It was after months of tightly packed days that I woke up to a slow Saturday morning. I was sipping my tea looking outside the kitchen door.
Ohhh…!
The scenery in the backyard made me realize that a lot of small changes had been taking place there lately. It felt like I was seeing parts of my own house, the comfortable space that I’ve ever known has been going through things by itself. Half of the backyard is now covered in wild grass. The pumpkin vine which was once a little baby among other vines, is now kind of a lady. Filled with flowers, she holds her dignified self while secretly bearing a little pumpkin. And there were a few other visitors gracing themselves in the sunlight, along with all the new things I was witnessing then.
Drowning in thoughts, I returned to the real world, feeling someone’s gentle approach from behind.
“Alright, alright, haah… Someone in this family finally tries to see the daylight after a while… At least…”
I received the warmest hug from my father with the price of getting teased by him nonstop with loud laughs.
“Here… Let me show you something. Look at this little bitter gourd vine… “
I looked at the side he was pointing. There was a considerably big hole in the soil, with a little bitter gourd vine growing near to a well grown one.
“Half of the roots and stem of the small one had been eaten by rats a few nights ago. It had grown a bit far from the mother plant” He kept explaining.
“It was barely connected to the mother vine then. I was worried that it may not find its way to twine with the mother plant again. But see? After a few days it found its way back to it. I didn’t have to do anything. How amazing does this nature work, right? Finding its way to where it got disconnected!”
While proudly speaking of a bitter gourd vine which has proven its courage, way through soil, my father gave me a whole trip around the backyard explaining the story of every plant, every flower I couldn’t see for last few months.
Listening to my father, I wondered where I had been for the past few months or maybe years. Being a child who genuinely enjoyed spending time with my parents while talking and looking at trees and flowers, seeing how they fight over buying new ones and us constantly laughing at each other’s garden ideas, what has happened to the soulful interactions I had with them now? They still do. But I may have forgotten. I may have walked a few miles growing apart from them. Suddenly, I felt like that little bitter gourd vine, struggling to rejoin with where I got disconnected from my own mother plant.
From where exactly did I start?
Yeah, right. When my hobby was picking fruits and vegetables in my grandfather’s garden.
Following him everywhere in his garden, I was a chatterbox who asked him thousands of questions. Growing his heart as in diverse forms of plants, with a kind smile he let me pick the tireless love it grows back with my little hands. It was when I was in grade 7 that I had my last soulful interaction with him. It was to pick the tomatoes he grew in his garden. I remember asking him one day in my very childlike voice,
“Seeya, you won’t pick these before I come from vacation, right?”
“No darling, I won’t. It’ll take a bit longer to get ripened.”
“Seeya, you won’t let others pick it, right?”
“No darling, I won’t let anyone touch your tomatoes”
“Seeya, but what if-“
“No, darling. There’s nothing to worry about. Seeya is here.”
I asked him a thousand more questions, and he promised me a thousand more times that he would wait till I come. It was just the day before my school vacation started.
Days went off. Tomatoes were already ripened. My grandmother was blaming him and asking him to pick them up. But no matter what, my grandfather didn’t pick any. Thinking about it now, my grandfather being a very silent man, he might’ve smiled patiently as a reply to every blame he got by my grandmother. Vacation was over. The day to pick those tomatoes finally came. While picking those one by one, I remember he giggled like a child, overjoyed by my joy of being a part of his garden of love.
One night, just a few weeks after this memory which I am still fond of, he decided to walk miles apart from all of us.
Time passed. I slowly turned from seeya’s garden to my parent’s garden. My parents built our house over his garden; our living room now being placed in the area where he had his whole tomato vegetation. Rather than being disconnected from us, his absence redefined and restructured our lives and his memories in a whole new way. Tomatoes are now bitter gourds to smile at.
“Don’t look at a fallen leaf from a tree as ‘the detached.’ The truth about a leaf was never the physical form it presents, but the life it carries. That liveliness doesn’t end with a simple phenomenon of falling from a tree. It’s about how it returns that energy of life to soil it had within, to find itself nurturing the same tree in a different form again, even when it got fallen. In terms of life, the leaf is the tree itself.” I kept thinking about this part from the novel “Sansararanya Asabada” by Simon Navagattegama.
Maybe being detached doesn’t make anything less connected, dead or fade away. Or it was never a disconnection at all. Maybe that was the point where you get the hint to reconnect in a different way. Till the soil holds its warmth, so leaves could fall, roots find itself to grow in million ways.
With time, we may have fallen apart from where we belonged and may have gotten disconnected inevitably. But I have sooner started believing that a connection finds itself twined with where it belonged somehow. Just like when I got disconnected from the warmth of my parents and from my own house. The effort it takes for them to wait till I return to our house, makes me feel how their love has grown through all the veins and leaves a plant could bear amidst seasons it faces. The flowers smile on the days we can walk through the new moments we could find for ourselves. My seeya who got detached from my sight but blossomed himself in the garden of afterlife and his beloved garden which got disappeared under our home, is strongly holding myself to smile through more than ever, making me look at my parents with love rooting for each other. And I understood that the little bitter gourd vine has given me hope to find all the way home.
No Responses