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A Punjabi Garden

f u l l e r t o n , c a l i f o r n i a

“I told my father, ‘I will be poorer in America, but my conscience will be free.’”

I write the words on a paper napkin and turn it to face her. “Is this right? Is this what you just said?”

“Yes. I did not come to America to trade my cultural heritage for money.”

I take the napkin back and write the second sentence as well. Her words are so striking that I do not want to rely on memory alone to record them. Ruhan Kainth is telling me why she left Indira Gandhi’s India in the late 1970s to come to the United States.

I first met Ruhan, a middle-school science teacher from Ful- lerton, California, and her husband, Atma, an engineer, in New Haven. They were visiting colleges on a crisp and shining day in early autumn, and they were looking for a place to take their youngest son, Hunar, to lunch. From Atma’s turban and the steel

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bracelet on his right wrist, a kara, I knew that they were Sikhs. I tried to think where the nearest Indian restaurants were.

“My son would like some pizza,” Ruhan said. The handsome boy with dark, shining eyes, his thick black

hair pulled up in a rishi knot, looked up and smiled. I explained their options—Naples Pizza, just around the cor-

ner, or Pepe’s or Sally’s, across town in Worcester Square. “We would prefer to walk,” Ruhan said. “Would you join us?” While Hunar enjoyed his pizza at Naples pizzeria, I asked

Ruhan why she had come to America. She came for freedom of conscience, fleeing India during a period of intense political re- pression. And then I asked if she and Atma had a garden.

“Oh yes!” Ruhan said. “We have a beautiful garden. And I have a tree that is rarely grown outside of India. It is called the neem tree. In India, the neem is a sacred tree. There is a story to go with this tree,” she added, leaning toward me. “The emperor Ashoka, whose name means ‘without sorrow,’ converted to Buddhism. He was India’s first Buddhist emperor and led India on the path to nonviolence. He dedicated his life to promoting peace, prosperity, and health for all of his people. His edicts about how we should treat each other in every aspect of life were inscribed on stone pillars that were placed in every village. You can still see some of them in certain places. Among the things he recommended was that every village should have a neem tree, first for shade from the intense heat, then for all of its wonderful healing properties. You must come and be our guest, and I will show you the garden, and you will see our neem tree.”

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Late the following summer I fly to Los Angeles to see Ruhan’s Punjabi garden. After a long, slow drive from the airport, the van drops me in front of the Kainths’ house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the sprawling suburb of Fullerton. Ruhan, slim and striking, her long black hair coiled in a chignon, comes out to greet me and introduces me to her two older sons, Koijan, a senior at Ber-

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keley, and Daraspreet, a junior at Stanford. Both are members of the U.S. national field hockey team. When I arrive, they are unpacking new gear in preparation for an international competi- tion. They step over the open boxes in the driveway, each extend- ing a hand in greeting, then carry my bags into the house, where Ruhan offers me a glass of juice made from passion fruit and strawberries freshly picked that morning.

When we go out the back door a few moments later, the first thing I see, standing just beyond the terrace, is a pomegranate tree laden with huge dark red orbs. Native to southwestern Asia, the pomegranate is as familiar to Ruhan as an apple is to a New Englander. However extravagant the tree is in its beauty, though, it is by no means the most extraordinary citizen of this garden.

On less than one-eighth of an acre, Ruhan Kainth cultivates fifty-odd varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. The thick can- opies of the trees and the densely planted beds of herbs and flow- ers dampen the drone of traffic and block the view of neighboring houses.

“For years, nothing would grow here,” Ruhan says. “The soil was dead.”

I turn to her in disbelief. Later, when I peer over the fences that divide one yard from another, I see why. On one side, a per- fectly weedless lawn mowed to uniform height rolls from the house to a row of dark green shrubs lined up in strict sym- metry against a stockade fence. Decades of use of lawn chemicals to maintain the iconic suburban American landscape have de- stroyed the structure of the soil here. What little grew when the Kainth family moved in relied entirely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

To bring the soil back to life, Ruhan began to plant tiny trees, which was all she could afford. As the trees’ roots threaded their way downward, they loosened the soil and slowly began to add organic matter. “Then the earth around them would begin com- ing to life again,” she explains.

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Until she came to America, Ruhan had never been able to make her own garden. How, then, did she know to plant trees?

In India, her family, members of an educated and prosperous elite, lived in Delhi, where they had a beautiful formal garden. They also owned a farm in the country two hours’ drive away, where sharecroppers worked the orchard and grew sugarcane. As a girl Ruhan would go to the village with her father, walking through the fields chewing cane, sucking out the sugar, then throwing the husks on the compost pile. She drank freshly made jaggery from the press worked by oxen; the juice was boiled in a great caldron to produce a crystallized brown sugar akin to maple sugar candy.

When Ruhan’s father became the private physician of the prime minister of Nigeria, which took him abroad for long peri- ods, he put her in charge of supervising the farm, an unusual role for a woman. Her brothers were at Eton and Harrow in England, so the task fell to her. “Once a month I’d go out to the farm,” she says. “They all welcomed me, but they’d be very amused, be- cause they were not used to seeing a woman coming to do that. But they were very respectful.” Even the fact that she drove there by herself made her remarkable.

As she learned to manage the farm, Ruhan studied the meth- ods of the peasants who worked there. From watching them she learned the principle of returning everything organic to the soil. “Nothing goes to waste in those Indian villages,” she says. The lesson has stayed with her. As has something else. “Those were times of great peace,” she says, her voice soft as she remembers. On the farm, Ruhan stepped beyond the constraints of her caste, class, and gender.

At home in Delhi, the family garden was full of roses, fruit trees, and flowers. Peacocks roamed the grounds freely. Though she longed to work in the garden, Ruhan was expected to do no more than stroll and admire. She was not supposed to work with the soil. “We had a full-time gardener who would come to work in the evening. During the day he worked as the supervisor of the

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Rashtrapati Bhavan, which had once been the residence of the British viceroy Lord Mountbatten.” He became Ruhan’s mentor. “He would treat me like the little granddaughter. I would follow him around the garden, asking him how to do things. ‘Could you show me how you graft the roses?’ I would ask. ‘Little baby,’ he would say, ‘do you want to see this?’ And he would show me. I can still see myself standing there. He would say, ‘See, baby? See how you do this?’ I learned so much from him. He would say wise things. Once we saw a mother being very angry and harsh in her discipline. So he said, speaking very gently to me in Hindi, ‘A child is just like a plant. Just as a gardener might tie the branches to make it lean a certain way, the mother is like the gardener, and the child the plant. She directs her child.’”

Ruhan knew this man only as Mali, which means “gardener” in Hindi. He and his wife, who worked with him, were elderly. While he clipped, pruned, weeded, and grafted, his wife would carry the waste to the compost heap. Each evening, when their work was finished, they would take home some of the branches for firewood.

“He was of a caste who did not have the opportunity to go to British schools,” Ruhan explains. “He rarely came in the house. And when he did, he would not sit down.”

If he remained conscious of the expectations of caste indoors, she felt the strict limits of her gender and class in the garden. “I would go pick up the spade and maybe plant a seed or some- thing, but nobody would ever see me digging.” Yet she longed to. It was not considered appropriate for her to mingle with garden- ers. As a female, she was not supposed to do such dirty work.

“Was there any other way to learn what I wanted to know?” she asks. “No—only from gardeners, only from the laborers.”

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Sir Albert Howard, the most famous advocate of soil restoration in India, learned how to grow things in the same way, upsetting British imperial presumptions about what constitutes knowledge.

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In two of his most famous works, An Agricultural Testament (1940) and The Soil and Health (1947), he describes his educa- tion on the land among the rural poor of colonial India. A con- temporary of Aldo Leopold’s, he published one of the twentieth century’s most important books on the relationship between ag- riculture and human culture two years before Leopold’s classic work, A Sand County Almanac, appeared in America.

Trained at the Royal College of Science in London and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Howard was appointed mycologist and agricultural lecturer in the Imperial Department of Agricul- ture for the West Indies in 1899. From 1899 to 1902 he worked on plantations in Barbados, a former center of the English slave trade, where he studied fungal diseases of plantation cash crops, including sugar. “In Barbados I was a laboratory hermit,” he wrote in the introduction to The Soil and Health, “a specialist of specialists, intent on learning more and more about less and less.” It was “contact with the land” and the people who worked the land that showed him the fundamental weakness in the hier- archical organization of academic agricultural studies. “I was an investigator of plant diseases, but I had myself no crops on which I could try out the remedies I advocated: I could not take my own advice before offering it to other people.” When he was offered the post of economic botanist at the Agricultural Research Insti- tute in Pusa, India, in May 1905, Howard readily accepted. Hav- ing worked in labs far too long, he was eager to have land of his own to experiment on.

The chasm between science in the lab and practice in the field led Howard out the door and into the fields of India’s peasant farmers, whose crops, he observed, proved remarkably resistant to pests and disease. Yet the farmers were illiterate, had no access to advanced technology, had received no scientific training, and never used chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides. Though they were poor by every standard of modern industrialized cul- tures, their soil, their crops, and their animals enjoyed robust

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health. How was this possible? What were they doing that made their agriculture so productive?

“I found,” Howard wrote, “I could do no better than watch the operations of the peasants . . . and regard them and the pests . . . as my best instructors.”

Though he had grown up on a farm in England and had re- ceived the finest education Britain could offer, it took Howard years to become as proficient a farmer as the rural poor of India. “At the end of five years’ tuition under my new professors,” he wrote, “. . . the attacks of insects and fungi on all crops whose root systems suited the local soil conditions became negligible. By 1910 I had learnt how to grow healthy crops, practically free from disease, without the slightest help from mycologists, en- tomologists, bacteriologists, agricultural chemists, statisticians, clearing-houses of information, artificial manures, spraying ma- chines, insecticides, fungicides, germicides, and all the other ex- pensive paraphernalia of the modern experiment station.”

It was coming to understand the way in which living fungus threads in the soil invade the cells of plant roots, where they are digested, that helped Howard understand why rural farmers’ practice of returning the manure of their farm animals to the soil proved so effective. Mycorrhizal association, as it is called, is the process by which plants feed directly from the soil, deriving the protein necessary to support life. If we interrupt this symbiotic relationship or destroy it with chemicals that kill microorgan- isms like the healthy fungi responsible for the uptake of proteins, the soil dies and nothing will grow. “One simple principle,” Howard wrote, underlies the “vast accumulation of disease which now afflicts the world.” The “undernourishment of the soil is the root of all.” By 1940 he had concluded that “the slow poisoning of the life of the soil by artificial manures is one of the great calamities of mankind.”

Disease travels up through the food chain—the “biotic web,” the “chain of energy,” as Leopold described it—from soil to

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plants to animals to humans. So too does health. The power to resist disease, to confer health and contentment on humankind, Howard argued, lay in mimicking natural cycles of growth, de- cay, and regeneration by returning all organic matter to the soil. “The failure to maintain a healthy agriculture,” he wrote during World War II, “has largely cancelled out all the advantages we have gained from our improvements in hygiene, housing, and our medical discoveries.”

Our economy, in other words, was backward, because we did not understand that our life depends on the health of the soil be- neath our feet. To the imperial mindset that dispensed Howard to teach the rural poor to garden, he replied with the news that the flow of wisdom traveled in the opposite direction—up from the poor to the rich, from the colonized to the colonizer.

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Ruhan Kainth made the same discovery forty years later. When she found the dead soil that chemical fertilizers inevitably pro- duce in her backyard in California, the wisdom of her humble teachers in India helped her to restore it to life.

Before leaving India, Ruhan had pursued two kinds of educa- tion—one through the generosity of rural farmers and the family gardener, another at the university. In 1972 she was studying for her master’s degree in economics in Delhi. It was a period of se- vere political repression and fear in India. It was also the first year Ruhan was eligible to vote. When a woman professor asked her for whom she would be voting in the upcoming election, Ruhan said of course she would never vote for Indira Gandhi. “No one in Delhi would dare speak openly against her,” she ex- plains. “You couldn’t trust anyone. You couldn’t speak. I knew university professors who disappeared. They were never seen again.

“In 1972 I decided to leave. I couldn’t live under those condi- tions. If you lived in a country where you had politicians like

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Mrs. Gandhi, who ruled with dictatorial power, then you could not be free, your conscience could not be free.”

It was then that Ruhan told her father that while she knew she would be poorer in America, she was determined to go. He had hoped she would become a government minister. “I told my fa- ther, ‘You have told me all my life how you have never compro- mised. It was you who taught me all this.’” Six years later, in 1978, she left her homeland to come to the United States.

Ruhan and Atma Kainth are from the Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers. “The land I come from is right below the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. The Punjab has a very rich history, because it’s the crossroads of all cultures. The Greeks, the Scythi- ans, the Parthians, the Mongols, the Arabs—just about every- body came by that route, trying to enter India. And the Punjabis had to meet them, sometimes had to fight them. That’s why most Punjabis are very open-minded, very liberal, very accepting of other cultures.

“It’s still very accepting. We’ve had all kinds of trouble, of course. When India was divided up in 1947, half given to Paki- stan, which became a Muslim nation, all non-Muslims had to leave—overnight. The British, in dividing India and Pakistan, drew the political line that led to the exodus. The moment the orders were given, people began to cross borders. As they began crossing, let’s say a trainload is coming from Pakistan into India, full of Hindus and Sikhs. Along the way it would be stopped, and all of the people were butchered by the Muslims. Even though they were leaving, abandoning their homes and their lands, they were killed. And the trains going from India to Pakistan, like- wise, full of Muslims, were killed. There was mutual slaughter. The rivers turned red.” Half a million people died in two weeks. “The few who were able to escape with their lives were lucky.

“Most of our relatives were on the Pakistani side of Punjab, so they had to cross over. Some had to live in refugee camps in Delhi for a time. My parents were lucky—they were able to get out.

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They came to India. My father’s ancestral lands were left there in Pakistan, their house, everything. All of the Punjabis living on the Pakistan side were uprooted. It would be just like dividing California between north and south.

“My husband’s family was on the Indian side of Punjab, so they did not see this. My husband, Atma, came to America with his twenty-five dollars in 1972. He still has five of those dollars. He kept them as a reminder. You see, in the seventies the Indian government only allowed us to take twenty-five dollars out of the country. Now they’re liberalizing, but then you couldn’t sell your property there and transfer your wealth here. We got married in 1978, so I came here as the spouse of a U.S. citizen.

“Now,” Ruhan says with great ceremony, “you have to see this,” and she leads me out across the garden to stand under the canopy of a great tree whose branches are hung with fruit unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They’re the size and shape of kiwis, but the smooth skin is magenta when the fruit is young, turning a purple so dark it’s nearly black when they’re fully ripe.

“Not many people have this tree,” Ruhan says, with marve- lous understatement. “It’s called a jamun in my language, which means ‘purple,’ but in the Fullerton botanical garden it is listed as a jambolan. I went seeking it. I finally found it with a Pakistani woman who had it as a two-year-old plant. This is the first time it has blossomed and made fruit. For me, it was like a baby being born when it bloomed.”

Ruhan has nursed this tree along for eleven years. “There’s a special story about this tree. In India, my father was given twenty acres of land in lieu of his ancestral lands lost to Pakistan. So he gathered the pits from all the jamuns we had eaten and planted them as a windbreak so that when the winds come at high speed —sometimes the wind blows at eighty kilometers an hour—it would not destroy what had been planted. So I grew up with these trees. I remember eating this fruit as a two-year-old. Oh, it just feels so wonderful to have it bearing.” She strokes the branches, whose bark resembles the drooping, wrinkled skin of

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an elephant’s legs. “All of my relatives who are in L.A. are so de- lighted. Now they wait for the fruit to ripen, and I will share it with them.”

Hunar suddenly swoops down, hanging by his legs from an upper branch, and holds out his hands, which are filled with dark purple fruit. He grins with pleasure to have startled us.

Ruhan smiles at her youngest son with great affection as she chooses the darkest fruit for me. I bite into the gorgeous sea- green flesh inside the dusky purple skin. It’s tart, with a hint of sweetness, surprising and delicious, unlike any fruit I’ve ever tasted.

A few yards from the jamun, Ruhan shows me the sugarcane she planted in the corner of her backyard—a tall, upright plant with strappy leaves, a link to the years she spent managing the farm. “This is not the same sugarcane that grows in the Punjab,” she says, “but it’s very similar. We cut the dried husks down to use as compost. Here is some of the sugarcane that we just har- vested. See how it’s looking very messy and junky there right now?”

She turns around and points to the cherimoyas growing in a small grove beside the house. “I’ve noticed that since I’ve been putting the sugarcane husks under my cherimoyas, I’ve never needed to feed them. They are creating a soil web which keeps the plants healthy without my having to fertilize them or use any pesticides.”

From deep within the cherimoyas we hear a squawk. “Ah, my chickens!” Ruhan says.

Chickens roosting in the cherimoyas? In suburban Los Angeles?

“We eat their eggs,” she explains, smiling. And they help fer- tilize the cherimoyas and, when she lets them out, the main gar- den too.

Hunar leaps over the low fence that keeps them within the cherimoya grove, sneaks up on two, nabs them, and carries them back to us, one under each arm.

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“These are Silkies,” Ruhan says, taking one into her arms and stroking it as it clucks. They’re huge, colorful beasts, with fearsome-looking spurs on the backs of their legs. “Then I have two Auracanas. They lay green-and-blue eggs.” She calls them the Mothers. “I love them,” she says, and it’s obvious. “I had a third one, a male, and he started crowing and the neighbors com- plained. He was a show chicken, so beautiful, but I had to give him away to a friend. Once, when the hens laid eggs, they sat there, and I knew nothing was going to happen, so I went to the Buena Park High School, and I got fertilized eggs and switched them. The hens hatched them and took care of them, so that’s why I call them the Mothers.

“These cherimoyas are my special babies. I have planted some of them from seed. Last year I had over three hundred pounds of cherimoyas,” she says, as if this were not at all unusual. “I ate them, I juiced them, I gave them away. We had lots of friends who wanted them.”

“You grew these from seed?” I ask, incredulous. The trees are as tall as the house.

“Oh, yes. In India, when I was little, I used to eat custard apples. When I came here, I looked and looked for them. One of my gardening friends said, ‘Well, we have something similar we call cherimoyas. They grow up in Santa Barbara. They can’t grow here because we don’t have the bug that pollinates them.’ I said, ‘Well, how are you going to have the fruit?’ She said, ‘I’m going to hand-pollinate them.’ So I said, ‘Show me how to do it.’ She taught me how to do it, so I hand-pollinated for several years with a brush.

“The flower is female in the morning, and by evening it turns into a male flower. So the trick is to collect the pollen when it’s a male flower and then look for the next flower in the female stage, and then you pollinate them. I did that for many years, and I got a good crop. Then last year—can you see up there?—I got fruit at the very top of the trees, and I certainly didn’t go to pollinate those. So I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute. Perhaps I don’t even

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need to pollinate anymore, because somebody has arrived in my garden who’s taking care of the job.

“The custard apple I grew up with as a child is a cousin, a rel- ative of the cherimoya. But for me, these will do just fine. They’re bigger than the ones that come from my country. I enjoy them, so I have adopted them.”

Just as I’m thinking about this garden as a biology lab—in the small triangle of yard that fences in the chickens and the che- rimoyas, Ruhan has created a biotic community of remarkable complexity—she turns it into a kinship system. Adoption, not as- similation, is her model, a relationship of choice, and once you choose, you love what you’ve chosen as your own.

How do people respond to the botanical wonders of her back- yard? Newly Americanized Sikhs as well as her American neigh- bors, Ruhan says, have been scandalized by her choices, each for different reasons. “People from my own country who came by and saw me back here working in the garden said, ‘Why are you digging?’ Why wasn’t I inside watching TV and doing American things?”

Speaking of her American neighbors, Ruhan says, “Tell me, is there some law that says I can only plant flowers in my front yard?” It takes me a minute to realize she’s not joking. The neighbors objected when she planted fruit trees in front of the house and strawberries and vegetables in the ground beside the driveway. It startled her to encounter such active resistance to her wish to use every available inch of her land to grow food. “I’m trained as an economist. I’m limited in my ground. I can’t afford more land, so why shouldn’t I be able to use every bit of it?”

To her Punjabi friends who wanted her to be at once more In- dian and more American, she answered with energy. “I realized that I was offending people. But here, I don’t have my gardeners. I don’t have crop-sharers. I have only myself. I want to have a garden, a beautiful garden. And I am my only resource. The plea- sure of planting a seed and making my own garden is a pleasure that should not be denied me.”

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How complex, the negotiation of so many boundaries in the garden. Questions of who plants, what is planted, and where it is planted make plain a host of unspoken rules about the decorum of how one ought to present oneself in the garden. The landscape is such a powerful marker of nationality and class.

Ruhan is mixing it all up. An educated woman from a wealthy family in India, she cultivates a peasant’s garden in America, down on her knees, digging in the dirt. What her neighbors and friends from India cannot see is the act of faith in her labor, the patient devotion of her commitment, a healing of the land that comforts her and keeps her family healthy and strong.

As we walk the dirt paths that meander through her un- planned garden, we are never very far from the house or the back fence, never more than thirty yards or so from her neighbors’ property, but the thick planting, the ring of trees around the perimeter, the rhythm of the tall and rangy next to the squat and full, the beautiful happenstance of planting things as she found them, suggests an impulse so democratic that it borders on anarchy.

“These are my guavas,” Ruhan says, introducing me to the peerless Allahabadis native to the Punjab. Nearly seedless, this variety has a unique flavor comparable to the rich taste that sets basmati apart from all other rice.

When Ruhan first arrived in the United States as a new bride, she lived with Atma in a small apartment. The first thing she planted in America was a pot of mint. Next she planted corian- der. When they were able to move to a house, it was wonderful, she says, remembering. “It opened up possibilities for me. I started looking for trees from my country. I wanted to eat a fresh guava so badly, so that was the first tree I planted. A friend who owned a factory knew that one of her employees, a Mexican, was a gardener.” Ruhan’s first seedling was the gift of another immigrant, someone also hungry for the foods of home. “I was so happy!” she says. “I would just look at it—I would watch it grow. These are things I need so badly,” she adds, her voice grow-

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ing soft, remembering her early years of adjusting to America. “When I put each of these trees in place, I am being true to myself.

“Oh, Hunar, go get that,” she says, suddenly pointing to a ripe fruit, which he plucks and places in her hand. “This is a white sapote. Now in India, the one that I have is a brown sapote called a chikoo. This is the closest I could come to the brown sapote. It’s so good that now I have adopted this one.”

Hunar has fetched my dessert. After the homemade dal and chapatis and fresh yogurt, I will, Ruhan says, taste the sapote.

“Ah, here is my okra,” Ruhan says, and I am grateful to see something I can actually recognize and have eaten. “I was raised with it. We eat it all the time in Punjab. I wonder how it went around the world—do you know?”

“With the slave trade, most likely,” I say. “Oh, really?” Ruhan says with a blend of sadness and surprise

as we continue past it. “This part of the garden is for my bees,” she explains, gestur-

ing to the brightly colored annuals and perennials at our feet. “I’m trying to plant as many flowers as possible to invite them. The hummingbirds love this part too.”

Along one stretch of the back fence are her hives, square white boxes that seem odd in their neat, angular whiteness among the wild growth, the textured bark, the many shapes of leaves. So Ruhan harvests honey as well. To the trees, shrubs, sugarcane, herbs, spices, and chickens, she invites the great pollinators and orange-throated Anna’s hummingbirds.

We pause before a white mulberry from Pakistan, like the ones she grew up with in her garden in Delhi. Close by, the beige perforated shells of ripe almonds hang from the branches of a tree native to a region north of the Punjab, where the climate is colder. A bougainvillea has climbed through the almond tree, draping its slender branches with the vermilion paper lanterns of its flowers. Close to the almond, Ruhan has planted a plum and a peach tree, so that they might help each other attract pollinators.

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Close by are her papayas, and below them edible cactus. A swarm of four o’clocks, lemon yellow, grows at our feet—more bee food.

Along the back fence Ruhan’s loquats are in bloom beside a stand of tall Jerusalem artichokes lifting their bright yellow flow- ers to the sun. Beside them, hung with fruit, is another Alla- habadi guava and jicamas, a root vegetable like the Jerusalem artichoke but sweeter. Her first jicama was a gift from a Colom- bian friend from the California Rare Fruit Growers Association.

“Here is a phalsa—it has a special berry,” she says. Like the strangely beautiful fruit of the jamum, the phalsa berry looks more like a jewel than anything you would want to eat. Ruhan fills my hands with the oval jet beads, whose sharp, sweet taste wakes the senses. When in flower, one variety of phalsa makes a stunning vermilion flower, the other a bright yellow. The phalsa is another of India’s medicinal trees. Ancient texts describe using its leaves, seeds, and flowers to treat a long list of ailments.

Hunar, who has come up behind us, surprises Ruhan with a passion fruit. She receives it gladly, then sends him off for more. “Find one that’s purple,” she calls to him, “and then I can make a drink with it.”

What, I wonder, will Hunar’s memories of this garden be? I think of this child of the twenty-first century foraging in his mother’s garden, thinking it’s normal to know the history of your food, to eat from the land you live on, to drink only fresh juices from exotic fruit you have watched ripen and learned to pick at just the right moment. He could not have this experience in Delhi any more than Ruhan could.

Our walk is nearly finished as we once again come up beside the pomegranate. Its huge dark fruits are awash in the honey- gold light of late afternoon, so that they glow against the dark green foliage of the tree’s great crown.

“This is one of the biblical fruits, isn’t it?” Ruhan asks. For her, every plant must have its story, its place in a culture. To eat is not simply to consume but to dwell in history. To garden is to cul-

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tivate a relationship of kinship—with the earth, with dead soil returned to life, with plants, bees, birds, and chickens. As tiny as this piece of land is, it is home to a vast and intricate world.

“Ah, and here at last,” Ruhan says, “is the neem tree.”

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Ruhan found her tall, straight neem sapling at a festival for all the chapters of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association. A nursery from San Diego had one specimen. Thrilled to have found it, she bought it, and now it grows with the phalsa and ja- mum, as it would in the Punjab.

“Do you see that little dome-shaped net? And another over here? They are full of neem seeds I am propagating,” she says.

It is rare indeed to find this tree, or its seeds, anywhere in the United States, and rarer still to encounter anyone here who knows the story of its place in the history of ancient India. A tall, straight tree with pinnate leaves, the neem, when it blossoms in early spring, bears white, honey-scented flowers. Its fruit, a one-seeded drupe, resembles a large olive when young, turning yellow as it ripens. The word neem comes from the Sanskrit nimba, a short form of the phrase nimbati syasthyamdadati, “to give good health.” In ancient Indian texts, the tree is referred to as Sarva Roga Nivarini, “curer of all ailments.” Its bark, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit, and seeds all have healing properties, pro- viding natural forms of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, pes- ticides, wormicides, and fungicides. For centuries Indians have brushed their teeth with neem twigs; women have known how to treat menstrual disorders using its leaves. Parts of the tree have been used for millennia to heal skin wounds, including snake and spider bites; it is a powerful remedy for malaria, leprosy, and common fever. Postpartum mothers and their nursing infants are strengthened by the juice from its leaves.

The neem grows fast and huge. It repels most pests without killing them while providing nutrients to the soil, birds, insects, and bats. For thousands of years the people of India have used its

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leaves to keep stored food and clothing free of pests. It is ex- tremely drought-resistant and makes an excellent windbreak. A neem tree can live for two to three hundred years. Its deep roots help prevent erosion and restore degraded land. Its wood is hard and naturally resistant to termites. It can even defend itself from an infestation of locusts.

It was for all these reasons, as Ruhan told me the first time we met, that the great emperor Ashoka had neem trees planted in ev- ery village and along all heavily traveled roads throughout his empire. In thirty places throughout India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan, pillars of stone, each standing forty to fifty feet tall, still polished to a mirrorlike shine after 1600 years of exposure to the elements, bear the words Ashoka addressed to his people af- ter his conversion to Buddhism, when he renounced war and de- voted his life to improving the conditions under which his people lived so that they might be happy.

Born in 304 b.c. , Ashoka was crowned around 263. Eight years later, the ambitious young ruler, known for his ruthless- ness and cruelty, launched a bloody war of expansion to annex Kalinga to the empire he had inherited from his grandfather and father. It is said that while he was walking the battlefield after victory, overcome by horror at the death and suffering he had caused, he encountered a Buddhist monk walking quietly through the rotting bodies of horses and men, already being de- voured by birds. Ashoka approached the monk and asked how he could be at peace in such a place. Was he happy? And if he was, how had he come to be so? And would he teach the emperor what he knew? In response to learning the precepts of Buddhism, Ashoka renounced violence and became an ardent convert, mak- ing a pilgrimage to the Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini and un- dertaking the lifelong study of Buddhism. In this way, as Sharon Salzberg, a leading Buddhist teacher in America, has written in her book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, a nameless man with nothing but a robe and a bowl influenced

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the destiny of an empire. As a witness for nonviolence in the midst of carnage, the monk indirectly helped spread Buddhism throughout Asia, for Ashoka’s son and daughter introduced Buddhism to Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. The Buddhist Pub- lication Society of Sri Lanka makes contemporary English trans- lations of Ashoka’s inscriptions available for free, hoping to continue sowing the seeds of nonviolence.

In one of the edicts still legible on an ancient stone pillar, Ashoka describes the carnage on the battlefield at Kalinga, where hundreds of thousands of men and animals perished. He speaks of his remorse for the great suffering he caused, recounts his con- version to Buddhism, and entreats his people to follow him in the way of peace.

As if it were not astonishing enough for an emperor to confess his remorse and devote his life to making amends for the ap- palling suffering caused by a war he waged simply to expand his power, Ashoka instituted a reign of peace that extended to all people, within and beyond his boundaries, and then to the land itself—plants, trees, birds, fish, and animals. He banned the hunting of many species of creatures and the sacrifice of any liv- ing being. In addition to creating thousands of monasteries, li- braries, and hospitals, he set aside wildlife and forest preserves. In his second rock edict, quoted in the Buddhist Publication Soci- ety’s translation, Ashoka made provisions for medical treatment for animals as well as humans, and “wherever medical herbs, roots or fruits for humans and animals were not available,” he had them imported. The neem trees planted along main travel routes grew near the resthouses Ashoka had built along the roads. He also had wells dug and other trees planted for fruit and shade so that his people, especially the poor, might not endure needless suffering. The state, Ashoka taught, has an obligation to protect and conserve the entire living community.

In Ruhan’s garden, the neem tree, with all its natural healing properties, commemorates this reign of peace and justice; its

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story is one of transformation and hope. In the context of the global marketplace, however, the neem is at the center of quite a different story.

In the past two decades, the neem tree has become the subject of intensive research around the world, as transnational corpora- tions and governments of developed nations engage in a race to be the first to successfully patent and bring to market biologically friendly agricultural and pharmaceutical products derived from it. In 1992, an ad hoc committee of the U.S. National Research Council published its findings in a report called Neem: A Tree for Solving Global Problems. It concluded that neem has the poten- tial to control many of the world’s pests and diseases and reduce soil erosion, desertification, and deforestation. And if, as some researchers believe, neem is also the source of a natural spermi- cide, research could lead to the development of an oral birth control pill for men, thus helping regulate the growth of world population.

In contrast to other trees planted for reforestation, neem is more valuable for the byproducts of its fruit and leaves than for its wood, so it could be raised sustainably. Because it can be grown in poor soil, large-scale plantings necessary to harvest quantities of its seeds do not need to compete with food produc- tion. Large plantations of neem, given the cooling properties of its great crown of evergreen leaves, might even help slow global warming.

No other known plant or chemical possesses all of the neem’s capacities for preventing and healing disease in soil, plants, ani- mals, and humans. It all sounds so wonderful. Where, then, is the problem?

A short passage in the 1992 report’s opening pages suggests the answer. The promise of the neem “is currently known to only a handful of entomologists, foresters, and pharmacologists— and, of course, to the traditional farmers of South Asia.” It’s that last phrase, which weighs a handful of specialists from techno- logically advanced nations against millions of traditional farmers

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in India, that gives so much away. What of these people—the world’s largest remaining population of small farmers—and the millennia of traditional knowledge that is their birthright?

The creation of just one byproduct of the neem, an eco- friendly fungicide, requires twenty tons of seeds per day. Neem seeds are now being bought up by corporations in staggering quantities, driving the price so high that farmers in India can no longer afford to buy them. As a result, the neem is now the sub- ject of a number of international lawsuits. Multinational corpo- rations supported by developed nations are attempting to patent the tree’s many byproducts. In May 2000, after a six-year legal struggle mounted by a coalition called the Neem Campaign, the European Patent Office revoked a patent granted to the United States Department of Agriculture and the multinational corpora- tion W. R. Grace. India’s leading environmental advocate, Van- dana Shiva, who directed the campaign, speaks of the West’s attempt to plunder the biological wealth and traditional knowl- edge of the rural poor of the East as “biopiracy.” In this, she echoes one of her sources of inspiration—Sir Albert Howard.

“Why has civilization proved such a disastrous failure?” Sir Albert Howard asked in The Soil and Health. “The answer is simple. Our industries, our trade, and our way of life generally have been based first on the exploitation of the earth’s surface and then on the oppression of one another—on banditry pure and simple. The inevitable result,” he wrote at the close of World War II, “is now upon us.” Sixty years ago, Howard argued that the way we grow our food—the way we till the soil in our own backyards—engages us with politics at the most fundamental level. “The real Arsenal of Democracy,” he declared, “is a fertile soil, the fresh produce of which is the birthright of the nations. Does mankind possess the understanding to grasp the possibili- ties which this simple truth unfolds?”

As one of very few private gardeners in America to cultivate a neem tree in her backyard, Ruhan Kainth keeps alive the legacy of its sacred place in her native culture. And in her devotion to

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the community of the land she has helped to create by restoring the soil to life, she has taken her place as a citizen, not of the Pun- jab or America but of “the land.” Here the seed and the tree are cultivated in a relationship defined as kinship—“adoption,” as she puts it—a commitment to loving responsibility for the earth that is essential to the health of a democracy.

“It is my devotion,” Ruhan says quietly, reflecting on what working in her garden means to her. “It teaches me. When I am out here, I am in the gardens in Delhi. I am visiting with the vil- lagers on the farm in the countryside. That was a time of great peace, so when I work in my garden, I see those scenes and I re- member that peace.”

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