Kalimpong Calling

Monsoon Magic

The eleventh essay from my 2002 book Kalimpong Calling.

In Kalimpong the pre-monsoon rains are like jazz music — syncopated, sometimes sudden. You can step out into a bright morning and by afternoon find yourself ducking into Himalayan Stores to escape a ferocious downpour. I was never fond of the rains, especially the monsoon with its dreary predictability and mildewy mess. But this year I found myself actually waiting for them. When they arrived on time, I was grateful for this providential arrangement — unlike that of the PHE, it works, and it is free.

You can blame my newfound enthusiasm on my architect friend, who persuaded me to pay through my nose for a garden. At first it was just a fancy, but his sweet talk pushed me over the edge. So the dusty outcrop in front of my house was transformed into quaint brick terraces with winding steps and even a pool. And all this in Kalimpong, where they did the Neora to get us water. You can see why I felt like a sinner.

At first everything was dry — pond, bricks, winter itself. But there I was, staring at the skeleton of my new garden. Soon it was March, and time to give it flesh: to fill those oblong boxes with loamy mud, seedlings, and cuttings that would one day be my leafy paradise, where I would hear the bullfrog sing in the monsoon and dragonflies stir the water in spring with their fantastic red and blue vibrations.

My gardening would be organic. My friends would be the earthworm, the ladybird, the sparrow, and the spider. The marigold, I learned, repels root-chewing nematodes. No chemicals here. Let others ravage the Teesta with their generators or kill trees older than their religion. My garden would be a Noah’s Ark, a sanctuary for caterpillar and cotyledon.

Easier said than done. Gardening has three aspects: the botanical content (for the expert but not out of reach of the enthusiast); the design (layout, colour scheme, scent scheme — hard because you must think five years ahead); and the emotional quotient. This last is intangible. You can read books, consult encyclopaedias, and design on paper, but the joy of gardening lies in the irrational delight of watching a wisteria coil or a tendril climb. It is in the excitement you feel when soil stirs with new life.

Indeed for me the joy began even before planting. I fell in love with the names: ginkgo biloba, thunbergia alata (black-eyed Susan vine), the Swiss cheese plant. Suddenly these plants had personalities — the flamboyant philodendron monstera, the red-stemmed nandina domestica, the eccentric ginkgo, the fast-growing alpina that fills spaces with arboreal embrace. They are all my friends now.

Today the garden teems with life — green, yellow, variegated. I have learned to love the sunshine and the rain, the competition that fosters growth. Kalimpong in the monsoons can indeed be a promise, provided you learn to savour the newness of life, to cherish, as Frost said, “the first green gold, the hardest hue to hold.”