“The gardens may flow with beauty, but let us go to the gardener himself”
-Jalaluddin Rumi
I grew up in my father’s garden among the marigolds, magnolias and mountain ash. I grew up planting trees and holly bushes, and feeling the cool dirt in my hands as we sowed potatoes and picked scarlet apples and perfect pears from our ample branches. I remember the smell of jasmine wafting in the breeze and his rough hands tenderly holding the petals of a peaking rose. My father, Ali Rajabali, is a creator and cultivator of beauty. And it was in this garden that he became the bearer of fruits and I learned to see nature’s subtle splendour.
In the garden, I became spiritually literate; as the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently wrote, “all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.” Season after season, the land ebbed and flowed with the rhythms of colour and change. Summer’s sunlight soaked the land and winter’s damp darkness followed. Leaves cast shadows and eventually fell to the ground, only to rise again. As my father laboured and lingered, I witnessed and experienced the fruits of his spiritual labour.
My parents came to Vancouver in the 1970s and I was the only child of colour on my street and in my school—a child with one hand in the east and one hand in the west. There was unrest in our hearts, but a sureness that faith would see us through. I was teased and bullied mercilessly. As an educator, I understand, in reflection, that what is unknown to others can bring tension and fear.
My father had insight and the garden brought a hopeful gift. He invited my kindergarten class to our backyard, and we sat in a circle under the shade of our magnolia tree eating fresh apples he picked. In these moments, in the shared experience of nature under the arms of a tree, the garden brought grace and friendship was born. He knew the poetic potential of nature and the power of communal light-filled social spaces.
As my father continued to dwell in the garden, I became more of a witness as I ceased from cultivating plants to cultivating words. He was a gardener, and I became a poet, both of us fulfilling a desire to know and capture beauty, to colour the world. As he planted lines of tulips, I wrote lines of poetry. As he formed patterns, I played with vowels, consonants and alliteration.
We both stooped in the rhythm of our craft, of what I have come to know as our faith in action toward a spiritual ideal. Here is a place amidst the horizontal and the vertical as in the tree I sat under with my kindergarten class—roots sinking into the soil with branches crowning up into the seamless sky.
My father went on to give his time and knowledge to various projects, such as the Burnaby Lake Jamatkhana landscape in Vancouver, the Ismaili Centre in Dushanbe and the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad. At Burnaby Lake, pin oak trees line the perimeter of the Jamatkhana, forming nature’s gate with an ushering in of quietude. In Dushanbe, cedar trees pyramid into the sky, stoic and evergreen, and silver birches with striking white bark bestow shade and shadow. At the academy in Hyderabad, fragrant local neem trees provide a soothing smell as students read outdoors on benches.
Nurturing gathering spaces amid Allah’s creation emphasizes the value of stewardship—our responsibility to revere and protect the natural world. To me, my father will always be a guardian of the garden. Like a poet, his desire to form and frame nature to its fullest potential helps him and others find contemplative moments—moments that renew the heart as the human soul intermingles with awe and mystery.
My father often expresses, “Plant a tree; thank Allah for something to cherish.” And with each tree he has rooted has come a humbling reminder of creation, a communing with God.
Now our garden is no longer and the old house is gone. New homes sit upon what once was and I have recently returned to this land after a long absence. In this homecoming has come flooding memories of moments upon moments in the garden. What is poignant is that the only remnant that remains is the resilient magnolia tree. As I look out the window to my backyard, I imagine its rhizomatic roots now extended and forged into the dank earth. These living roots branch deep in my heart as arteries pumping full of crimson colour and love.
My father is much older now and does not have the physical fortitude to dwell in the garden as he once did, as he goes through the end journey of human life. But nature’s life continues with the promise of spring bringing perennial petals; the gardens he has created continue to flourish and strengthen. I resonate with a powerful sentiment from the inauguration of the Aga Khan Park in Toronto where His Highness the Aga Khan said: “The Park and its Gardens can serve as a symbol of ‘connection’… across time linking us to the past.”
The smell of jasmine often transports me to the past—sentimental, nostalgic moments infused with a pedagogical lesson on finding beauty and purpose. In the end, when gratitude cannot be spoken, there is poetry, which I offer here. As with the aroma of an English rose, I hope it lingers with a sweet, enduring fragrance.
Spoken Word: Ali by Anar Rajabali
Ali
Gardens are a place
where the ephemeral meets
the eternal, and
where the eternal meets
the hand of man*
The hands of my father
down deep in the ripe rich soil
dwelling in the garden
for forty years of
weeding, watering,
pruning, root feeding,
tending to the flowers he brings for me
on special days like the rhododendron
he planted when I was ten
to bloom only on my birthday
in May
petals of grace peeking
outside my bedroom window
to the graceless child
a father who knew
the wisdom of plants
cultivating a silent form of love
I could not see then
his heart in the soul of a flower
ruby red in rough hands
how his faith came in these moments
blossoming.
I keenly remember
my kindergarten class
in our backyard
and how we sat in a circle
eating red delicious apples
picked from our tree
he put in a silver bucket
for our eager hands
and vanilla ice cream, too,
he knew that gardens can make friends
to the only child of colour
A rootedness to the unrooted
the fruits of his own spiritual labour
flowering.
One Sunday visit I asked him:
Dad, can you tell me about the garden?
Yes, yes, we have
pink dogwood,
Japanese plum,
azaleas…deciduous (he stressed),
boxwood hedges, I made them round,
five of them, for each one of us,
Rosa Hansa,
Rowan mountain ash,
forsythia,
camellia,
clematis…deeply fragrant it is!
Crimson King maple,
Yucca gloriosa,
lavender,
heather,
bamboo,
banana,
Bartlett pear,
Bing cherry,
peach…
And I started to feel the poetry
in the nature of his own creations
wearing the colours of his spirit
a unity in this work
with the hands that sowed the Earth
that always gave back—
to him.
You have made me most happy by asking me, Anar,
as he brought me some jasmine,
but I was silent—
And on the way home I said to myself softly:
Oh, Dad, you have made me most happy,
too.
* Excerpt from a speech delivered by His Highness the Aga Khan at the inauguration of the Aga Khan Park in Toronto on May 25, 2015.
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of The Ismaili Canada.
