The travails of my tulsi plants

 

It is peak winter here – 5 degrees on average at nights, 10 -15 in the daytime. The pale sunlight takes hours to trickle and accumulate warmth on your bare skin while cold drafts of polar winds blow in steadily from the Antarctic lands. I take comfort indoors wrapped from head to toe, but when I look outside, I feel a pang of guilt – my tulsi plants seem to fight the winter winds alone.  While I am a utilitarian gardener, ensuring all growth can yield something edible, the tulsi is an exception – not that I don’t often chew on its leaves (Thank you, ayurveda), but I have grown the little shrub because primarily, it reminds of home. Mind you, Tulsi has many species, some of which grows expansively even in northern tropical Australia, but essentially, it is a plant of the tropics that love sun and moisture. These temperate lands blasted by polar vortices is no land to grow the tulsi. Yet, in my own footsteps, I have brought them here, exiling them in these far-off lands, where now they are fighting cold and mist. Hence, mea culpa, my guilt looking outside the window.

But my tulsi plants are a resilient hardy lot. They need little, they give much more in return. In summer, they thrive extensively, and small cuttings have led new plants to grow and proliferate. I had bought 2 saplings here – the greener one (Ram tulsi or Lakshmi tulsi) and the slightly darker, purplish one (Krishna tulsi or the Shyama tulsi). From two, I grew over a dozen excluding many more that I have gifted to friends (my plan of creating back-up stocks given the unpredictable pangs of winter that intensifies in the slightly hilly clime where I live). Autumn saw a proliferation of their extremely fragrant flowers – the Krishna Tulsi with its purple flowers is so delightful you can spend hours gazing at the inflorescences. And their fragrance – you crush one leaf, and you float back home in no time.

I keep talking of home, as I grew up in a house that always had a tulsi – either in the garden or in the rooftop or in our balcony – basking in the summer sun, rejuvenating in the indigo monsoon, mellowing in autumn, and then holding fort in winter, only to burst forth anew in spring – a small shrub but flourishing in every season. Most households in India revere the tulsi –it is worshipped as the avatar of Lakshmi, besides being considered sacred by Vaishnavs (perhaps exclaiming why the monikers are addressed to Vishnu’s avatars). The tradition comes from Vedic times with multiple stories in the Purana revolving around the Tulsi - Even Krishna’s Vrinda-van meant forests of tulsi. I am not overtly religious, but the tulsi reminds of home. In this land so far away, I seem to cling even harder to every thread that trails back home, no matter how threadbare it is. And so, while I never bothered nurturing any of this when I was hopping from one city to another in India, here, I must have spent hours watering my little Vrindavan of a dozen pots, looking at the buzzing bees drawn to the same fragrance that I admire, and taking countless macro shots of the inflorescences.

Winter arrives, and my garden has shrunk – which is obvious. Yet, as I said, the tulsi is one resilient plant. It is the only one still blooming, still nurturing both pollinating bee and philosophizing boy. And I keep watering the plants, to ensure despite all the chills and the wintry mist, there is hope and a chance the tropical plants will surpass the travails of this temperate land. That the pale sunlight trickle of the winter solstice still be sufficient in this long wait to spring.

The resilience has helped pass half of winter. As the solstice passes by, and Uttarayan begins, I hope my tulsi can sustain the ongoing winter. And while I have dragged these little plants to join me in my exile, today they seem to show me the way – that you can continue to be who you are in an unknown land, and yet survive and surpass the test. The sun may turn paler, the winds far cooler, but if you stay true to yourself and your values, the bees will continue to come to you, when the rest of the garden goes empty.

In that vrinda-van, if you sit and meditate as a true devotee, perhaps you can even hear Krishna’s flute wafting through the ages, flowing through the breeze, and dancing amongst the purpled leaves and flowers of the blessed basil…

9^th July’2023