Hari, the Gardener

The bushes and trees in the garden were massacred. I had asked Hari the gardener to trim them. When I came back after running some errands, almost every leaf and flower had been wrenched or chopped off. The loud sprays of bougainvillea, the jasmine flowers that bloomed every night, the hibiscus flowers that little birds like to trapeze off were all gone. Only brown, amputated branches were left on stubby pedestals.

It happens. You ask for a trim, and you get a full-blown Tirupati-style shave.

You might have heard my disbelieving scream echoing through the city, sending volleys of birds off into the sky.

Bolo Hari, Hari Bol. Bolo Hari, Hari Bol. "Chant the name of Hari (God)." I remembered that chant rising from the streets through the window of my family's Calcutta apartment every time a funeral procession passed by.

I took several deep breaths and stewed inside the house. When Hari showed up hours later, I had calmed down. There are thousands of gods in India. And one of them had just saved Hari his job.

“Pervah nahi,” Hari said casually. Don’t care, it translates. I took umbrage the first dozen times I heard it. You mess up and then you tell me not to care? What Hari actually means is, “Don’t worry.”

“It’ll grow back in no time.” It did. But now Hari indulges my peculiar attachment to leaves and flowers and only takes off a hand’s length of branches at a time.

I’ve long been dubious of Hari’s botanical knowledge. He claims he grew up on a farm has been an agricultural laborer all his life. But since the city’s expansion east has swallowed farm land, Hari now tends some of the gardens in my subdivision, including mine.

In India, people ring your doorbell asking for work minutes after you move in. They know because someone who knows someone who knows someone else told them.

When Hari showed up, I told him I didn’t need a gardener. His shoulders sagged with disappointment. No, no one else had beaten him to the job, I assured him. I was planning to tend our garden myself. I had my own tools. I just needed someone to cut the grass a couple of times a month.

Hari was skeptical. He was thinking: People go abroad and come back all funny. What about jhadu? he asked. Na-ah. I didn’t need someone to sweep the garden every day. I was determined to do as much of my own work as possible and turn nobly away from the nitpicky Indian habit of having everything in the house swept and cleaned every day. I’d lived with that in America and grown to enjoy my privacy and self-sufficiency.

India is a place that tests all your resolves and turns them upside down. In a few days, my garden looked ready for intervention. I couldn’t just spend a few solitary hours a week weeding and watering and snipping I imagined I could. The garden begged for the attention of a broom. There were leaves blowing from everyone else’s garden and my own. Little foil packets of paan masala and pieces of plastic showed up from nowhere. Was a secret league of under-employed gardeners planting these in their efforts to persuade misguided expatriates to employ them?

I showed a friend my little green patch that had already come up in three weeks. “What’s the green tile you have there,” he said pointing to a bed of methi greens.

“What do you mean tile? Why would I put tile here?”

It was a green snake with black markings on its green body.

I only tend to potted plants in the front of my house since. Hari has charge of the garden.