Babies?” asked Amma spiritedly. “Then I’ve had enough of them! I’ve brought up two (she meant me and my sister, of course) as well as I could, and now these babies are all yours!”

There was a strange glint in Appa’s eyes. “A challenge!” he cried. He bowed Sir Walter Raleigh style, doffed an imaginary cap in Amma’s direction and said, “I’ll not disappoint you, Madam!”

“You stay away from these plants!” he said to no one in particular the next day as he marched into the house with a load of books… four from the British Council Library, five from the American Library and an assorted collection of dog-eared books from various friends … all on house plants and how to keep them happy.

That Saturday and Sunday there was not even a mouse of a stir from Appa. Then Sunday evening he emerged from his cocoon, all set to show off his new-found knowledge.

“Looking after plants does not start and stop with singing to them!” he said grandly. And he diagnosed that all our plants had grown “tight,” that they were “potbound.”

Amma was out on her weekly shopping, and I was the only one around he could show off to. Sad!

“How do you know?” I asked suspiciously.

“I’ll show you!” he said promptly.

And as he looked around, he told me how plants’ roots got all tangled up and stunted when they had to keep growing inside pots that had grown too small for them. Then, he said, the roots might come peeping out through the drainage hole.

He chose the biggest pot that Amma had (the monstera) and picked it up. I peered at the bottom carefully. There were no roots peeping from anywhere.

“This plant is not potbound!” I said.

“Ah! Just you wait and see what’s inside!” murmured Appa. “To check roots, you hold the pot in your right hand, like this, and you spread the fingers of your left hand over the top …”

“You are going to DRO …”

CR … ASH! Went the pot. My mother’s favourite monstera lay in shambles. I was dismayed, but Appa seemed to take it in his stride. “Not to worry!” he said. “I made the mistake of starting with the biggest pot we had. Lesson number one: never overestimate your own strength!”

He bent down and picked up Amma’s rubber plant.

“Do you think you should?” I had to ask.

“Have faith in your father, boy!” admonished Appa as he continued with his lesson. “Now, after inverting the pot and holding it with one hand, you hold it such that the stem comes between … damn! … the second and oof! … third finger of the left hand!”

To be continued —
Geeta Dharmarajan’s short story, Who wants green fingers anyway? first appeared in the children’s magazine Target edited by Rosalind Wilson. It was later published in the short story collection, The Carpenter’s Apprentice, by Katha, a Delhi-based non-profit organisation and publishing house.

Illustrations by Suman Choudhury