years old a few months back. She lives in Mumbai and can speak English, Hindi, Konkani, Malayalam, Tamil …and the list is endless. She doesn’t look a year more than seventy. We have always seen her wear bright coloured saris with her curly hair coiled into a tiny bun at the nape of her neck. She is young at heart and not an old soul. These days she has started wearing long gowns but her face has the same vibrant smile with a well-kept set of teeth. Recently her son gifted her a smartphone and the first thing she learnt to use was’WhatsApp’. It gave her a great opportunity to connect with her family in Kerala. She joined the family group and began updating herself. During the lockdown, she also began using video chat. My husband has been her favourite nephew. My husband goes to meet her once in a while and they chat for long hours. Sometimes the conversation goes on till dawn and during these long sessions, she would take my husband through the magical lanes of memory chuckling and giggling at the numerous anecdotes.
That afternoon, the video chat showed us the cheerful face of Kakakka, we all spoke to her but many times she would show us her hair. We asked her to hold the mobile straight. She told my husband in Malayalam, ‘Mone, I am taking my ear close to the phone to listen to you’. We said, ‘Why don’t you use your earphones’. She was puzzled and we decided to show her a normal set of earphones that are available free with any smartphone. She asked the maid to help her with the earphones and smiled gleefully saying, ‘Now I can listen to you both’. She showered me with appreciation saying that I looked beautiful and so on. We conversed on various topics and the topic of nature and plants came up. I told her, ‘Akka, why not see the plants that grow in our garden, our balcony I mean’.
We had bunches of freshly bloomed red and pink roses that had pushed their heads across the wall. I felt it would cheer her up. I showed her the roses and suddenly a hibiscus peeped into her vision. She asked me, ‘Which flower is that one, Jyothi? I quickly focused the camera of the phone on the plant. The dark pinkish single whorled hibiscus was from our uncle’s home in Tiruvalla. The plant was just a year old but had grown well and put its bobbing head above the wall of the balcony. She loved listening to the story and I turned into a narrator for her.
I then walked to the balcony adjoining the sitting room where I showed her the three feet tall curry leaf plant called ‘Kadhi-Patta’. She now turned childish and said, ‘Can I pluck one leaf, bring it close, let me smell it…’
I said, ‘Take two but the ones that are on the lower end’.
I began showing her the Christmas tree. I told her that I had brought it from the man-made forest, it was just a twig then and two years back when it did not have a strong stem, I brought some decoration items during Christmas to hang them on the tree. I had removed most of them but a glowing silvery bulb and a tiny drum were still visible on the branches. She loved it, said, ‘Take it closer, It is so pretty, I love Christmas plant…’
I then showed her the tiny frail bamboo plants with a maroon laughing Buddha stuck in the sand. I focussed the camera of the phone on the triangular corner where we had let plants like money plants and many others grow into an amazon forest kind of wilderness. Amongst those plants were the coloured Colocasia leaves. She jumped in delight and said, ‘Do you have Colocasia? I said, ‘It is an ornamental species, the leaves have a pink colouration on the veins’. She then glanced at the Basil plants, we had three varieties. I showed her the Periwinkle, and the lemongrass shoots, the ginger plant jounced its head into the camera of the phone with its green foliage. I showed her the short stout shoots of Dates and came back to lemongrass.
She hadn’t used it for long and so I rested the phone camera on the long grassy shoots. She suddenly saw a Golden flat leaf-like dish in the Amazon forest like wilderness and asked me about it. I had a porcelain pot, a tiny one filled with water under the coloured Colocasia leaves placed in the golden flat dish.I told her, ‘The porcelain pot was an attractive artefact until its lid fell off and broke into pieces, we moved the pot into the wilderness and now the wild-bees drink water here’. She loved the way I created the effects with the phone, the same small spot was transformed into a movie for her. She said, ‘I love these plants, I will come in the night and carry the plants to my home.’ I nodded in affirmation. She said, ‘I can’t travel but the plants can…’ I promised a truck-full as soon as the lockdown owing to the Pandemic was eased.
Well, that was bought three years back, it was golden but it lost its lustre and resembles the Eiffel tower with its cast-iron look’, I said
I showed her the succulent phyllode of the Brahma-kamal plant, it had a long stalk that peeped into the free space beyond the balcony and I could not pull the reddish-yellow leaf to focus but her eyes caught the thick growth of the Money plant with its huge leaves growing upwards. ‘This is fantastic’, she said and clapped her hands in glee. I whispered, ‘This is the effect of the magic pills that we bought during the flower show just before the Lockdown.
I told her that money plants were air-purifiers and she said, ‘I must grow a few more maybe without the magic pills’. We kept speaking for a long time brooding on each plant. In the end, she said, ‘Thank you, Jyothi, let me kiss your forehead for this tryst with plants’. Those words left me glowing for a long. I forgot my work and got transported into the magical world of a second childishness, a foolish one for people but a transcendental one for the old.
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