Delhiwale: Notes on city colours

Delhi's streets are vibrant with blooming yellow Caribbean Trumpets and pink bougainvilleas, evoking nostalgia and seasonal beauty amid city life.

This portion of the Vasant Vihar pave is littered with yellow flowers and pink flowers. It is night at the moment, but the flowers are shining brightly in the dark, perhaps helped by the ample street lighting. The pink flowers certainly are bougainvillaeas, but the yellow ones? This isn’t yet the season for summertime yellow Amaltas.

One afternoon, some seasons ago, this reporter landed into a New Delhi avenue with no flowers at all. (HT Photo)

These are actually the blossoms of the so-called Tree of Gold, the Caribbean Trumpet. Brought into Delhi in the 1970s, it is in bloom across the city. In Jangpura, a showy crop of yellow trumpets is currently overlooking a lush cascade of pink bougainvilleas. From a distance, the scene looks as if two friends were throwing gulal at each other.

Another night, in Gulmohar Park, a brown dog is seen sleeping under these same trumpets, the yellow flowers falling quietly over and around him, half-burying him in a heap.

One afternoon same week, on a pave along Baba Kharak Singh Marg, a woman in mustard-green sari is carefully walking through red semal flowers fallen from a bunch of wayside trees. She stops, introducing herself as a retired researcher from faraway Baltimore. These flowers, she says, remind her of “palash ke phool” of her youth. The woman from America had grown up in Patna and is in town visiting her sister. Standing amid the red flowers, she longingly talks of the flowers that are absent from the scene—the Amaltas blossoms.

Colours, or rang, aren’t exclusively perceived in flowers. Delhi has a village literally named ‘colour.’ Rangpuri lies close to the international airport, behind a sand-coloured hotel.

Then, there’s the monument named after a colour. The red ramparts of the Red Fort spread out along a length of Netaji Subhash Marg. Now try heading to the Ring Road, behind. From there, the Lal Qila is without its lal—appearing instead in pale white. (Originally, Lal Qila wasn’t even called Lal Qila, but Qila Mubarak, the Blessed Fort.)

In a city where blue sky remains mostly elusive, it is surreal to see Shivji Bhagwan in blue—the statue is perched atop the small Shiv Hanuman Mandir in Daryaganj. The shade of the blue is far richer than that of the jacaranda, which is to start blossoming in our city any time now.

However, one afternoon, some seasons ago, this reporter landed into a New Delhi avenue with no flowers at all. Yet, the city was showing colours—thanks to its citizens. See photo. Happy Holi.