Sangeeta Nautiyal builds her poem on a simple contrast: a plant that has finally given fruit, and a plant that hasn't. The first belongs to a shared memory ("our garden"), the second to the speaker alone. The poem begins as a small celebration, but the real subject is the fear that effort and patience do not always pay off. What makes this fear sharper is where the doubt ends up. The speaker doesn't blame the weather or bad luck. The suspicion falls on the speaker's own hope.
The opening stanza sounds almost cheerful. "Come and see it has blessed with fruits" is an invitation, and the admission that the fruit is "Some sour and some sweet" keeps the scene honest. Then the vocabulary turns solemn. The plant's growth is called "Penance," a word from religion and self-denial, and its seasons are listed as "Burning summers, ruthless monsoons, and freezing winters." The adjectives are carefully chosen. Heat burns, rain is ruthless, cold freezes, so each season has its own kind of cruelty. The short line "That much it suffered" lands like a sigh after the long list. The stanza ends on a legal-sounding phrase, "It was entitled to get the fruitage." Fairness is the idea being set up here. The plant suffered, so it earned its reward.
The pivot comes with "But what about," a line that reads like a lump in the throat. The speaker moves from "we" to "I," and from a plant that can be pointed at to one that can't: "the plant of hope." The language of the first stanza comes back, but it now describes someone still waiting. The word "burn" returns in "Till when it would have to burn." "Penance" returns too, in "outcome of penance." The difference is that the first plant's suffering has ended and this one's hasn't. The speaker also adds "nights" to the plant's trials: "how many nights it will be agonized." The first plant endured seasons, while this one seems to endure the sleepless hours of a person. Meanwhile "Don't have any clue" and "Don't know when" show a mind that keeps asking questions and getting no answers.
The final stanza is where the poem turns on itself. "May be never" is blunt, and it is followed by a run of guesses, each one more painful than the last. Perhaps the speaker "sowed the bushes of acacia." Acacia is commonly associated with thorny shrubs, so the guess suggests a plant that was never going to give sweet fruit however well it was tended. Perhaps it was "a wrong seed," which puts the blame on a bad choice. The last possibility is the cruelest: "Or a moldy hope." Mold grows on things that are damp, stored too long and neglected. A moldy hope is one that was spoiled before it was planted, or one that has rotted while waiting. The title is held back until this final line, so the reader meets the image at the same moment as the speaker's worst fear.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are of uneven length and the voice is conversational, almost like thinking aloud. Structure does the work that rhyme might have done. The stanzas run seven lines, seven lines and then four, so the poem physically shrinks as hope does. Repetition ties the sections together: "sowed," "fruitage," "penance," and the stammering "May be" that opens three of the last four lines. Even the plain, slightly formal diction ("fruitage," "entitled," "agonized") suits a speaker who is trying to reason about something that hurts.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses an easy comfort. The familiar belief that hard work is always rewarded is shown working in the first stanza and then questioned in the second. The ending offers no reassurance, only an honest, uncertain question. Anyone who has waited a long time for the result of their effort will recognise the feeling.