by Moakshaa Vohra
01.
On May 29, 2023, while waiting for a friend, I wandered into a park I hadn’t seen before – The National Indo-African Friendship Rose Garden. The name made me smile – formally absurd, oddly tender. I imagined men in suits beneath flags, palms outstretched for the cameras. Flash, flash, flash. Pictures. Press. Roses blooming somewhere in the background.
Later, I found a Google review that read, “Ideal nature for lovers.” There it was again – a quiet undoing of protocol. To mark friendship as a garden – diplomacy softened through planting, flowering, and porousness – felt like the work of women. Who knows that beauty, softness, and shared space can be strategies too?
This encounter marked the beginning of a larger preoccupation with Gardens.
02.
Emily and I met in Printer Row Park in the summer of 2023. I was walking home from the lake when I saw her playing an instrument. I went and sat on the bench next to her. She continued playing uninterrupted by my presence. She noticed me listening and asked the usual questions that you ask a stranger.
I said, “Moakshaa, from India, yes, studying here,” my usual response. Followed by a seemingly quick “And yes, I sing,” an unusual acknowledgment that for years has remained unacknowledged. She listened patiently as if the words would soon reveal themselves. I crossed each verse with my eyes closed. She followed diligently.
As I write from memory, I caution the reader not to tip over the gaps.
“I am Emily. My son lives here, and I am from China,” she introduced herself. It is through Google that I can tell you now that she was playing the Hulusi. She points to the body of the instrument and tells me it is made of a vegetable. “Which one?” I asked. She gestures a round shape, and I immediately say, “Melon.” She stretches the neck of her round shape gesture, and I mumble “Lauki” in Hindi. The English “Melon” and the Hindi “Lauki” are both foreign to her.
This lack or limitation of language should not be confused with the absence of language. Our legibility was made of hesitations. We allowed each other the grace of gaps, to locate words from our native dictionaries, to extend our gestures in explanation, to borrow from the only common language available to us – English. We spoke in translation; we spoke from Chinese, Hindi, and English, often accompanied by a quizzical tilt of the head to indicate “tell me more,” followed by assuring nods of “I understand.”
We created space for and from our illegibility.
03.
Printer Row Park was the site of our “new understandings.” Formerly known as Park No. 543 and initially owned by the City of Chicago, this 0.38-acre land was later transferred to the Chicago Park District. Upon acquisition, the park district renamed the space after its historic locale, Printer Row – a printing district dating back to 1880. Here, publishers, printers, bookbinders, and typesetters worked tirelessly to supply written material to the Midwest. Thus, this site seems apt for addressing concepts of legibility and illegibility.
The actions of naming, renaming, owning, and transferring associated with Printer Row Park exemplify the concept of enhancing legibility, as discussed by Venkatesh Rao in his essay “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility” (2010). Rao writes about our tendency to reorganize systems that we find incomprehensible in an effort to make them more governable. This action of “making legible” extends beyond administrative structures to our environment in the form of manicured landscapes to make nature more desirable and complimentary with modern architecture.
Certainly, a garden, then, embodies deliberate design and our desire for legibility.
04.
In British English, the term “garden” typically denotes a small, enclosed area of land, often situated next to a building. Etymologically, the word “garden” is linked to the idea of a built structure, highlighting its inherent connection to human intervention and construction.
The act of gardening, then, is not just cultivation, but curation.
Mel Bellar, writing in The Andes Gazette, defines a garden as “a space in which man collaborates with nature to create an aesthetically pleasing and/or productive, and functional result.” Bellar arrives at this definition after critiquing various sources on the internet. Though he apologizes for the inelegance of his phrasing, Bellar’s definition emphasizes the co-authorship between human and wild.
05.
I first learned about Purdah Baghs through Amita Sinha’s writing– these gardens that once served as sanctuaries for women – commissioned by Mughal queens and princesses as spaces of leisure, privacy, and gathering. In present-day Old Delhi, the traces of these lost gardens endure, quietly continuing their original purpose.
The Memo Bai Mahila Garden is a contemporary incarnation of the historic Queen’s Garden in Old Delhi. In the course of my research, I discovered it is named after my great-grandmother, Memo Bai. The realization felt like a quiet revelation. In the public archive, her name surfaces briefly in a paragraph in the “Unsung Heroes” section of a government website. Elsewhere, she appears as the “Chandni Chowk revolutionary.” Her memory in our family is scattered, almost spectral. And yet, here she stands – as a garden: open, living, held in common.
A Google review by a local guide, Jitten Sharma, describes the park as a “safe place for women morning walk.” His words, perhaps unintentionally, point to the purpose these gardens have always held. In the veiled garden, women momentarily liberate themselves – spatially, socially, and bodily. The virtues of the garden lie not only in its physical design, but in the presence of other women.
06.
I reached out to four practitioners, inviting them into this preoccupation- with Memo Bai Mahila Park as a speculative and conceptual anchor. Each artist brings their own landscapes into view, treating gardens as metaphor, method, or memory. Their gardens grow alongside mine, rooted in histories both known and speculative.
The invitation to them, and now to you, echoes a line from Sultana’s Dream, the 1905 feminist sci-fi novella by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – “Will you please come out and have a look at our garden?”
This gentle question, offered by Sister Sara to the dreaming Sultana, offers hospitality – but also a threshold. A soft opening into a radically reordered world – one led by women, powered by science and sun, and organized through care. In Rokeya’s world, the garden is not only a site of cultivation, but of quiet resistance. It is both structure and subversion – a place that makes life possible, and imagines it otherwise.
07.
The wild is often reclassified as irrational. The garden becomes a tool of control. And yet, the gardens in this project remain partially wild. They resist being fully known. This is not a project of neatness. It is an act of partial cultivation – editing a garden from the forest, knowing the forest will always return.
To write is also to garden. A clearing of space. A scattering of seed. An invitation to the wild return.
08.
To garden is to touch time. To tend to something that is yet to exist.