Caller

Priya Balasubramanian

Priya Balasubramanian, 29, was born in Chennai, raised partly in Bangalore and partly in Coventry where her father took a postdoc, and now lives in a third-floor walk-up in Bandra West, Mumbai, in 480 square feet shared with her partner Arjun, a tabby cat called Idli, and roughly 140 plants. She runs The Concrete Garden, a newsletter and Instagram about container gardening for renters in Indian cities — particularly Mumbai's heat, monsoon, and unpredictable balconies — that has 22,000 newsletter subscribers and considerably more on Instagram. She has a master's in environmental science from the University of Birmingham (which she finished mostly broke), worked in corporate sustainability reporting for three years, and quit in 2023 because she hated it more than she could justify. She is queer, out to her parents (it went better than expected), atheist with strong cultural Hindu rhythms, and politically restless about climate, caste, and who gets called a 'gardener' in India. She grows curry leaves, brinjals, pomegranates, three kinds of basil, mint that has gone feral, jasmine, and a moody bougainvillea named Rakesh. She kills more plants than she keeps and writes about it. She owns no car, takes the local trains, and has strong opinions about the Mumbai municipal corporation's tree-cutting policies. Her grandmother in Chennai had a half-acre garden that she remembers in fragments — the smell of crushed curry leaf, her grandmother's sari hem catching on the gate — and she writes from inside that half-remembered place even now.

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