nature
This week You! takes a look at the rooftop garden of Cheena Chhapra, which is a work of pure love...
We have seen some really beautiful and creative gardens; we have seen some exquisitely manicured ones and then we have witnessed some breathtaking landscaping but rooftop gardens remain rare in Pakistan. The trend has now been catching on but it is still not a common sight in our city. So when I first set eyes on ‘MehBil Gardens’, I was spellbound by its beauty and mystique. Brainchild of entrepreneur Cheena Chhapra, MehBil Gardens is a work of pure love. “I always wanted to name something after my late parents so that I could think of them every day. So when I came up with the idea of our rooftop garden, I decided to call it MehBil (Meh from Meher - my mother’s name, and Bil from Bilal - my dad’s),” Chhapra shares nostalgically.
As Chhapra likes to put it, the rooftop garden was not something she had planned. It just happened. It was a whimsical act but one that took shape beautifully as it progressed. It all started when Cheena Chhapra’s daughter, Ayesha brought home sunflower seeds which she planted in a pot and placed on the rooftop. This gave Cheena the idea to create a grassy patch on the same spot. So she had her gardener bring in four tiles of American grass.
“My children Ayesha, Marium and Habib would check on the progress of the sunflower seeds every day while I would observe my grassy turf. One fine day both took shape simultaneously and when we saw the result we fell in love with it. It was then that the idea of expanding it into a rooftop garden hit me. My husband Umair told me to go ahead and get whatever I wanted for my MehBil Gardens and I started working on it,” she recalls excitedly.
The first thing that Chhapra began with was a staircase to her rooftop since there was no access to it except for an air-conditioner duct that allowed them to wiggle through it whenever they had to get to the rooftop. From then on, she and her green thumb team, comprising seven members, started building the garden from scratch. “I started getting blocks from all over to either have them placed on the ground or in some cases even serve as a table top or hang them at a specific spot,” she shares.
“It was a lot of fun putting things together. The best part is that I did not go to any shop or make expensive purchases. I would go to Sunday bazaar and spend hours looking through various stalls searching for any and every trinket, accessory, blocks, tiles in fact anything at all that could add to the charm of MehBil,” she adds.
As an admirer of her creativity, when I looked around the gardens, I could see exactly what Cheena Chhapra was talking about - the miniature frog, chime bells, water can, and lots of other trinkets beautifully adorn the various corners of the garden. Also, the garden has many pockets offering you a different experience in each space. There is the main sitting area with block flooring and tufts of grass peeping through the chinks. A cane sofa set with an improvised centre table serves as the family’s relaxing point. To one side is a small wrought-iron four-seater arrangement, while in another corner is their small kitchenette where the family spends many a winter evening, cooking and devouring their meals. Another enclave of the garden houses the chicken hatchery where the Chhapras love to keep their exotic Japanese chicks. The chickens, fondly named Mr and Mrs Pablo had already given birth to their first lot of chicks while another one was ready to hatch. Mrs. Pablo was in fact seen sitting on her eight eggs the day I went for the interview with Cheena Chhapra. And while talking we heard the delighted squeal of her daughter Marium who excitedly called out to us as a chick from the second batch had just hatched. It was still in the process of breaking out of its shell.
Such is the life and beauty at MehBil Gardens that makes you feel as if you’re transported to Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale land.
And while the Chhapra’s sit and enjoy their freshly brewed coffee in the balmy evening, Fred the Tortoise comes crawling and joins the happy lot in their secret garden.
Photography by
Shaharyar Hasan