My Grandmother’s lessons in Ontology

I was very intrigued by the golden rods blooming in the fall. One morning in late October

2023, I stopped by the side of the road to look closely and took a few bunches. At that

moment, a somewhat presumptuous woman hurriedly approached me and asked me if I had

permission from the city to do this. I was baffled by this and couldn’t believe that “the city”

would have the capacity to process such “plant picking permits” instead of working on more

important things like the housing crises—this moment made me think of my grandmother.

When I was a child, I used to sleep with my Dadi [दादी] (paternal grandmother) at night, and

she would take me with her to the temple at dawn. On our way to the temple, carrying our

little baskets, we would collect jasmine or चमेली flowers from wild bushes. Jasmine is a very

fragrant flower with a very short lifespan; touching it too much usually crumples it. My

grandmother would say, “Hold the flower gently; if it wants to come with you, it will fall over

with minimal effort; if you need more strength to break it, leave it alone.” That was my first

lesson in asking for consent from plants. I would smell each tiny white flower I picked,

placing them in the basket carefully. We would then take them to put under the idols of

Krishna, Ganesh, and other gods to wake them up.

I find similarities in the sacred way my grandmother acknowledged flowers, stone idols

embodying gods and the “Place-Thought theory” that is referred to by Vanessa Watts (cited in

Zoe Todd, 245) in Indigenizing the Anthropocene. Philosophical theories about ontology, like

the presence of consciousness or prana in all that exists, are a way of life in the Indian culture

6 In the Hindu Sanatan Dharma faith, intention is considered presence. If the intention of the presence of gods is assigned to a stone, the stone is considered alive. This could be any stone, sometimes sculpted, but raw stones are often used and decorated. Hence, the stone gods are woken up, fed, and cleaned, just like one would care for one’s child or a family member. Caring for stones shaped like gods is so normalized in the culture that I never questioned it. The stories about trees, animals, and birds in epics like the Ramayan and Mahabharat, as well as folk tales I grew up with, are not mere stories.8 They are part of histories that have shaped cultural and emotional landscapes, ecological knowledge, and how we think about our relationships with more than humans. Living and studying in Canada, I can’t help but bring in my Indian grandmother’s teachings while parsing through Western epistemologies (Grosz,4).

My grandmother never taught me to knit or stitch, and she insisted that I focus on a formal

education because she never could. I was introduced to finger crochet by my son V, who goes

to Waldorf School in Toronto. The colonial education I received in India (a post-colonial

country) taught me to think with metaphors like “decolonize the mind” but did not teach me

tangible ways to decolonize with the community — while knitting with other women like my

grandmother or how gossiping and telling stories matters. In a place to fall apart, I knitted

and crocheted poorly, much worse than V through some of these tensions and problems. The

speculative objects hold multiple materials, including my grandmother’s teachings and

harvests, all of which project hope for humanity’s relationship to nature and not solely to

“mother” nature.