Wild Monsoon World
Sohaila Abdulai writes:
While Xin, Chen, Wan, Ping and the other Chinese farmers are busy growing vegetables in Manhattan, USA, it is the beginning of the monsoon in Maharashtra, India, and we have to cut, cut, cut.
What is your favourite stuff? The substance that thrills you most? Emeralds, silk organza, hot rice, the curve of your lover’s cheek? Mine is mud – red Maharashtra mud, to be exact.
The red mud I grew up with is full of iron oxides, silica, alumina, titania and calcium oxide. It is soft and full of nutrients, thanks to mangroves, snails and many, many worms. If you ride on a State Transport bus from the city to any village in the dry season, you will reach your destination covered in fine red dust. It will, unless you are dead inside, give you joy. Here in Maharashtra’s Raigad District, the soft red mud turns into blazing orangey-red lakes when the monsoon rain hits, and it will make you a little crazy, a little out-of-control. Which is just what it does to the trees.
Here in our garden and all up and down the coast, the red mud is like crack cocaine for the local flora. Anything grows anywhere anytime, but in the monsoon, the combination of wind and water and fitful sun mean that our biggest task on the land is not growing, but cutting.
My mother’s garden is a living kaleidoscope. Neither of my parents, who ran an orchid nursey, could resist a cutting or seed or bulb from anyone, or ever say no to colour. So we live by the sea surrounded by bougainvillea, hibiscus, frangipani, wild berries, native orchids, figs, a weird giant Christmas tree that grew through the pot and is now taller than the house, and tall mango, coconut and casuarina trees. As soon as June and the monsoon arrive, everything goes berserk and we have to call in the Merry Men before the inmates take over the asylum.
The Merry Men is our name for a motley crew of locals from the nearby village, some of whom we employ all year round to water, prune etc. Right now, though, we need reinforcements, so a line of men appears every morning, sickles in hand. Vivek, our gardener, fell out of a tree and smashed his foot when he was a boy, and now walks with a limp. Bharat has one arm that doesn’t quite work but gets around just fine in his sandals that are handmade by his dentist who also makes shoes. Pritesh used to go out on a fishing boat but gave up the high seas to start a family and still walks with a slight sway, not quite fully on land. They cut all day, discuss everything at great length, drink cups of the world’s sweetest tea, and haul away baskets of foliage, ready for the rain to create more.
One day, the official tree cutters arrive to climb the tall trees and trim them to prevent them from falling on us in monsoon storms. The leader of the crew is Amol, and he brings three or four helpers, plus the star of the show, Mangesh the Adivasi. Adivasis are aboriginal people, and Mangesh has been climbing trees since he could walk. He is small, silent and focused. It is raining when they arrive, and very windy, but he walks up to a 50-foot casuarina and starts climbing, holding a coil of rope and a chainsaw. Up in the tree, the rope is carefully tied (to protect the tree, not the tree-climber) so the back-seat drivers below can tell him exactly how it should fall. He stands on top on an impossibly small branch, swaying in the wind, completely at home. He is wearing shorts and a shirt, no shoes or hat or other useless impediments. After much sawing and chopping, a giant branch crashes to earth, to be hauled off by the people below. And so it goes. Nine trees are ruthlessly chopped; we don’t want a repeat of the time when one crashed through the roof, stopping two feet short of my sleeping infant daughter.
A day or two later, the cut bougainvillea stalks, all pruned except for the ones that have birds nesting in them, already have fresh green fuzz on them. The small hibiscus, transplanted to their monsoon homes in a less windy part of the garden, look nicely rooted in their new beds of red mud where they will stay until September. The wild grass at the back has grown another inch overnight. The moss on the flowerpots is turning into baby ferns. A striped snake darts through a red mud puddle near the gate, into the giant saucer-shaped leaves that have sprung up overnight, each holding perfect exquisite clear pools of rainwater that reflect the wild green unstoppable world.
We buried my father in a homemade grave of red mud. My father was the Merriest Man of all, and I can’t think of anything he’d have liked better than to be part of this seething landscape. Red Maharashtra mud. Magical as primordial ooze, bearer of gifts, mad broth of life.
Sohaila Abdulali is the author of several books, including What WeTalk About When We Talk About Rape. Her stories here are excerpts from her new book on women, land and belonging.
