Devil’s Ivy

How not to raise a plant

I carried the plant outside the room and placed it under the rain. It had been raining for the last six days. There was no let up. Mother said she hadn’t seen rain like that in her lifetime, which axiomatically implies that I hadn’t seen rain like that in my lifetime either, although it could have just been recency bias, and maybe in my mother’s childhood there was a rain that lasted for more than six days, a rain more relentless than what had been pouring outside the window, but perhaps my mother wasn’t looking at it. Lately, I had been ignoring this plant. I forgot to water it even though water was the only thing it needed to grow and survive in the world. When I visited the nursery a few months ago, I specifically asked for a plant that didn’t need any sunlight to stay alive, and the man who ran the nursery gave me this plant whose name I have forgotten. I think he said it’s a Dumb Cane, or perhaps he called it Devil’s Ivy, probably the latter, I don’t really remember the name, and my knowledge about plants is glaringly elementary. I wanted a simple plant with simple needs; no fuss, no elaborate care, just simply water. Initially, I was very enthusiastic about raising it over the summer. I watered it on time. I noticed its leaves, the soil underneath, and the subtle changes that came about over the course of days and weeks. It made me happy, then. But my enthusiasm soon dampened, in fact, it just disappeared, like it wasn’t even there in the first place. It was as if I almost forgot about the plant’s very existence. It was there in the room but I barely noticed it. At times, when I was about to leave the room, I would cast an inadvertent glance at it, and its pale leaves would often leave me very sad, but then I used to recover from that sadness rather quickly, because it wasn't the kind of sadness that settles in your chest and makes an eternal home there, but a sadness that at its saddest resembles a dull ache in your gut. Mother and I knew that it was dying, that it wouldn’t survive our negligence, and yet neither of us could do anything to help it come back to life. So, on the sixth day of the rain, perhaps feeling sickened by the mutual inertia, my mother suddenly blurted: “why don’t you take that plant outside in the rain?” Without saying anything to my mother in response, after making a vague gesture with my hand, I quickly got up and carried it outside, as if placing it under that ruthless rain would make up for the days and weeks of neglect; as if it would suddenly rush back to life, to us, to my room, with all the injustices washed away from its memory. A part of my heart hoped that something like that might happen, but that very part of my heart also knew that even though all it needed was water to survive, maybe it wouldn’t survive that much of it. It was now on its own though, outside, under the harshest of rains, a rain so relentless that my mother hadn’t seen anything like it in her lifetime.