Part 5 of 17 · 2 minThe Plastic Plant

Somebody had given them a plastic money plant in a red pot for a housewarming eleven years ago and it had lived on the veranda ever since, doing what plastic does, which is nothing.

Ammamma began watering it.

Every morning. A small brass tumbler, filled at the tap, carried out with both hands as though it were heavy, poured slowly around the base so it would go to the roots and not run off the top. Then she would stand and look at it for a while with real satisfaction.

The water ran out of the drainage hole and across the veranda and Bujji slipped in it twice.

"It is PLASTIC," Bujji shouted the second time, from the floor, with his elbow hurting. "Ammamma, it is PLASTIC, it is not even a PLANT—"

"Bujji," said Amma.

"But it is plas—"

"Bujji."

That evening Amma went to the nursery and bought a real money plant in a green pot and put it on the veranda next to the red one, and moved the red one about a foot to the left so it was slightly behind.

She did not say anything about it to anybody.

The next morning Ammamma watered the real one. Not because she had noticed. Because it was in front.

She watered it every day for a year and it grew all the way along the veranda rail and around the pillar, and when people came to the house they said what a beautiful plant, and Ammamma would say, "I look after it," and that was true, and everybody in that family let it be true, and it was the only completely successful thing anybody did in the whole of that year.

Chinnu asked her mother about it once, much later.

"Why didn't you just throw the plastic one away?"

"Because she would have had nothing to water that morning," said Amma, "and I had not bought the other one yet."

"You could have told her it was plastic."

"Yes," said Amma. "And then what?"

Chinnu thought about *and then what* for a long time. It became, eventually, the most useful question she knew.