To the Groundskeeper of Lodi Garden
You were usually sitting with the other gardeners in the shade of the amaltas tree with its sprays of yellow blossoms. I never saw you pruning or planting or doing anything that gardeners do, yet you were clearly familiar with the landscape of Lodi Garden: intimate with the seasons, the flowers, the secrets held by its ancient tombs and trees. You would detach yourself from the group and amble toward me and my dog in your long white kurta and pants—spotless, strangely, considering your line of work—wishing me good afternoon, asking, “Did you see the roses today?”
The five thousand rose plants in the park were hard to miss, but you would insist I veer off the pathway and visit the rows of English roses miraculously blooming in both the scorching heat of summer and the deep cold of winter. “Stop by for five minutes at least,” you would command.
My dog Deuce and I always began our walk around the ninety-acre park in the urban expanse of New Delhi at the arched sixteenth-century bridge flanked by slim pilasters and dressed stone minarets, the faint rumble underfoot recalling the clatter of horse hooves and wooden chariot wheels. We would typically meet you at the halfway point of our walk, by the tomb of the ruler Muhammed Shah Sayyid, which is ancient and alien all at once, perched like a flying saucer on a small hillock, its large central dome skirted with sculpted stone canopies. You were taken aback when you realized I never deviated from the same outermost path I followed every day.
“Our park,” you explained, “is like a mandala. There’s the peripheral circle—the one you’re on—that brings you back to where you started from, but if you go inwards you’ll find that the paths go left, right, converge, and diverge.”
I ventured to say, “Doesn’t happiness lie in the center of a mandala?” You laughed when you understood I was alluding to how I doomed myself by keeping to the outer path. My excuse to you was that I didn’t have time to dally.
What I didn’t say was that I was wrestling with a sense of loss and disorientation, and wasn’t sure I had the energy to go off-path. I had moved back to Delhi because of my husband’s job, though I had not lived there full-time since graduating college. The opportunity to be close to family again was thrilling, and I had assumed I would slip effortlessly into the rhythms of the city I was so intimately acquainted with. What I had not bargained for was just how much Delhi and I had changed over the years.
The city was more frenetic than ever, and to my surprise I struggled to keep up with its invigorating pace. My language skills were rusty and while I looked physically like everyone else, my muddled accent, still native but influenced by all the places I lived before, gave me away as being “other.” I was beset with the notion that by moving away for so long, I had lost the connection to the place I held so dear.
I couldn’t tell you any of this at the time, as I didn’t fully understand it myself. Stunned by my inability to regain my sense of belonging and feeling out of sync in the very city that I should have felt most at home, I walked the outer circle with my dog without much thought or interest in what was around me.
“My language skills were rusty and while I looked physically like everyone else, my muddled accent, still native but influenced by all the places I lived before, gave me away as being ‘other.’”
It was by asking about my dog that we first began to converse. From then on, you would start talking without preamble while I yanked out my earbuds, scrambling to pause the podcast I was using to drown out my thoughts. I learned about your own dog called Rosy–or was it your tween daughter who was so named, though I privately judged you to be too old to have such a young child. We commiserated over the slow progress of the restoration work to the interiors of the tombs, where one could find squinches supporting the circular domes, soffits inscribed with Quranic scriptures, patterned red sandstone, and frescoed medallions of blue and white. The reigns of the Sayyid and Lodi kings resting there were brief and unexciting, their dynasties lasting but three or four generations before petering out.
You were amused by how the kings must have wanted their lives and exploits extolled in history books. Instead, they lay mostly ignored inside a city park, any hope for exaltation reduced to anyone who bothered to read the interpretive signs. Their dusty mausoleums have become Instagram-able backdrops for kid’s birthday parties and family picnics on the expansive lawns, the dark niches in the walls surrounding their tombstones now offering privacy to canoodling young lovers. I got the sense that such karmic ironies of life amused you.
“He will want a tip at Diwali,” a friend told me, and I was sure she was right. Such friendliness often has a transactional intention and like everyone else, you had perceived from our first meeting that I did not entirely belong. But the festive month came and went, and I didn’t see you for a while. When we did meet again, you spoke only of spotting a pair of grey hornbills. “They are in the peepul tree by the India International Centre,” you said.
Whenever we ran into each other during the couple of years I spent back home, it was always the same—you strolling toward us when we came into view as I pulled out my earbuds. Follow the ko-kila call of the rufous treepies, you coaxed; watch out for the pack of stray dogs who would bark ferociously apropos of some perceived threat but retreat quickly; wander around the crenelated monuments of glazed cerulean tiles where the lime-green parakeets swoop down from the laurel figs; step off the bridge and look for the white-throated kingfisher that is a sparkle of electric blue searching for insects and frogs by the banks of the lake. Tread surely toward the heart of the park, you urged.
“I found respite in quiet minutes spent by the tombs of forgotten kings.”
It may have been that I was politely responding to your efforts, or perhaps it was your persistence that I was shortchanging myself by skirting around the life flourishing within the park, but I eventually gave in to your promptings, venturing off to peer up at the hornbills with their telltale casque and drooping tails. I searched for a barbet’s broad yellow beak in the trees by an old turret, straining to hear its kutroo-koo call to locate it as you coached. Deuce and I wandered up the steps and into the dank hall of the rotund Bada Gumbad, its dome crowned with a stone lotus, and entertained ourselves watching the children play hide-and-seek around the latticed arches of the adjoining mosque. We explored the simple guest house on their shared plinth where weary travelers would take shelter, be fed, and find solace. Meandering down to the lake, vibrant green with algae, where the geese waited for our breadcrumbs, we found camaraderie with other locals and their dogs who drew succor from their ramblings off the outer path. Soon, I no longer relied on the drone of a podcast for relief from my relentless introspections. Instead, I found respite in quiet minutes spent by the tombs of forgotten kings.
One day, a friend who had lived her whole life in the city asked me to show an out-of-town relative around the park. “I don’t know it like you do. It’s your park,” she said. Unsettled for a moment, I could not refute the truth of her claim.
“It’s not happiness that lies in the center of the mandala,” you contended on one occasion. “What awaits—when we choose to untether ourselves from the constraints of the outermost circle and find our way within—is peace of mind.”
You were right.
Deuce in Lodi Garden. Photograph courtesy of the author.
About the Author
Tania Malik is the author of the forthcoming novel Hope You Are Satisfied (May 2023), set in Dubai during the months leading up to the first Gulf War. Her previous novel, Three Bargains, received a Publishers Weekly starred review and a Booklist starred review. She was raised in India, Africa, and the Middle East, educated in boarding schools in the foothills of the Himalayas, and has had a varied career in the travel and non-profit fields. She currently divides her time between San Francisco’s Bay Area and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She can be found at www.taniamalik.com and on Instagram @taniamalik.
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Header photo by Ayoub Kada.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
