Clarissa Dalloway, I feel you

I should have been a gardener. Gardening beats reporting. Gardening beats mucking about in a newspaper office (even though office does have some greenery – also by way of one money plant transferred by yours truly in a small coke bottle).

I'm telling you, Gardening is my true calling, my first love, my loyal supporter, my best friend, my only option (my last resort?).

I’d hang in the sun, risk skin cancer, stomp in carries, play with a khurpi, dig with a spade, get mud under my fingernails, soil my rolled up baggy pants, squat, hum and maybe wear a straw hat. I’d get myself a moderately affectionate, not-too-clingy terrier, who will guard me and listen carefully when I talk to myself and thump his tail when I make sense.

That would be the life.

Instead, I’m on a 24/7 crib mode about the low life in office. A garden would have worms too, I guess, but those you can flick off, can’t you? Or stamp on – not that I ever do that.

And if I were ever the golden-hearted lead in a Walt Disney movie though I might have to be less callous, more humane, and exude sensitivity. The modus operandi would have to be: gently lift worm on to palm, rise slowly, transfer worm on big dewy leaf, look at his inscrutable gleamy eyes, give him a nickname – Your Sluggishness? – ask him if the leaf is too slippery. If Your Sluggishness back chats, and says yea duh, then we have to find him a newer, bigger, shinier, dewer leaf for him to grip his icky behind on so he doesn’t plop off.

Walk Disney might be a lot of work. It would go against my grain in horrible extreme ways. I’d have diaper rash in my brain and then I’d wake up and be back in office.

I’d also have to wear a billowy dress with satin ribbons in my hair. No shorts and Birkenstocks for Disney ladies, forget scowl and the tongue of a stable hand.

Damn it.

I feel sad. I can’t just stamp on my office slugs with muddy boots. No bucolic tra la la for me even though I have cows to deal with – grazing on my brains, if I can say that, without you calling me a drama queen.

~

When I don’t whine to myself and grumble to maybe 56 other people about how we need new bitches at work, I am zen. Breathe in, breathe out. Hear the sound so-hum. In: so. Out: hum. Repeat like a mad woman. Be true. Be cool. Don’t let them get to you. So...Hum...

~

Check out the gorgeous hydrangeas meanwhile. My grandparents landed up in Delhi, leaving their truly bucolic house in Dehradoon behind for a few weeks. The hydrangeas came with them. My grandmother, smart woman, didn’t want to leave them behind for neighbours, monkeys and weevils to attack. Big balls of pretty, don’t you think? The colours! The colours! Focus on the colours!

And look at these other cuties. I go to bed seeing them or their other flowery cousins – the Juhis, and the Jasmines, the Champas and the Chamelis last thing at night.




There's nothing like it. The routine: cap pen with which I write my diary, or put in the book mark, switch off yellow light, block out the slugs, and do the so-hum to the smell of freshly-robbed Motia.