On Finding a Mali

On finding a genuine mali
by Punam Khaira Sidhu

Gardening as anyone will tell you is not everyone’s cup of tea. You need to know your grasses from your weeds and your aphids from your mealy-bugs. And more significantly the right poison to treat each. The advantages of grafting versus air-layering are not for the uninitiated. Take a simple matter like pruning a rose bush of its vagrant post-monsoon sprouting. It requires both knowledge and skill: knowledge of the woody and green stems and skill to clip the green ones at the right slanted angle so that you do not damage them. Its no wonder then that only a few blessed ones can claim to possess the legendary green fingers.

But this middle is not about gardening but about finding a gardener or a “mali”. You see most so-called malis in Chandigarh come from what they refer to as ‘dehat’ (UP and Bihar) and go through the process of daily-wager internship at Labour Chowk, do odd jobs painting houses, mending potholes in Chandi roads, weeding berms etc before they discover the upmarket status of malis in the spacious Northern sector homes. There of course, indulgent madams train them to clip hedges, mow lawns and even raise bonsai. A couple of entries in the annual Rose Festival later and they achieve iconic status. Also this is probably the only job apart from the Chandigarh IT Technology Park, where they get paid by the hour.

But coleuses rots and crotons wither, by the dozen, under these spurious malis. And naturally they can’t tell why, let alone resuscitate them. The real one, now, wouldn’t allow a plant to die unless it was hit by a missile. Even then he would, probably graft the fragments onto another and, save the genetic code. But after one such spurious worthy had laid some of my prized specimens to a premature rest, I decided to put my administrative capabilities to the test of finding the genuine article, a real mali.

Now the real mali knows and can pronounce the botanical names of even the most exotic and esoteric specimens of the plant and insect kingdom but can’t read hence clearly I couldn’t reach him through the “Classifieds”. My strategy, therefore, involved driving around my sector scanning healthy looking gardens and then addressing my requests and enquiries to the home owners.

The malis who responded to my fervent appeals, were put through my “Find a Genuine Mali Test” that went as follows: Can you paint? Can you repair roads? What are the winter flowers? How do you keep the lawns green through winter? etc ...Eleven interviews later, Eureka...! I do believe I might have found myself the genuine article. I am at peace now as indeed are my crotons, coleus and difenbechia. Amen.