Treelogy. The plant whisperer

Perhaps because he was ‘deaf-and-dumb’, that nomenclature of a less empathetic era, Ajay da made a perfect ‘plant nurse’. Both can’t speak — that line of reasoning came as a serious joke from his many employers in our neighbourhood. Ajay da did speak, infrequently, a few times a year, though with great difficulty. When he could, he insisted that he be called ‘nurse’ because he had spent most of his life in a plant ‘nursery’. When his speech problem began to aggravate, Ajay da , illiterate for all purposes, got business cards printed — they had a stamp-size photograph of his face hanging, like a fruit, from a line drawing of a tree. On this monochrome, even dull-looking, business card was his name and nothing else, no phone number, no address.

The name was enough, regal and self-explanatory: Ajay Gachh Naas. Ajay was fine, and then Gachh, ‘tree’ in Bangla. ‘Naas’ must have been ‘nurse’, but the ‘r’ sound had disappeared easily, as it often does from a Bengali’s tongue. Ajay da ’s clientèle included many Marwari families in Siliguri, and the ‘naas’ they must have interpreted in Hindi as standing for ‘nerve’. Either way, Ajay da ’s supremacy as a plant nurse was established.

Ajay

da behaved more like a psychologist than a general physician. He spoke to the plants, scolded them, threatened them with dire consequences if they did not show the urge to live through the growth of new leaves and flowers; he pampered them after the flowering or fruit harvesting seasons. All these he did with such ease that it seemed no different from the way nurses treated our grandparents. But his behaviour and mannerisms were different from a gardener’s.

To begin with, what marked this difference was the diet Ajay

da fed the plants in his care. Not the water-and-manure staple of common gardeners but fish bones, rice water, fish scales, powdered egg shells, mashed vegetable peel, milk, even curd and paneer. If he found a tree or plant branch broken, Ajay da did not tear it off like most gardeners. He let it remain. He designed his own surgery and traction technology for plants — the severed branch with tiny pulley-like things hanging from ropes and strings looked straight out of some children’s picture book, but Ajay da was serious about the treatment and its imagined results. We saw him touching the tree and the severed branch from time to time — it looked like an exact replication of a nurse or doctor reading a pulse.

Whatever the treatment might have been, Ajay da ’s ‘patients’ usually lived long and well. And so no one grudged him his madness.

The Arthashastra often mentions an Ajay da -like figure: the phrase for the post is not Ajay da ’s ‘plant nurse’ but ‘superintendent of agriculture’. The Brihat Samhita suggests a parallel between tree medicine and human medicine, with the application of the three humoural classifications used in human medicine — wind, bile, and phlegm — to trees. Ajay da — we’d never know from where he might have inherited this knowledge — had tweaked it to include homoeopathy and allopathy. My grandmother found Ajay da feeding powdered paracetamol to our drooping guava tree on a hot day in August.

Ajay da indulged a cult of myth-making around him. A miracle worker, green thumb incarnate (his right hand had only four fingers; when he could speak, he’d told Mr Pradhan, his first employer, that the severed finger he’d planted in the nursery had grown into a ganja plant), natural botanist, an odd tautological phrase that we didn’t mind. Though, of course, I didn’t realise it then, I can now see how Ajay da helped us look at plant life differently. He did this, first by challenging our linguistic consciousness. And then the minor seismic shocks in our thought systems: he forced his employers to give him leave so that he could attend to a plant’s treatment. A parent or child’s illness gets an employee leave, but not the ill-health of a house plant (or even a pet animal). The easy indifference with which we accept the death of plant life was another. The funeral and the rituals of mourning that attend the deaths of humans Ajay da replicated in the lives of dead plants. He burnt them or buried them, he mumbled prayers for them, and once (though I have this only from hearsay) lit a candle for a departed cactus. All this seemed ostentatious — even hilarious — then, but when I visit him in hospital, where he will be operated for a fractured leg next week, I am grateful that Ajay da claimed for himself that unique tag.

When the nurse came to take readings, he gestured to me about getting him a stethoscope to check on his plants.

I’ve decided to give it to him on the day after his surgery.

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri