'Kidnapping' plants for their 'best'

The author is talking about plants

Reports about the rain providing the perfect foil for a stranger in the neighbourhood behaving oddly in the colony have been doing the rounds in recent weeks. She appears mysteriously, dressed sometimes in a gown-like garb, and a raincoat in others, and abhors human company. Sudden appearances have been known to cause her to bolt, leaving a trail of vegetation in her wake that leads suspiciously towards our house. She’s known to change her appearance regularly, so spotters are hard put to identify her. Last week, she appeared at home, having grown an impressive bosom that she removed to reveal bags of lemons purloined from a neighbour’s garden. A few days later, she had the nerve to send a jar of lemon marmalade to the same neighbour.

If the popular saying that stolen plants thrive best has any merit, the rain lily blooms in our balcony should make my wife blush with shame — but she’s made of sterner stuff. This morning, she’s potting a pink frangipani, a handsome-leafed monsteira, and some shoots she can’t even recall the names of. The blue wisteria she purloined from our hotel in the Himalayas, but the red amaranth owes its existence to the Jains in the cul-de-sac, the Sharmas need to be thanked for the heliconias and anthuriums, and if anyone’s missing a pot of jade, you know where to find us.

My wife’s frequent walks are accompanied by an impressive arsenal of gardening shears. There’s a knife and even a hammer to bludgeon obstinate branches. Her pockets are full of pouches containing strange powders and stranger unguents. These are her healing potions for shoots and roots parted traumatically from the mother plant, or soil. Ever since she joined sundry kitchen garden societies, she has become proficient in vegetation witchery, a nursery quack who heals plants through the simple premise of kidnapping them “for their own health”. She’ll apply cinnamon powder on one and insecticide on another. They’re dipped in solutions that heal as well as help them grow. They arrive like babies, their ends swaddled in rags.

Nor are plants the only things being pinched. She sends her minions to construction sites to beg for empty cement sacks. She rifles through disposed garbage searching for pruned leaves and dead flowers, bringing the spoils home. They are chopped up and placed in bottles and vats with water, the dioxides being released regularly and water topped up, to create enzyme tonic for her plants. The rows of bottles resemble a rogue scientist’s laboratory, but the plants don’t seem to mind and flourish as a result of these ministrations.

Her gardener is her partner in crime on most forays. As someone employed in the homes from where plants have been inexplicably disappearing, he points out to her the particular foliage missing from her own garden. To help her further, he places pots in a place where a furtive nip with nimble fingers and a handy pair of scissors might make quick work of such thievery. Generously, she is happy to share the multiplied spoils with the gardener to let him take back to the original owners — to assuage her guilt, and his. As for the hundreds of pots created as a result of these efforts, they’re handy gifts for friends, there being only so many plants she can keep in her balcony. If that makes them complicit in a crime they are, of course, unaware of, perhaps it’s time to upturn the saying about not looking a gift horse in the mouth.