That wild vegetable

I was on my way home from the office. It was hot, the road was jammed, and I had been sitting in the bus for ages. Out of nowhere I remembered someone calling traffic jams ‘the biggest man-made monster in Dhaka’. There was nothing to do but sit and look around. Tall buildings lined both sides of the road, and down the middle ran a thin divider with a few plants on it. I didn’t want to look at any more buildings, so I looked at the plants. But the more I looked, the sadder I got. Of the few trees I could see, one had broken branches, another had leaves worn out by dust and black exhaust, another had leaves scorched by engine heat and whatever poison comes out of those engines, and another was half dead because it had no soil underneath and no room to grow.

Poor trees. What a hard life they have. They are all dying slowly. I grew up surrounded by trees and I studied botany, so maybe I feel for them a bit more than most people do, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand seeing them like that. I sat back in my seat with my eyes closed for a while. The man next to me kept dozing off and falling against me, which annoyed me, so I got up. Home wasn’t far anyway, and I thought I might get there sooner on foot. As soon as I left my seat, the people standing in the aisle started pushing to get it. I squeezed through the crowd and got off. Looking at the crowd on the footpath, it seemed lots of people had done the same thing, telling themselves home was just up ahead. I joined the line and walked along behind the person in front of me, like ants.

A childhood vegetable on the footpath

As I walked I glanced at the little roadside stalls, like I do every day. One had fish, one had clothes, one had electronics, and some had vegetables. You won’t find them at other times of the day, but because everyone walks home in a line like this at this hour, that’s when the stalls set up. Business doesn’t seem bad either. I sometimes pick up a good vegetable for home myself. The funny part is that when someone stops to buy something, the three or four people behind them bump into each other and get stuck. It turns into a small traffic jam of its own. Then it slowly clears, gets stuck somewhere else, and bit by bit I make it home.

But today I stopped short at one stall before I got home. The seller had a wild vegetable I had eaten as a child, back when I lived in the village. It was so long ago that I couldn’t even remember what it tasted like. I bought about a kilo and was about to leave when I thought, if I don’t find out where he got this, I won’t sleep tonight. When I asked, he said he had never sold it before and today was the first time. The person who gave it to him had picked it from the woods near his home, and you can’t always find it. I didn’t bother him any more and quietly went on my way.

The ones we are losing

Wild vegetables like this one are slowly disappearing from our lives. They resist disease better, they survive almost anywhere, and they can take drought and floods. And still they grow uncared for and ignored, because sadly their yield is low. To be fair, their yield isn’t really low. It’s normal. But since high-yield hybrid varieties came onto the market, these get compared with them, labelled ‘low-yield, poor-quality wild vegetables’, and nobody grows them any more. So they are disappearing. Meanwhile the high-yield hybrids are good at one thing, yield, and nothing else, so they need a lot more care. They can’t handle bad weather. When pests, drought or floods come, they don’t survive, and then there’s a food shortage.

At university I used to joke with my friends that these wild vegetables were like the students who really understand what they study, go deep into it, help out with everything around them and throw themselves into extracurricular activities, but whose yield is low, meaning their results are average or a little above. The ones with the highest yield, the CGPA 4.00 crowd, spent four years studying and nothing else. That’s all they had to show for it. There are exceptions, of course, people who are the best at everything. As the saying goes, those who cook can also do their hair. I wasn’t in either group myself. I scraped through four years somehow, so I really enjoyed teasing them with this. Today some of them are abroad for higher studies, some are deep in research, and most of the rest are like me, getting through life with a small job. With those old adda sessions coming back to me, I got a bit nostalgic. One step, then another, and before I knew it I was at my front door.

When I got home I handed the wild vegetable to my wife and asked her to cook it. She got a little heated. “You always bring home the stuff nobody sells at the market! I’m not cooking this grass.” Then at dinner the two of us happily ate that same wild vegetable. I was about to say something when she beat me to it. “Don’t bother, I know. I’ve kept the seeds. Tomorrow you can plant them in the pots on the roof. Oh, your office is closed tomorrow, so you can do it yourself. The soil is ready in the right-hand corner of the roof. And while you’re up there, check whether the wild kakrol you brought home last time is ready to eat. If it is, pick some and take a few to the landlord.” Before going to sleep I did what I always do and lay in bed writing about the day in my diary, but I didn’t get very far. In the end I gave in to my age and fell asleep.