Rajkamal Nursery

Down at D-1598 Bapu Nagar on Savitri Path, you’ll find Rajkamal Nursery. It’s a bit of a green patch in the middle of all the houses and paved roads. We spend our days mostly outdoors, checking on the saplings and making sure everything gets enough water. The ground is almost always damp, and there’s that heavy smell of wet earth and fertilizer that lingers around. We don't have a big office or anything like that; usually, we’re just sitting on some plastic stools near the gate or moving pots from one side to the other. It’s a lot of manual labor, digging holes and mixing soil, so our clothes are usually covered in dirt by noon. The sun can be quite harsh in Jaipur, so we have some green netting over parts of the nursery to keep the more delicate plants from burning. It isn't a perfect, landscaped garden you’d see in a magazine. It’s a working nursery where things are grown from seeds or cuttings. We have rows of terracotta pots and some plastic bags with small trees waiting for someone to take them home. Sometimes the stray dogs come in to sleep in the shade, and we don't mind much. It’s a slow-paced kind of life here on Savitri Path, just watching things grow and dealing with the seasons as they come. It is just us and the plants most of the time.