On Grandmothers, Gardening and the Gita

Ruminations on 25 years of life

By Ayush Kumar

I turn twenty-five this year. A well-rounded age for some introspection. And the clearest thought I had — standing in that strange no-man's-land between youth and whatever comes after — was not about ambition or achievement or any of the things people my age are supposed to be thinking about.

It was about my grandmother's hands in the soil.

She kept a garden in the dusty town of Gamharia, nestled away from the industrial Jamshedpur. Not a decorative garden, the kind that exists to be looked at. A working garden — the kind that feeds people and teaches them things they didn't know they needed to learn, the kind that exists to exist in. I spent seventeen summers there as a child, and what I remember most is not the flowers or the vegetables but the patience. The absolute, infuriating patience of a woman who could look at bare earth and see what it would become in six months, and who was in no hurry to get there.

I remember mornings. She would be in the garden before the heat came, when the light was still soft and the soil was cool enough to hold in your hands. She wore her torn maxis, the hem dusty before she'd even begun. She moved through the rows slowly, not with the slowness of age but with the deliberateness of someone listening. She would kneel and press her fingers into the earth the way a doctor checks a pulse. Sometimes she would bring a handful to her face and smell it. I didn't understand this. Dirt was dirt. But she could read that soil — its moisture, its readiness, its mood — the way I would later learn to read code or a balance sheet. It was her language, and she was fluent.

She would say things I didn't understand at the time. That you don't grow a plant — you grow a soil, and the soil grows the plant. That some seeds need darkness before they can reach for light. That the worst thing you can do to a garden is to want it to be something it's not ready to be. I nodded and forgot. I was young. I wanted things to happen fast.

I didn't realize she was educating me on the Gita.

The Bhagavad Gita has a metaphor so direct it barely qualifies as metaphor. In the thirteenth chapter, Krishna describes the body — the whole of one's life, really — as a kshetra: a field. And the self that inhabits the body is the kshetrajna: the knower of the field. The one who tends it.

Kshetrajñaṃ cāpi māṃ viddhi sarvakṣetreṣu bhārata.

Understand that the soul is the knower in all fields.

The field is not the fruit. The field is the soil, the climate, the conditions in which things grow or fail to grow. Your body. Your mind. Your habits. Your relationships. The daily texture of your life. These are the field. And you are the gardener — not the architect, not the engineer, not the CEO of your own existence. The gardener. The distinction matters more than I understood at twelve, and it is becoming the central organizing principle of my life at twenty-five.

You choose the seed. You don't choose the fruit.

This is the most famous teaching in the Gita, and the one most consistently misunderstood.

Karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣhu kadāchana.

You have the right to your action, but never to its fruits.

People hear this as "don't care about outcomes." That's not what it means. A gardener cares deeply about whether the tomatoes come in. But the gardener also knows that caring doesn't make them come in. You choose the seed. You prepare the bed. You water. You weed. And then you surrender to the fact that rain, sun, frost, wind, soil chemistry, and a hundred forces beyond your understanding will determine whether this particular seed, in this particular ground, in this particular season, becomes what you hoped.

My grandmother never once checked on a seed the day after planting it. I asked her why. She said digging it up to see if it's growing is the surest way to kill it.

I think about this every time I refresh analytics on something I just published. Every time I check my phone after sending a message that matters. Every time I evaluate a decision I made yesterday based on results that won't be visible for years. Digging up the seed. The surest way to kill it.

The soil is the practice.

She spent more time on soil than on plants. Composting, turning, aerating, adding bone meal, letting beds rest for entire seasons. To a child, it looked like she was doing nothing — just moving dirt around while the actual garden sat empty. I wanted to plant things. She wanted to prepare.

The Gita calls this abhyāsa — disciplined, consistent practice — paired with vairāgya, detachment from the specific results of that practice.

Abhyāsena tu kaunteya vairāgyeṇa ca gṛhyate.

Through practice and detachment, it is mastered.

The verse is about the restless mind, but it applies to everything. Your body is soil. Your daily habits are soil. Your reading, your thinking, your relationships, your sleep, the way you spend Tuesday mornings — all soil. Most people focus on the plant: the startup, the career move, the creative project, the relationship. They put all their energy into the visible thing and neglect the ground it's growing in. Then they wonder why it wilts.

My grandmother would have told them: you have a soil problem. You don't have a plant problem.

I'm twenty-five and I'm slowly, reluctantly learning that the least glamorous work — the meditation, the exercise, the journaling, the reading that has no immediate application, the relationships maintained without agenda — is the soil work. It doesn't look like progress. It looks like moving dirt around. It is the most important thing I do.

Some seeds don't bloom. That's information, not failure.

The sharpest reflection while ruminating on my life, and the source of most of my confusion this past year, is love, and the failure to hold onto it. I met her during college, a pivotal time during Covid. We connected fast, almost impatiently, and it was the kind of story you tell yourself will last. She was the source of calm for my often tumultuous mind. A personality so blissfully compatible, it seemed like the gods had crafted her for me and me alone. I felt I'd solved the toughest problem of life: finding the right partner.

Well, it did not work out. I was not yet the person I wanted to be. I still am not.

I spent a long time treating that as a failure. My grandmother would have looked at me with that patient exasperation and said nothing — because she knew what the Gita would call it. Confusion. A garden moves through seasons — the sattvic spring where everything wants to grow, the rajasic summer of heat and urgent fruiting. And then the tamasic winter. Dormant. Still. Apparently dead. A gardener who has only known spring will panic in winter. They'll think the garden is broken. But the garden isn't broken. It's resting. It's composting last year's leaves into next year's nutrients. The dormancy is not an absence of growth. It is growth turned inward, invisible, doing its work underground.

Some seeds don't bloom because they were planted in the wrong season. Some don't bloom because the soil wasn't ready. Some don't bloom because they weren't the right seeds for this particular garden. None of that is failure. All of it is the garden teaching you what it needs.

Some plants bloom weird. That's the garden being honest.

My grandmother had a guava tree that grew sideways, wrapped itself around the fence, and produced fruit in entirely the wrong season. A neighbor told her it was defective. She told the neighbor she had never tasted anything sweeter.

I know what that feels like — having something grow in a shape you didn't plan and discovering it was better than what you imagined. Very few times in my life have I felt completely dejected. One of them was missing out on my dream college in Delhi, by two points. Just two. I'd not worked harder at anything before, and I felt betrayed by life and destiny, disgracefully accepting the second on my list. But at that second-choice college I met the amazing woman I just told you about. I made friends I'll carry for life. I found a pedagogy that fit me and gave me room to grow, and passions I never knew I carried.

There is a teaching in the Gita that I come back to often: samatvam yoga uchyate. Equanimity is yoga. Steadiness in the face of both success and failure, bloom and drought, the plant that matches your plan and the plant that becomes something you never anticipated. The garden doesn't owe you the shape you imagined. It owes you only its honesty. If you planted with care and tended with consistency, what grows is what was supposed to grow — even if it grew sideways, even if it fruited in winter, even if it looks nothing like the picture on the seed packet. I am learning, slowly, to love what actually grew.

You don't control the weather. You build for it.

The Gita contains a moment of terrifying beauty. In Chapter 11, Krishna reveals his universal form to Arjuna and says:

Kālo 'smi.

I am Time.

Not "I manage time." Not "I exist within time." I am Time. The force that creates and destroys and creates again. The seasons that come whether you're ready or not. The frost that takes the tomatoes. The unexpected rain that saves the corn. The years that pass while you're busy making other plans.

A gardener cannot argue with the weather. They can only build a garden resilient enough to survive it. Drainage for the floods. Shade cloth for the heat. Cold frames for the frost. Not resisting the conditions, but designing for them. Accepting that some years the monsoon comes early and some years it doesn't come at all, and your job is not to control the rain but to make sure the soil can hold water when it's abundant and survive drought when it's not.

At twenty-five, the weather has started to become real. Lost passions. Lost jobs. An unexpected uprooting to Bangalore just when Gurgaon had started feeling like home. A back injury that still stings. I didn't choose any of it. I couldn't have prevented it. But I could choose how the garden responded. Whether the soil was deep enough to hold.

My grandmother buried three in her life: a child, a home, and a dream. She kept gardening. I once asked her how. She said: the garden doesn't know what happened. It only knows whether you showed up today.

I think the reason this metaphor has settled so deeply into me at twenty-five is that it resolves a tension I've been carrying without knowing it. The tension between ambition and patience. Between wanting to build something extraordinary and accepting that extraordinary things grow on their own schedule.

Modern culture — the world I live in — worships the architect. The person with the blueprint, the five-year plan, the pitch deck, the roadmap. Build your career. Build your company. Build your brand. But construction is linear. You pour the foundation, you raise the walls, you install the roof. If you follow the blueprint, you get the building.

Life doesn't work that way. Gardens don't work that way.

A garden is a collaboration between your intention and everything you can't control. You bring the vision — which seeds, where to plant them, how to prepare the ground. The earth, the weather, the seasons, the microorganisms in the soil, the insects, the rain — they bring everything else. The garden that emerges is not the one you designed. It's the one that was possible, given the conversation between what you wanted and what the world offered.

The Gita understood this three thousand years ago. The field is yours to tend. The fruit is not yours to demand. Your hands go in the soil. The rest — you trust.

I think of her every time I plant something — a project, a relationship, an idea — and feel the impatience rise. The urge to dig it up. The urge to check. The urge to control what can't be controlled.

Granny is old and weak now, often incoherent, unable to move freely or tend to her garden. She watched it fall into disrepair a couple of years back. On my last visit home, in February, she politely asked me to carry her to her garden. She felt so small and worn in my arms, but warm with delight. As I placed her in the center, she looked around — at the plants that had grown wild, at the empty spaces where her favorites used to be. She let out a sigh.

"I tended my garden, and I'm proud of it. I always will be."

She put her hand in the soil, and pressed a stray seed into it.