Delhi a la Fleur (Or, floral nemesis of my last post, Driving, Delhi, Crazy)

March makes me giddy with mush. I thaw with the weather; my moods stir, yawn and face the shiny sun. And before I know it, the days are suprise-full with moody madness: one moment I'm melting and sighing and throwing innumberable 'awwww!s' at the drop of a hat, the next I'm raging with some kind of inexplicable, phantasmagoric frenzy. It's high wattage, this month. And I am in love with it.


And my city mirrors me this month. Driving through Delhi in March is like winding your way through a Ragamala miniature painting series, in random order. The landscape periodically turns into moodscape; everything is invested with feeling. And if you're lucky enough, the car stereo will mindread and throw up the perfect song to go with the scene.


Okay, I allow you to interject and say, 'Whaddafuck, you live in Mughal Gardens or something? Cuz Delhi is just...grey'. Hmm, it is, but there are little pockets of surprise and colour - you just need to look. (If you're me, that's all you will do, and delete/ spam all the grey bits).
Don't believe me yet? Ok, so have you driven down Race Course Road and met the randomly coloured, big bouncy dahlias at the Ashok hotel roundabout? (I swear, they bob their heads in funky 'yo!' type rhythm). Have you seen the four back-to-back Semul silk-cotton trees at the messiest point of the Naraina nightmare, and rediscovered that particular sensation of 'heart-stopped-for-a-nanosec' at the sight of their lavish, flamboyant display of big, waxy, blood-red flowers? (Last March, with no flyover in sight, this sight would nevertheless make me forget, magically, that my car was bumping over potholes in the exact same way was a tiny boat would bob on choppy seas.) And if you see the poetry of a single Silk Floss Tree in full, towering February bloom (with flowers so pink, so delicate and so heart-implodingly ripe and ready to drop into your lap), left with none but one pink flower on a high branch in March, I'd totally believe you if you claim that you're swept and stunned and suddenly surreally inhabited by the ghost of Mir Taqi Mir.


And of course, the riot otherwise known as the bougainvillea, in full-full show off mode at this time of the year! It helps that I spend most of my day in JNU, which is bursting in a perpetual impressionist fireworks-y display of bougainvillea hedges the size of single-storey buildings. Every day I drive in from the North Gate and try not to bump over the many speedbreakers because my eyes are too busy soaking in the gorgeous-ness of a kilometre of luscious fuchsia, red, and white explosion.

Everyday I remind myself to evolve a graceful way to sweep my jaw off the ground, because that's where I find it after I've taken in the sight of an entire field of wild flowers amidst trees and rocks outside my school. There is the droopy elegance of the bottle brush that despite its ethereal charm looks very much apt for utilitarian purposes (exactly like the brush my mother used to clean bottles, making me wonder which one was named first - the brush or the flower). And there is the pretty petulance of the red powder puff which is so ripe and round and feathery and I'm always tempted to pluck it and feel it against my jaw (which is probably why its other name is the shaving brush tree!). I could be walking innocently to the library, hoping for nothing more than the warm, somewhat attractive-repulsive smell of freshly photocopied notes at the end of the walk, until a huge 20-feet long bougainvillea bush (that was until the other day, absolutely innocuously green and nonchalant), takes hold of me with its heatachingly sexy magenta efflorescence - the kind of beauty that's so sudden and so pretty, the only way you can dignify it with an apt response, is by wanting to eat it. And to make the gravitational forcefield of the bougainvillea even more maddening, is the naturally prepared rani-pink bed of flowers underneath the bush - and now I know exactly why Radha slept with Krishna so readily. A little cove under a low-lying tree grove, with a dense carpet of lusciously coloured flowers. Wanton woman, check.


I'm looking at the anaar tree outside my school and its little budding anarkalis, and smiling away, reminded of that Nasikh poem, dripping with typical fleshy Lucknowi decadence and wit:


I am a lover of breasts

Like pomegranates;

Plant then no other trees

On my grave but these.


I wish I could be as sure as Nasikh about my favourite tree (no no, neatly gendered equivalents don't work here; dreaming of banana trees just isn't as much poetic, or hell, even as much fun). What tree gives me the most sukoon? Which tree would I rather stare at, even in death? I have no bloody clue. I am equally seduced by the March bounty I just described, as I am by the awaited April lavender grace of the Jacaranda (four of these trees in quick floral succession make for a sight to behold, from the terrace of my dance class at Triveni), the vermillion burst of the Gulmohar, the thin-waisted smell of the yellow-mouthed Champa. And in May and June, the miracle of the hot loos making the Amaltas flowers bunches (in a frozen animation of drop-drop-still petals) turn a more ferocious florescent shade of yummy yellow (I have my own secret patch of amaltas heartbreak, on a narrow road called Kama Koti Marg in RK Puram, lined as it is, by about 30 full-blown amaltas trees on both sides.) In August, there's the luminiscent pile of Mogra gajraa to be soaked in wistfully, as I get heady on its surround-smell fragrance and wonder if its reasonably sane to buy the entire pile, stuff into a pillow, and hug it to sleep. And when September ends, it'll bring with it, the faint dhaak sounds of the Durga Puja, heralded by the early morning nippiness that's inseparable from the intoxication of the Harshringar flowers. A haunting fragrance so ironic and short-lived, that it seems apt that its other names are as phonetically brief (parijat, shiuli), as they are poetically infinite (the night jasmine, the tree of sadness).



I can't decide, and I can't bear it, all this floral glory that my moody Delhi is throwing at me in one big rush. So am just going to do what I do to let off the steam, to bleach the love, to sober myself up. I'll drive through a shower of pale yellow dry neem leaves on Aurangzeb Road, nodding at the neem trees leaning-bending in a question mark over the road, letting my whizzing car rake up a mini storm through the voluptuous heaps of dry neem lining the road-side. It's a feeling that's pale and bland and yet alluring, like the faint strains of a half-remembered tune. And it sufficiently brings me back to myself, just so I can steady myself before being blown away by yet another cunniving March flower.