My sister once sent me a screenshot of a tweet. It was a picture of a couple enjoying some quiet moments in their apartment balcony in Paris, which had this caption, “What’s stopping you from doing this on a Monday morning?”
The epic reply by a Mumbaikar was this: “First, we Mumbaikars take the balcony into the main house and fit a box grille around the windows. These box grilles are then either beautified with various potted plants or used as a clothesline or as a storage place for outgrown tricycles, prams, carrom boards and so on.”
There couldn’t be a truer statement to describe the essence of living in Mumbai apartments.
I’m particularly fascinated by the home gardens. People have gardens in the most odd spaces, though it will feel impossible or impractical to the untrained eye.
There is this one house which is at a level lower than the road. Its side walls hug the road. There is no footpath, which means that vehicles and people are literally going past their windows at all times of the day. After all, this is the city that never sleeps. Since this house is built so low, one would imagine that the windows are all important to let in some natural light.
But there, right on their window sills, by the road, is their garden. They have pots in both their windows with lovely plants growing and it also acts as their window curtain. Though I worry that they have blocked sunlight, the plus side is that they have kept their privacy while also ensuring a good dose of oxygen from this indigenous garden.
There is another house on a very narrow street whose residents have put rows of pots just on the street on either side of their main door. It reduces the space even further for vehicles to move, but no one objects to these green patches, I guess. Even with all the dust and heat, these plants thrive! I envy them so much as my plants are always on the verge of dying or simply not flowering for months together!
Another building in the same lane has a very narrow corridor as the only way in and out. Even this extremely narrow corridor is lined with pots and have plants with leaves of varied hues. Makes for such a pretty sight! Again, the practical side of me is always wondering how one would move quickly in such a congested space in an emergency.
There are so many kinds of gardens in the grille windows: perfectly symmetrical ones with the same kind of pots or the same kind of plants all in a row. Then there are others with varied sizes and shapes of pots with a variety of plants. There are some that are bursting with such large bougainvillea that it looks like a mini forest. Again, I’m bewildered that people don’t mind giving up the natural light that enters the house through those windows.
I keep talking about the reduced light in the house, because it is most essential during the monsoon. Lack of natural light during the Mumbai monsoon is how the walls are covered in mould so quickly. They creep up before you even know it. It grows on your walls, furniture and on your dark clothes inside the cupboards too. Cleaning them every week is a big task all through the season. This is definitely a story for another time.
But the award for the most dedicated gardener goes to this one girl I saw watering her plants. The house was on the first floor with no box grille on their window. Her garden was on top of the roof of a shop on the ground floor of their building. This part was an extended part of the building. So, while the girl stood on this “terrace” garden, her mother was handing her mugs of water from inside the house while she gingerly made her way to reach all the plants and there were plenty!
Also, another one that deserves an award for the cutest garden is this: in a small bylane, a very old house has a staircase going up to the balcony of the first floor house. All along the stairs and in the balcony, there are the smallest hanging pots I’ve ever seen. And just under the staircase, they’ve fit the slope with thin strips of wooden planks and used it as a notice board for the smallest pots there can ever be. It’s a riot of colours there, with green being the clear winner!
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