The little jasmine

I have a famous brown thumb. Nothing I plant normally gets anywhere. I therefore simply don’t do any gardening whatsoever. The brown earth of my backyard mocks me constantly. I have tried gardeners but S will not let me plant flowers or put in a lawn. He thinks we should grow organic vegetables. I cannot find a gardener who knows squat about planting vegetables however! Besides that just means more work for me – he isn’t going to water them or fertilize them or even look at the backyard more often than once a year. So I said forget it.

This plant however I had put in quite a few years ago. Its a jasmine plant. The flowers are not very pretty unlike jasmine flowers normally – in fact they are a little ungainly. The petals lack symmetry and the colour is off-white as opposed to the pristine whiteness of the other varieties. But oh the flowers are so sweet-smelling that a single bloom can fill the air with heady fragrance. During one of my backyard-renovation schemes, I had gotten the wall tiled with terracotta tiles. I had told the workers expressly to not step on the plants but they did just that. Out of the plants that I lost, the little jasmine plant was the one I missed most. It lay crushed on the ground looking sad and done for. I left it just so thinking that there was nothing I could do for it but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

Today morning I sat quietly at the dining table, closed off from the world and lost in my thoughts which were not of a very happy nature. I had to think of something else to focus on – writing was a thing of the past. What did it matter that its perhaps my only talent – without validation of any sort, without growing into anything more than mere writing it meant less than nothing in the long run. So there I sat with my chin on my hand looking out at a brown backyard and resting my eyes on the little mango tree when I spotted a flash of white. I looked carefully and to my surprise saw one little ungainly jasmine blossom on a tiny plant. I got up and peered through the grills. I wasn’t mistaken – there it was – smiling at me – as though back from the dead. I had given it no chance of survival. It had taken so long to revive itself that I had indeed forgotten about it altogether.

A slow smile started. The ugly jasmine didn’t die after all. Maybe it was unimportant to everyone else. Certainly my husband wouldn’t notice it. But for me it was like a sign. It didn’t seem to matter to the little plant that it could only produce one flower. It didn’t seem to matter to the flower itself that it was not at all pretty. Neither did it bother itself with wondering if anyone else could appreciate its fragrance. It was just a flower – it bloomed – those who wished to enjoy it could do so freely. But whether you paid attention or not, whether you valued it or not, it would continue to bloom and spread fragrance – that was its inherent nature – no one could change that not even the flower itself.

I did not magically transform back to my normal self but I did start thinking that it didn’t matter so much whether I would ever write my book or whether anyone around would believe in me enough to think that I had it in me. I cannot stop writing. Its my nature – maybe these words are only for myself. Maybe, just maybe someone who is going through a hard time will come across these lines and think that everyone has a time to bloom, that bad patches cannot last forever, that the most worthwhile thing you can do is be true to yourself. And me? I am going to go and smell that jasmine J