Her Plants Outlived Her. I Kept Them Alive.
Watering the money plant became my only fluent prayer.
Twelve days after my mother's funeral, her plants started dying, and I took it personally. The tulsi went first, sulking brown at the edges like it knew. Then the ferns. Twenty three pots on a fourth floor balcony in Pune, all of them turning their faces away from me, the son who once killed a cactus by forgetting it existed.
Nobody had wanted them.
That is the part I keep going back to. When we sat down as a family to divide what she left, there were quiet, polite negotiations over the sewing machine, the pressure cooker with the burnt base she refused to replace, the gold that fit in one small box. The plants came up last, the way you mention a pet nobody wants to take. My brother lives in Dubai. My aunt said, with real regret, "Beta, my building has no light." And I heard myself say I would take them, all of them, with the confidence of a man volunteering to adopt twenty three children because the silence in the room was unbearable.
I moved them in two taxi trips. The driver helped me carry the big Dalda tin with the money plant in it, the oldest one, older than my marriage, and said, "Aap plants waale ho?" Are you a plant person. "No," I said, truthfully. "They're my mother's."
Present tense.
He was decent enough not to correct me.
Nobody writes guides on caring for a loved one's plants. I looked. There are guides for the paperwork of death, for the clothes, for what to say to children. There is nothing for standing on a balcony at 6 a.m. holding a plastic mug, realizing you never once, in forty years, watched your mother do this closely enough to copy her.
Because she did it daily and I treated it as scenery. That was her hour. Before tea, before the newspaper, before anyone else's needs woke up. She talked to them. We teased her about it endlessly, my brother doing her voice, asking the mogra about its exams. She would flick water at him and keep going.
So there I stood, her incompetent heir, drowning some pots and starving others, and the balcony kept dying on me in slow motion. I dreamed twice that she came back only to inspect the tulsi... and left without speaking to me.
What saved us, me and the plants, was her phone.
We had kept her number alive, none of us willing to be the one who cancelled it. Scrolling our old chats one night, I found years of voice notes I had half-listened to when it mattered. "Did you water the tulsi? Not too much, it hates wet feet." "The curry patta wants sun, move him left after October." "Money plant is greedy, ignore him a little, he grows better when ignored."
Him. Her. Every plant had a gender and a temperament and a file in her head, and it turned out she had been dictating the manual to us for years... and we had replied with thumbs up emojis.
I listened to all of them in one sitting, taking notes like a student who shows up in the last week of term. Then I went out at midnight and moved the curry leaf plant to the left.
The balcony steadied. And something in me steadied with it, because for the first time since the hospital, my grief had a chore attached.
Every morning, 6 a.m., her hour, one mug at a time. I am not a praying man, my mother made all my temple visits on my behalf, but I understood within a month that this was what I had instead. Watering the money plant became my only fluent prayer. The rest of the day I stammered through. That one hour, I knew all the words.
I started writing again in that hour too, on the steel stool she kept out there, mostly small poems about memory, about how much of a person turns out to be stored outside their body, in routines and pots and voice notes, waiting to see who will claim it.
Then, in March, the money plant began to die, and I came apart completely.
Not the ferns, which are drama queens. Not the roses. The money plant, the oldest, the one from the Dalda tin, the one that had climbed her kitchen window on a string grid my father put up in 1994 and outlived him too. Its leaves yellowed one by one, politely, like guests leaving a party.
I did everything. I did too much of everything, which may have been the problem. I stood on the balcony one evening actually saying out loud, "Please... Not you."
I took a leaf to the nursery near the flyover, the way you carry a report to a specialist. The owner, a dry old Maharashtrian uncle with soil in the creases of his hands, looked at the leaf, looked at me, and asked how old the plant was. "Thirty years, maybe more," I said. "It was my mother's. She died in August." And then, horrifyingly, in front of the seed racks and two schoolchildren buying a cactus, I started to cry.
He did not panic. He must see this more than anyone guesses, the people who come in carrying a dying plant and a dead person in the same breath. He made me sit on an upturned crate, gave me tea in a small steel glass, and told me the thing that changed the whole year.
"Old vine is tired," he said. "You can't save the whole plant. You save it in pieces. Cut here, below the node. Put in water. It will root. The plant doesn't end, it continues differently. Purana rasta khatam, naya shuru." Old road ends, new one starts.
You cannot keep a person alive. But you can keep alive what they kept alive, and some mornings that is almost the same thing.
I went home and made cuttings, seven of them, my hands shaking like a surgeon's should not. They sat in glass jars on my kitchen windowsill, and for two weeks nothing happened... and I refused to look at them directly, the way you avoid the phone when results are due.
Then one morning... there it was: a single white root, curled in the water like a question mark answering itself.
I sat down on the kitchen floor and laughed. Then the other thing. Then both together, which I have learned is how hope mostly arrives now, wet and undignified and real.
The cuttings all took.
And this is where the story stopped being mine alone. My brother flew back in June and left with one rooted jar wrapped in newspaper in his cabin bag, and her money plant now climbs a bookshelf in Dubai. My aunt with no light got one anyway; it is managing, like her. My daughter took one to her hostel in Manipal, where her roommates call it Aaji. Seven cuttings, six houses, three cities. My mother, continuing differently.
Last month I wrote all of this down properly, the taxi, the voice notes, the nursery uncle, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because she used to enter every ludicrous competition the housing society ran and win most of them, and it felt like keeping a family tradition watered.
The monsoon broke over Pune last week, her favourite season, the one month she let the sky do her morning job. I stood at the window with my tea and watched the rain hammer the balcony, all twenty three pots out there drinking, the old vine's daughter already reaching for the string grid.
The glass streamed. Through it the green blurred and swam, and for a moment the whole balcony looked the way things look through the other kind of water.
I let it. Then I drank my tea, and left them to their mother.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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