Transplant Shock

1.

The banana plant was decidedly unhappy. For a week, it shed a leaf daily, until it was just a bare stump. Water and manure didn’t help, neither did adjusting its position in the garden for light.

“Leave it,” Hanumantha, our gardener, said in Kannada, waving his hand dismissively. “It will come back.”

I asked him if we should try manure, or dig up the soil in the pot to aerate it.

“No,” he said. “Just leave it alone.”

2.

In June last year, I did the oddly frightening thing of moving back to Bangalore, after almost seventeen years away in Delhi. I’d left when I was eighteen, and so this was meant to feel like a fantasy homecoming.

Nine men from the packers and movers arrived one Saturday morning and, with a kind of vulgar efficiency, wrapped up the things that made up our life.

“Baavan box hai total,” the supervisor announced. Fifty two boxes.

Kitchenware, books, clothes, my box of underused Covid hobby supplies.

“Let’s take the banana plant, no?”

“Come on”.

K was insistent.

He and I had spent the week intermittently litigating what items will be left behind, and what would come with us.

As we’ve learnt, I am quick to discard things that might still have some potential.

It took the men four hours to disassemble our home. When they were done I felt more vulnerable than relieved.

3.

Many mornings, I’d wake up to kids singing their assembly prayer.

Two or three were always wildly out of tune. I’d be amused even before my eyes actually opened. It was a gentle way to meet the day.

Our apartment in Soami Nagar sat between two schools - a high school at the back of the house, and a pre-primary school across from the front. It was the homeliest place I ever lived in.

The living room was from a storybook. It had marigold granite flooring and exposed brick walls painted white, so the room seemed to gather and hold the daylight.

But the centrepiece was this imposing gulmohar tree that protectively flanked the front of the house.

Floor to ceiling accordion windows meant that you walked in and it immediately hit you: this enormous tree, buzzing with life. Like a painting. It changed through the day and through seasons. Crimson in summer, thick with foliage, almost covering the view of the sky in the monsoons, and visited by owls and butterflies and bats and squirrels and grey hornbills.

When we first moved in, my nervous system reacted with fear. I had never lived in a home so beautiful before. The scene was disorientingly idyllic, like a doll house. Almost too good to be true.

Am I “rich people” now?

I have bone china plates and cups and saucers, and they match.

We have a flower uncle deliver fresh flowers weekly.

Did I finally have my shit together?

4.

K and I had high hopes for the banana plant’s Bangalore era.

The city’s famed eternal spring and the red laterite soil would surely suit it better than Delhi’s harsh extremities. My childhood home had an overly eager elakki banana plant. It asked so little of us, and it flourished. It was responsible for both an endless supply of bananas and a persistent monkey problem.

But for weeks, the plant just stood there, awkward and frozen. Change felt lonely and uncomfortable. It was mourning, like me, the gap between expectation and reality. And quietly resisting the work of unearthing and re-rooting.

Three gulmohar trees stand in a line, overlooking Lalbagh lake. They are each twice as established as my Soami Nagar tree, forming a type of expansive roof over a bench I sit on after my run.

This is now my favourite spot in the city.

I’ll do some EFT and watch the sunset.

There’s a jacaranda tree in the distance, right below where the sun dips, like a dab of purple paint in the sunset.The color of the evenings vary each day, but it glows violet and blue and pink. There’s a rosy incandescent light settling over the lake while all the cormorants make their way back to their nests. A group of smaller birds, maybe starlings, perform murmurations across the sky.

I try to take a picture of the scene from my phone, but the result is underwhelming. Nature is always prettier in person. One of those rare things untouched by arrival fallacy.

Spring has finally sprung in Bangalore, and Lalbagh is now a type of higher dimension. In my runs I’ve spotted magnolias, figs, chikoos and cannon ball flowers.

I’m slowly beginning to know the city again through its trees.

The banana plant has sprung a few leaves. It is early romance season again.