The Constant Gardeners

Yesterday was a good day.  On a whim I decided to go to the government run Sunder Nursery in Delhi.  Based on all past experiences with almost anything tainted by the establishment in our country, I expected to find a sad, grimy, wasteland.  However, much to my surprise, what I experienced was a totally blissful couple of hours, albeit with some typical abecedarian culmination without which any encounter with officialdom would leave one feeling slightly unsettled and off balance.

The first thing that hits you as you enter the gates is the disconnect you suddenly feel from the din of Mathura road considering you are barely a few yards away from the main road. The nursery is really beautiful and lives up to its claim of being the largest in Asia. The various sections are very well organised and laid out.  The perennials are divided into shady and sunny expanses with large, old trees dotting the landscape. The greenhouse was mouthwateringly lush.  The seasonal acres were a riot of colour.  The gardeners were knowledgeable, engaged, and very helpful – ready with advice and care instructions when asked for.  I know I sound a bit like an advertorial for the nursery but, in my defence, the afternoon was just so pleasurable that I feel compelled to publicly admit that my preconception was way off the mark!  The best part was that the place was completely uncrowded.  Besides us (and the people working there), I noticed only one other person.

I did not get to the bonsais or the section where manure and other accoutrements of gardening are sold, but elsewhere I bought plants with total indulgence towards myself.  At each greedy acquisition, the employee accompanying me handwrote a tally in duplicate, with price, on a sheet that had ‘gate pass’ printed on it.  The plants were all loaded onto my vehicle and I was told that the payment would need to be made ‘in cash’ on my way out, near the gate.  We said our ‘thank yous’ and goodbyes, and drove off.

At the exit were two guards who pointed us to the office.  Inside, there were two ladies and one gentleman sitting behind a counter, less than two feet from each other.  I handed my ‘gate passes’ to the gentleman along with the money.  He ignored the proffered cash but took the gate passes from my hand.  Then he proceeded to laboriously transcribe all that was written on the two sheets of paper, on to one –  also in duplicate.  In the meanwhile, the lady in the middle was sitting with a bowl of seeds very precariously balanced in her lap and a bunch of little envelopes on the counter in front of her into which she was meticulously transferring the seeds -  a teaspoon full into each at a time.  The gentleman finished his transcribing, tore off the first copy and handed it to me along with the earlier two sheets (gate passes), still ignoring my outstretched hand with the money.  I then asked in the general direction of the three whom I should make the payment to as there was no cash register in evidence.  The two flanking the seed lady laconically nodded in her direction.  I waited with trepidation as she juggled with her spoon, and paper packets, and seeds, expecting either the seed bowl or the packets to flop to the ground and the seeds to spill all over.  She managed to get everything out of the way without any mishap and reached out for the payment.  I handed her the money with what I surmised was the final bill just given to me by the gentleman sitting to her right.  She couldn’t care less about it but impatiently wiggled her fingers at me indicating that what she needed from me were the gate passes.  She briskly stamped those, handed me the change, plonked the money in a drawer, and returned to her interrupted task with an air of somebody who has a heavy cross to bear.  Back at the gate, the guards took the two gate passes from me and waved us through without even a pretense of checking off the items in the car against the ones listed on the gate pass. 

As to what the other lady’s job description was, who knows!