Bonsai Trees | Sangeetha G

It was eight in the morning. I walked up to the top floor. This is his dedicated hour in the morning for his babies- bonsai babies. If not travelling, between half past seven and half past eight in the morning, you can find him on the top floor. At night, before going to bed, he would meet them again.

My husband is passionate about bonsai trees. Our 5000 sq ft top floor of the house is a haven of bonsai trees. He calls it ‘little jungle’. Once you enter the floor, you would feel as if you are in a jungle. There is a water fountain at one end and a tiny stream runs from one end of the floor to the other, cutting it diagonally. The multi-colour pebble-laid pathway meanders through the foliage of tiny trees. You can take a miniature bridge to cross the stream gurgling underneath. The tree pots are placed on wood stumps of varying heights. They are stacked up on the walls as well and the entire area is covered with soothing shades of green, while the translucent glass ceiling gives you a glimpse of the open blue sky. Trees across the world, you name it, we have it in our jungle.

As expected, he was carefully examining each tree with a servant in tow. Oaks, maples, pine, banyan trees, that would otherwise grow more than 45 metres tall, stood in pots like babies which forgot to grow up. But their bulbous trunks and roots and manicured canopy tell you that they indeed are trees.

He kept instructing the servant as to how the new ones should be pruned off their branches, leaves and roots, wired and treated. He designs how the trunk, roots, each branch and leaf should grow – what should be retained and what should go. “Creating a bonsai tree is an art. You design the tree and decide how it should grow and that makes you feel like God”. That is his oft quoted lines about his decades-old passion.

“Today a business reporter is coming here in the evening to interview me,” I said. Without looking up he replied, “I will sit with you”.
“I don’t even remember how many interviews I have given to newspapers, magazines and other periodicals. Why do you want to be there today?,” I asked curiously.

“It is a financial daily and not a lifestyle magazine. They would somehow try to get out some financial numbers,” he said.
“Business dailies meet you regularly at the office. This reporter wants to specifically talk to me, I said, without openly showing my displeasure.

“It is your interview. I will just be around if you need some numbers. The numbers should not go wrong,” he pacified.
Well, I was just talking about my husband’s passion for bonsai. Let me also tell you about what he does otherwise. He runs petroleum refineries, ports, a construction company, a textile mill and a few infrastructure finance companies. He has been in the Forbes list of billionaires for the past three years.

So, now you are curious to know more about us, aren’t you? I met him when he had come to my college to attend a function and give away the scholarships for the bright students among the underprivileged. He just had a construction company at that time. After receiving the scholarship, I gave a speech on my right to have opportunities in life and that my family background should not define me and limit me from growing.

During my graduation, I got a chance to intern in his company. He would greet me in the morning every day during my internship days in the company. Those days, the company started receiving several large projects and it had started growing fast. According to him, some projects came in due to sheer luck. The business started diversifying.

At the end of our business management programme, he came over to the college again to give away the awards. With all humility, let me inform you that I was the gold medallist. I received job offer from an Information Technology company with a handsome pay.
Before I could join the company, I got a call from him. I assumed it was a call as a management trainee in his construction business. I decided to give it a thought only if the remuneration was better.

He put a proposal before me. “I am inviting you to join us as a director on the board,” he said. I could not make any sense of what he was offering. How can a graduate without any job experience become a director of a company? “Is it a joke?”, I wondered.
“No, you can become a director and part of the board after marrying me,” he said. I sat there for some time without saying anything. He had caught me completely off-guard. I had never sensed that he had any such feelings for me.

“I think you are my lucky charm and I want you to be with me ever,” he said. I could not understand where he got this ‘lucky charm’ idea. I did not believe it then. But I had to believe it five years into our marriage when our group turnover grew several fold and my husband entered the Forbes list.

The marriage was a giant leap for me – from a cramped single-bedroom government flat to a sprawling villa in the upmarket neighbourhood of the city. It was a new life for me. It took me almost two years to get groomed to match the lifestyle of my husband and etiquette of the elite he mingled with. He helped me shop the best from the international apparel brands. I got the best jewellery from Tiffany and Cartier. All these years I have not repeated an apparel or a pair of shoes in public.

My daily routine is as tightly-scheduled as my husband’s. I head the corporate social responsibility programmes of the group. Though the CSR team manages the activities, I attend their public events on a regular basis.

As the only woman director on the board, I attend most of the meetings and ensure my presence at the Annual General Meeting and the press conference thereafter. Three years ago, we launched a premier football team and I am the face and charm of the team. The team has not tasted failure in the past three sessions. Visibility of the group has received a boost with the football team and now we use the team’s victories for most of the brand promotion activities.

Our day today life is not complete without the evening parties. It could either be a business party or those for close friends and well-wishers. I always ensure that I look my splendid best for the parties. While the women adore my outfits and accessories, men prefer to walk around the little jungle of bonsai.

Several lifestyle magazines have featured my husband’s passion for bonsai trees. I am also a constant presence on Page 3 of the dailies. Things like my diet, my favourite apparel brands and designer wear and my vacations are news for them. My Instagram stories too become news on a regular basis. After all, my journey from the government flat to the priciest neighbourhood of the city is no less a dream.

The business reporter arrived at five in the evening. We had just started, talking about the CSR projects of the group, when my husband joined us. Once he joined, the questions largely centred around the different business verticals, new investments and projects and my husband answered all the questions.

She then turned to me and asked me about the premier football league team. She wanted to know how the sports venture is in synergy with the objectives of the company. My husband offered to take that question. She was eager to know whether the vagaries of a venture like sports could affect the investor interests of the holding company. I had never thought that such financial complexities were involved in the business and how each and every step of the company is up for scrutiny of the investor community. For me the football team was just a brand-building exercise. My husband tactfully answered the questions and convinced her that the holding company’s financials would remain unaffected even if the football team meets failures. He then detailed the plans for the sports venture, how we were planning to hive off the business as a subsidiary and looking at diluting the stake to secure private equity funds.

I was not privy to any such plan. In fact, I had not even gone through the balance sheet of the sports venture properly. I started feeling uneasy about how little I know about the venture which I supposedly headed.

Once the interview was over, she took our photos. My husband asked me to show her our ‘little jungle’. She had read about my husband’s passion for bonsai trees, but was seeing them for the first time. She was curious about how my husband took care of them. Step by step, I detailed the entire process of creating bonsai trees and added his favourite lines on them.
“I pity them,” she said.
“Excuse me!” I wondered.
“I was just thinking about the predicament of the trees. They would have grown up tall and large in the wild. They would have wanted to touch the skies, spread their roots voraciously

around and would have rejoiced on their prowess to find water and nutrients from the soil. They would have proudly housed several birds, insects and animals. By now, they would have seen their seeds sprouting and growing up. But, they are squeezed into tiny pots with the roots clipped and branches pruned. They look like trees, but they are not. They are a form of life which is stunted but still alive or rather kept alive. It is a cruelty to the trees. I feel pity for them,” she said.

That night, I lay on my bed waiting for sleep. I don’t know why my thoughts were wandering around my college days and my friends. We used to diligently make plans to found a start-up after studies. We used to come up with ideas, do research on the feasibility of such ventures and think about ways to get funding. We were starry-eyed about the future – of building something from scratch, learning and unlearning, committing mistakes and imbibing lessons from them and achieving something in life. I used to imagine how proud we would feel when our start-up grew into a large company and how proud I would make my parents by building something on my own.

After marriage, I have not heard from my friends nor have they contacted me ever. In fact, I have not even remembered them once in all these years. Did they launch any start-up? If so, they could have approached me for funding. But they have not. How far and cut off I am from my past?

The next morning, after my husband left for the office, I asked the staff to carry some of the bonsai trees into my car. I made them squeeze in as many as possible and collected a few essential tools. I drove them away till the end of the city limits, where I could see vacant land. I stopped my car and chose a portion of land which was moist enough. I took out the shovel

and started digging the earth. I planted the trees in the pits. I was not sure whether they would be able to adapt to the new surroundings and survive. But they deserved a chance to grow wild. The process took a couple of hours and I was exhausted in the hot sun. Once I finished the job, I got into the car and drove back into the city. I still did not have any clear direction in mind. After a few hours’ drive, the vehicle stopped in front of my father’s flat.

Sangeetha G works as a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Sky Island Journal, Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Indian Review, Nether Quarterly, Muse India, Storizen, The Story Cabinet and Borderless Journal. Her stories have won Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest and Strands International Flash Fiction contest. Her debut novel ‘Drop of the Last Cloud’ was published in May 2023.