Enamul Hoque and the garden of love part 2

(Continued from previous post.)

After a work-related adventure in Manhattan last night, I was back in Crown Heights, I experienced the familiar disorientation that often accompanies my return from the Island back to my home turf. Walking up Nostrand from the subway stop, past all past the wig stores and 99 cent shops, I was thinking, "Yep, I live in the full-on hood," and pondering the comforts and pitfalls of urban insularity, when I noticed something going on in the usually empty abandoned lot about a block up from Fulton. About half of the grassy lot had been cleared down to the dirt. A small black-haired man in a work shirt and dark pants, his back to the street, was walking the length of a long gash in the dirt, tamping it down with his tennis shoes. A seed row, I realized. This guy had planted something.

I took out my iphone, ready to take a stealth photo and move along. But before I could press the button, a friend of his had called out from the fruit cart on the sidewalk - "Hey! She gonna take your photo!" The planter turned around.

Even from there it felt like he was smiling -- amused or delighted, or both, that someone would be snapping a pic of him at work on his project. His friend, an older bearded black man, beckoned me to step inside the chain-link fence and take a closer look. I did.

I recognized the planter as the owner of the fruit cart, which was being manned by several of his friends so that he could take care of his gardening. I asked what he was growing. "Tomatoes," he said in a South Asian accent, and then something else I didn't understand. I had to ask politely twice more before I got that it was "cucumbers". He has plans for other plants too -- potatoes, beans, and flowers -- the names of which became easier to decipher the longer I listened to him speak. He loves to garden. It's his favorite  thing. I have to come back and see it all grow.

The friend who had called to him from the cart came over and joined him, and let me know that they would be working on another garden about a block away, at Fulton and Herkimer, and I had to come check it out next week. I asked him if he'd like to be in a photo. He rushed to the planter's side and posed.

Then came the multimedia portion of what was starting to feel like some kind of spontaneous interactive form of street performance. At his friend's request, the planter gave me his name and cell number so that I could send him the photos. Enamul Hoque. The proud gardener and seller of fruit. "I garden everywhere and make it beautiful." From what I could understand (he talks kinda fast), he doesn't own the lot, but the city lets him garden on it. It's a micro-version of the organic farms emerging on the city-owned, neglected urban prairies of Detroit - and the community gardens that have been created in similar lots on the residential streets of Crown Heights. 

But there was something about seeing the emergence of this garden, smack-dab in the middle of the hood's retail district, that was especially moving. As I texted the photos to Enamul and thanked him for letting me take them, he brought me over to the fruit cart, saying "Please, please. Take banana. Please." I was so enamored of him and his generous spirit, and so caught up in the moment, that I took another photo, almost without thinking.

I thanked him again, for the banana and the photos, smiling at his fruit-cart friends who were all looking on in amusement (case in point, background dude in this photo). As I walked away, Enamul called out, "Hey - hey! Take plum! Here. Take plum." 

I realized that he needed to give me something without being the subject of a story, without having his picture taken this time. I turned back and accepted the perfect round fruit and thanked him again. I would be back to see his garden, I assured him. And the one on the next block too.

I placed the sweet gifts in my bag and resumed my trek up Nostrand, feeling the garden love at my back and all around me, the beauty of the full-on hood.