Colour purple

Colour purple
Shama Futehally

FOR anyone living in Delhi, March is surely the season of the gods. The fresh wintry breeze, the trees in new leaf, the flowers making a `riot of colour' all this evokes grateful surprise in a populace used to dust storms on the one hand and polluted winter evenings on the other.

It is also a time for birds; since many of the trees are not in leaf, the flitting and darting and pirouetting of small shapes seem to be all around us. As I sit here I can see rose-ringed parakeets flying into the neem trees, their long tails glinting blue in the sun. The peepul tree by the verandah, whose leaves are still tightly curled, harbours a family of crimson-breasted barbets. On the hibiscus bush outside my window a Tailor Bird is looking for nesting material, perhaps, along with an Ashy Wren Warbler. And on top of the hedge a Magpie Robin, glossily black and white and as self-assured as Clinton himself, is singing his heart out, because it is the courtship season too.

Further away, a tall pale tree is preparing to shed its leaves and cover itself with a washed lilac colour which could belong inside a Japanese painting. Because we have this blessing too that when the freshness of March gives way to the sadder suns of summer, the flowering trees leap into colour, and they are colours so amazing that we should seriously consider banning them. The red silk cottons are already aflame, and alive with sunbirds, flowerpeckers, bulbuls and mynahs. Then it will be the stunning yellow of the laburnums, and after that the frothy whites and pinks of bauhinias.

Around our house some unnamed horticultural official, on whom be peace, has ensured that during the most despairing weeks of summer we are treated to a vision of Purple Jacaranda in full bloom. And, of course, for the rest of the summer life is worth living only because of the gul mohurs. For the last two or three years, the advent of March has seemed to me peculiarly unexpected. The gentle message which it brings, ie, that you never have a single season but a cycle, that every wheel comes full circle and today is not all, now appears both more reassuring and harder to believe.

And that, I suspect, is because we live in a world where, increasingly, today is in fact all. The print media and television, those two dictators of our lives, scream about today in a way which drowns out both yesterday and tomorrow. Thus, in our personal lives, in our social life and in the national life, we grab for today with a vehemence which is out of all proportion to its importance. And, as recent events have shown, we sometimes somersault right back into yesterday.

Whoever planted the Jacarandas was thinking about tomorrow, and contemplating them for a bit may teach us more than we imagine.