The Soil Must Feed: Notes on Caste, Paternal Grief, and Desert Cacti

I revisit a childhood memory—sitting on the front frame of my father’s bicycle while he cycled back home from the park where he worked as a mali (gardener). His job was to shape the life of a public park throughout the day, but the evening journey home was ours. We carried saplings of marigold, tulsi (holy basil), and cuttings of Indian roses that, unlike English roses, produce fragrant flowers. It was a quiet ritual that, after all these years, feels less like a simple ride home and more like a shared purpose that bound us to care for the plants and help them grow in safety, presence, and love.

The years layered over that bicycle ride have buried the ease we once shared. The more I entered the world of adults, the more the unspoken burden of the unlived life between us grew, deepening the psychic rupture. The disconnection became so sharp that we stopped sharing what we loved, replaced by a silence and anger that grew upon our shared grief. It was as if there was no return to the home—the homeliness—something known that remained unknown. Over time, the playfulness between us was displaced.

His instincts were entirely agrarian, rooted in the soil of the ancestral village that he had left for city life, but never truly departed. In our rooftop garden, a sharp divergence emerged: his edible, agrarian, survival-oriented kitchen garden, alongside the white-yellow calendula flowers that open with sunrise and close with sunset (a feature that, later, I began to love most), versus my collection of desert cacti and succulents—silent, slow-growing plants that demand less space, water, and care but far more distance.

Yet the ground beneath the rupture was never truly dead. The reparation of our bond began without warning, not through words but through the very juncture that had divided our instincts: the soil. I remember the precise moment my father joined me in preparing the soil mix for repotting my cacti. After watching me struggle aggressively with a massive pile of soil and grit, his old mali instincts took over, and he dove straight into the heap. Preparing that messy soil together with our bare hands was how we began to reconnect, meeting in our roles as gardeners through nonverbal gestures and the shared symbolism of the terrace.

He helped me repot the cacti, worrying over the bare-rooted plants for days, not knowing they can wait comfortably for weeks un-potted. In fact, the longer they wait, the lower the risk of root rot and the safer their foundation becomes. The beautiful paradox of desert plants like Adenium obesum and Adenium arabicum (the desert roses) is that the greater the shock they endure, the thicker and more resilient they grow, thriving at their own measured pace. The relational rupture between us had found a tactile channel to access an interpersonal life force that responded long before words could form. The inability to speak emotional truths was replaced by the quiet language of soil, watering cans, and subtle horticultural observations.

Still, the discord between us remained marked. My father grew green chilies, tomatoes, coriander, turmeric, ginger, garlic, and seasonal vegetables. He would hold up a heavy cluster of tomatoes, quoting their current market price as an assertion of his accomplishment. For him, a plant had to justify its existence on a plate or at least offer blossoms, like his hibiscus and wildly growing Sadabahar (Vinca).

In our home, soil was never an ornamental privilege; it was an inheritance of survival. For a Dalit man whose ancestral memory carried the generational weight of agricultural servitude, historical dispossession, and hard labor, planting was an existential contract. In the collective psyche of the caste-oppressed, soil is a site of toil and extraction. One does not “play’ with dirt; one works it to survive through daily labor—watering, pruning, and fertilizing—where negligence of timing can spoil the yield. My father’s insistence on heavy tomatoes, chilies, and coriander was rooted in this unarticulated vigilance: the soil must produce, it must feed, it must nourish, and above all, it must justify the space it takes. For him, every square inch of the terrace had to produce food because hunger and deprivation were generational memories inscribed directly into his body. To me, his garden felt like an anxious theater of seasonal labor.

I, on the other hand, collected desert cacti and succulents as an act of personal transgression: claiming the unproductive freedom to celebrate the luxury of uselessness. My collection included Lophophora williamsii, Ariocarpus trigonus, Obregonia denegrii, Melocactus matanzanus, Discocactus placentiformis, Astrophytum, Lithops, and other species that thrive on neglect, hoarding water in secretive flesh beneath geometric ribs and spines. To my father, these desert plants were inexplicable because they offered no sustenance, producing neither edible root nor sweet fruit.

Where his hands worked to fend off ancestral lack, mine sheltered organisms tailored for harsh, abandoned borderlands. He looked at my pots with confusion and with the quiet anxiety of an elder watching his educated son cultivate stillness and uselessness—freedoms he was never permitted to imagine. In truth, that anxiety shadowed me as well: occupying the elite, intellectual world of psychoanalysis often felt like a borrowed existence, as if a body marked by generations of manual servitude had no legitimate claim to sit in the therapist’s chair. In an Indian social hierarchy, decorative leisure gardening signifies upper-caste ease. In a marginalized reality, growing slow desert cacti that yield nothing to eat is a fundamental rupture. His disapproval registered as an ancestral alarm: Why are you wasting labor and space on something that cannot feed us? Who taught you that you could afford this kind of stillness?

And yet, when the ideologies of our gardens clashed, the raw language of the earth still brought us back, fostering a capacity for mutual concern. In the beginning, he would water my desert cacti alongside his vegetables. We lost several plants to his well-intentioned care. Over time, he learned that desert plants do not know how to refuse water; they absorb it indiscriminately until their tissues collapse. What they require is slow holding and facilitation: an attunement to how much water to give, followed by long periods of leaving them alone. The more distance you maintain, the deeper the care.

In turn, I was drawn into his vegetable beds. We fell into a shared rhythm where he would call me up to the terrace to show me tiny, newly set fruits hidden beneath dense foliage. His observant eye never failed to stun me; he could read the promise of a harvest in a speck of green. He would count the embryonic pumpkins, bottle gourds, bitter gourds, sponge gourds, eggplants, and capsicums—an abundance that kept us connected to life.

Beyond our domestic retreat, the cactus bench opened up an alternative perceptual universe. Through their silent, sensory presence, my father and I were able to share in a different kind of consciousness. A freshly bloomed Discocactus placentiformis was a revelation—a nighttime wonder native to Brazil that unfurls its white flowers only in the deep dark, best admired between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. When it blooms, the entire terrace is enveloped in a hallucinogenic fragrance, a subtle blend of jasmine and lemon that drifts on the night breeze before vanishing at sunrise. Twice a year, this quiet specimen gifted us moments of pure magic.

These plants disrupt rigid, structural defenses and invite an affective, vegetal awareness. As a psychotherapist, bringing my agrarian roots and clinical training together, I often reflect on how our field remains preoccupied with language—with the talking cure, the decipherable signifier, and the verbal bridge between minds. But what do you do when language is the very ground that has broken down between a father and a son?

Our plants demanded a nonverbal attunement. Tending them was sensory immersion. The delicate wool on an areole, the nocturnal flower releasing its perfume into the cool air, the cherry-red fruits of a Melocactus emerging slowly from its head—these carried an uncanny aura. My four-year-old niece, Iva, reprimands the Melocactus when it fails to produce its edible fruit for her to pull out and eat. With her childlike urgency and sudden wonder, she bridges our generational divide—carrying my father’s agrarian insistence that the soil must yield, while celebrating the stillness I learned to protect.

In my own psychic economy, sitting before the cacti offered a sanctuary from the vigilance demanded of a Dalit body in caste society. In our world, the marginalized psyche is conditioned to anticipate humiliation, to calculate utility, to prepare for exile. But the cactus asked nothing of me. It did not demand productivity. It survived deprivation, hoarded its reserves in secret, and inhabited the desert without apologizing for its thorns. As the plants grew at their slow pace, my father would occasionally stand behind me in silence. He never touched them; the ancestral fear of thorns kept his hands back. But in that shared, quiet gaze, two men marked by historical injuries stood observing an organism that refused to submit to the utilitarian laws of the world around it.

Bearing witness as an independent psychotherapist requires taking a distant, analytical position, much like cultivating desert flora. In my practice, working with trauma survivors, psychoanalysis reveals itself as a specialized form of gardening. Each person stands before me as a distinct genus requiring singular attunement; we observe the delicate balance between structural resilience and sudden vulnerability. For those displaced by systemic erasure, dissociation ceases to be mere pathology and transforms into a vital defensive adaptation—much like a desert cactus hoards water beneath protective spines to survive an inhospitable terrain.

To honor the cycle of trauma is also to honor the necessity of dormancy: the quiet periods of withdrawal where a person protects their inner life force. It is not weakness but a silent gathering of strength to survive displacement and keep at bay the impact of erasure. Thriving on the margins demands periods of bare-rooted endurance; the greater the shock a body absorbs, the deeper the internal ground must settle, allowing the self to cultivate stillness and bloom at its own pace.

The nonverbal communion we cultivated through the soil became my anchor during my father’s final days and in the grief that followed. For two agonizing years before his death, his body was held captive by paralysis. Months after his passing, he visited me in a vivid dream, standing in the open fields of his ancestral village. He was smiling, his hands and legs completely restored, walking with an ease his body had long been denied. I smiled back and called out, “Oh, you have already reached here before me. Look, our crops of wheat are finally yielding.” But there was no reply, only that serene, absolute smile. I reached out to embrace him, but he did not embrace me back; he simply turned and walked away into the open fields.

When I woke, the brutal weight of the dream settled over me. The unconscious had staged a desperate wish-fulfillment to soften the finality of death, but his silence enforced the reality principle, re-establishing the boundary between the living and the departed. I was left alone on the terrace, holding the soil, learning to endure the shock of his permanent stillness.

This monsoon brought a quiet miracle: a stray plant sprouted on its own in a neglected six-inch pot, yielding nine green chilies first and then eleven more. Rising surprisingly from the stillness of my desert pots, it felt as though the soil had intercepted my grief to deliver the sustenance my father always fought for. He is gone, but his agrarian vigilance remains inscribed in our terrace soil—still growing, and still finding a way to feed us.