My Landlord's Daughter Waters My Plants
I never asked; the city sometimes assigns you a family.
There are three plants on my balcony and in four years I have watered them perhaps eleven times. They are thriving. This is not my doing, and for the first several months I genuinely believed it was a miracle, because the alternative was that someone was entering my rented barsati while I was away, and my landlord had a lot of rules about exactly that sort of thing.
Sharma-ji's rules were taped inside the stairwell on the day I moved in. No non-veg cooking. No guests after ten. Rent by the fifth. Gate locked at eleven sharp, and the way he said sharp, you could shave with it. He was a tall, dry, formal man who wore a full sleeve shirt in June and referred to me exclusively as "tenant sahab" for the first year, which from him was practically an embrace.
I had come to the city for a job that looked much better in the offer letter than in the fluorescent light of its actual office, and I knew nobody. My first winter I got so homesick that I did what homesick people do in every city on earth: I bought plants. Three of them, from a nursery cart, chosen with no knowledge whatsoever. A money plant, a tulsi, and something the cart man called "december" with great confidence. I put them on the balcony ledge, watered them with a steel glass for one enthusiastic week, and then my project shipped and I worked ninety-hour weeks and forgot they were alive.
They did not die. That was the first strange thing.
I came back from a two-week Bangalore trip in March fully prepared to hold a small funeral, and instead the money plant had climbed half a metre of string that I had definitely never tied, and the december thing was covered in pink flowers like it was showing off for someone. I stood on the balcony with my suitcase still in my hand. In the flowerpot, planted like a flag, was an ice-cream stick with careful Hindi lettering: isko roz paani nahin chahiye. Zyada pyaar se yeh mar jaayega. This one does not need water daily. Too much love will kill it.
It is an unsettling experience, being gardened.
The culprit took three weeks to catch because she was small... and I was slow. Sharma-ji's daughter, Gunjan, eleven years old, two plaits, school uniform the colour of weak tea. She had a jug with a bent spout, and she came up the back stairs at five in the evening, watered my three plants, pinched off the dead leaves, said something to the tulsi that I never once managed to overhear, and left. When I finally opened the balcony door mid-operation, she did not startle, did not apologise... did not explain. She looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient's relative and said, "Aap ka money plant bada ho raha hai. Isko bada gamla chahiye." Your money plant is growing. It needs a bigger pot.
Then she picked up her jug and left, and that, apparently, was my notice period.
I bought the bigger pot. You would have too.
I want to be honest about how lonely I was in that flat before all this, because the story is dishonest without it. I ate standing up. I knew my delivery riders' names and nobody else's. On Sundays I sometimes took the metro to the last station and back just to be inside a crowd, and I wrote long, circling things at night that never once used the word lonely, which is how you can tell exactly what they were about. Into that flat, uninvited, came an eleven-year-old with a bent jug and opinions about drainage. I did not understand yet what I had been handed.
The understanding came in pieces, the way it always does when you rent someone's upstairs. From the pressing wala I learned that Sharma-ji's wife had died two years before I moved in. From the milk booth aunty I learned that the terrace, my terrace, the one I paid extra for, had been Mrs. Sharma's garden. Forty pots, once. Bougainvillea trained over the water tank. After she died, Sharma-ji had every single pot given away in one weekend, to neighbours, to the mandir, to anyone with hands, because he could not walk past them. The terrace I rented as "open space, good ventilation" was actually a cleared field. I had been living in the middle of someone's grief and calling it a good deal.
And Gunjan, who was nine when the pots went away, had watered them with her mother every evening of her life until then.
Then a tenant sahab with more salary than sense bought three random plants and abandoned them on the same ledge where the bougainvillea used to be.
She was not doing me a favour. I was the favour.
My negligence had accidentally rebuilt the one room of her house that her father had dismantled, and she moved back into it with a jug. Once I understood that, I stopped thanking her, because thanking her made it mine, and it was never mine. I just started buying pots. One or two a month, casually, as if I had developed a hobby. Curry patta because she mentioned it. A rose, which she called an unnecessary drama plant and then tended fiercely. By the second year the ledge was full and we had started on the floor.
The city doesn't give you a family. It leaves the gate ajar and lets one wander in.
Sharma-ji knew, obviously. Sharma-ji knew everything that happened within fifty metres of his gate. For a long time he said nothing... and I said nothing, and Gunjan operated her jug in the space between our silences. Then one October evening I came home at eight and found him on my terrace with a cup of tea, standing in front of the drama rose with his hands behind his back, a formal man inspecting a parade.
I froze in the doorway. He did not turn around.
He said, "Meri wife december mein hi lagaati thi yeh wala." My wife used to plant this one in December too. Then he finished his tea, nodded at me, said "tenant sahab" in a voice with something new in it, and went downstairs.
The rent has gone up exactly once in four years, by an amount so token I suspect it was for appearances. Meanwhile I have been absorbed the way houses absorb people. Diwali cleaning happens to my flat whether I consent or not. When I had dengue in 2023, dal came up the stairs twice a day and Sharma-ji himself sat with me for the platelet report, reading it slowly, like rent terms. Gunjan is fifteen now and taller than the rose, and last month she informed me, doctor to relative, that she will be taking her boards and I will be watering the plants myself for three months, and that she has written out the schedule. There is an ice-cream stick in every pot. Instructions. Warnings. On the tulsi, just a name, her mother's, which I was never told and never asked about, lettered as carefully as a prayer.
I got a better flat offer last spring. Company lease, fifteen minutes from the office, actual parking. I read the email twice... went out to the terrace, and stood in the middle of forty pots at sunset while the water tank ticked and cooled, and somewhere downstairs a jug was being filled. I wrote about it that night, the way I write about family now, which is a thing I did not used to have words for in this city.
I declined by morning.
Too much love would kill it, but the right amount... it turns out, the right amount grows up a string you never remember tying.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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