The Inner Classroom

PNS

By Sheetal Bagaria

Sadhana in Green

I met Sangeeta Fatehpuria through a common friend and arrived expecting to meet someone who loved plants.

I thought I knew what that meant.

A beautiful home, thoughtful interiors, perhaps a gardener quietly doing most of the work.

What I entered instead was not a house arranged around plants.

It was a life arranged around attention.

Plants occupied the space naturally. Leaves appeared where one expected objects. The indoors opened into the outdoors and eventually upward into the terrace. Somewhere in moving through those spaces, I realised this was not decoration.

This was vocabulary.

Plants were not an interest in Sangeeta’s life.

They were one of the languages through which she seemed to understand existence.

She spoke of them with memory rather than ownership.

This one had struggled.

This one preferred less water.

This one had finally adjusted.

There was history in the way she described them.

When I asked whether staff or gardeners managed things, her answer stayed with me.

Many of us enjoy the beauty of plants while someone else waters, notices disease, repots and revives.

For Sangeeta, affection seemed to begin where participation begins.

She spoke of putting her own hands into the soil, of learning which plant truly needs water and which only appears to, of observing rather than managing.

Then she said something simple.

If somebody else is doing all the caring, then what exactly is the relationship?

And suddenly this stopped being about plants.

At one point she paused beside a plant and spoke softly to it.

Not for effect.

Not jokingly.

Just speaking.

There were private names, small sounds, the kind of softness that belongs to intimacy.

Then she told me about a bumblebee she had grown used to seeing.

One day it was not moving.

What struck me was not that she noticed.

It was that she could not stop noticing.

She kept checking until she realised it had recovered.

Perhaps her relationship with plants was never really about plants.

Perhaps it was about remaining sensitive.

Allowing oneself to care.

Refusing indifference.

Later, Sangeeta used a word that stayed with me.

Sadhana.

Not in a grand spiritual sense.

But as repeated attention.

She spoke about how plants teach silence, patience and surrender.

You prepare the soil.

You water.

You care.

But growth belongs elsewhere.

Listening to her, I found myself returning to the Bhagavad Gita.

Act, but do not possess.

Care, but do not control.

Offer effort.

Release the outcome.

And I wondered whether devotion sometimes moves not away from the world but toward creation.

If creation belongs to the divine, then what does it mean to care for it with this kind of attention?

Watching Sangeeta, I wondered whether this too could be bhakti.

Not because plants are more sacred than people.

But because there was reverence in the way she participated.

Perhaps sadhana does not always look like withdrawal.

Perhaps sometimes it looks like staying.

Watering.

Waiting.

Noticing.

One leaf at a time.

Sheetal Bagaria is an essay strategist who guides students toward foreign education while sharing meaningful life lessons along the way. bagariasheetal1971@gmail.com