Houseplants, potted minds and the longing for light

As someone who’s fascinated by the rewards of the analogical imagination, of the kind that indulges the plant-as-person and person-as-plant kind of metaphor, I often catch myself thinking of the differences in behaviour between humans and plants when they are outside. Or inside. There is, at first, the difference in the way I am allowed to treat both – I cannot pick up a human being and bring them home the way I often carry broken branches and plants abandoned by the roadside.

On the windowsill of my bedroom is a colony of plants that have grown from plant parts, severed branch to chopped root, the varied states I found them in. Once alive outside, without the need for prefix or suffix, nothing besides their name, now they’ve acquired a noun that introduces them – ‘houseplant’, their habitat has become their name. I think of humans whose living spaces became a part of the architecture of their names. Tenali Raman, or Kishore Kumar Khandwa, for instance. ‘Houseplant’ is not a marker of geographical location though – in the ascription of residency is character and characteristic. If I were to think of a human relative, a close category could be grihabadhu, housewife, the griha or house of the name, a certificate of a type. A couple of thoughts come to my mind here: how similar women and plants are, how seemingly fragile, that they need the protective amulet of the word ‘house’ (‘housewife’, ‘houseplant’), for very rarely does the word attach itself to a man; how do women and plants change when they are brought inside the house?

Take an idiom like ‘shrinking violet’. It must have originated from trying to characterise the hidden, inconspicuous, and shaded areas where violets bloom. By ascribing shyness to a woman with a phrase such as this one, and thereby drawing equivalences, something else is created: home and the hidden place of the violet also become an analogous pair. ‘Shrinking’ is an appropriate word to express the effect of the inside on what was meant to be outside. Anyone who’s cut a fat money plant growing in the garden and put it into a vase knows that this is exactly what happens – the leaves begin to shrink, until after a few months, it no longer looks related to the parent plant.

This transformation compels me to liken this phenomenon to the behaviour of the mind. It’s the first thing that a deprivation of the outside does to the human – it shrinks the mind, so that it becomes the opposite of elastic, its natural state, its plant-like state. The window – and, if the climate allows, a balcony or a veranda – therefore becomes the most important architectural habit in a dwelling. It allows a connection with the outside, to both the houseplant and the house-human – that is why it is not just an aperture for light to get in, it is also a site of melancholy, hope, and longing, of waiting. The homebound mind and the housebound plant lose size and expanse when restricted to a life indoors. It is also possible that the ability to flower is bleached away from both.

Take the snake plant, for instance – ubiquitous in houses across urban India. Long and strong-leaved, it stands erect, always alert. It can seem as unchanging as the pot that holds it, for no one notices new leaves grow in this plant. It is easy to forget that the snake plant is a flowering perennial, for it rarely flowers indoors. There’s also the monstera, native to Central and South America, now domesticated in large pots in the corners of our homes. Our eyes admire its leaves that look torn and therefore resistant to continuity. What we deprive both the monstera plant and ourselves, by taming it indoors, is its fruit, not just edible but tasty, a fact that is responsible for its scientific name ‘deliciosa’, Monstera deliciosa.

I’ve already mentioned the money plant – the pothos is a large-leaved vine when it grows outdoors, but when brought inside, its leaves begin to shrink, as do its stems. There’s the jade and the bamboo; there’s the spider plant and aloe vera and countless others that we have brought into our zoo-like homes, taking away the only freedom they know – to grow. There’s also Bonsai, that we call art, a miniaturising impulse of controlling the form and growth of trees so that the outdoors can be enjoyed indoors, as if the growth of plant life were a spectator sport. Some plants resist indoor life through the very architecture of their form. No one grows grass in pots, no lawn on floors.