Delhiwale: Now showing at Kamani

Kamani Auditorium is at Mandi House, Delhi’s theatre district

Kamani Auditorium is at Mandi House, Delhi’s theatre district. It routinely stages dramas, musicals, concerts, and sometimes meet-the-author sessions. At this time of year, a tall floss-silk tree, or kurayjia, is staging its own quiet drama right beside Kamani’s black-painted gate—see photo. In its annual bloom, the tree is performing this late afternoon with hardly an audience.

At this time of year, a tall floss-silk tree, or kurayjia, is staging its own quiet drama right beside Kamani’s black-painted gate. (HT)

Kamani’s setting otherwise is familiar to any New Delhi aficionado. A broad avenue, leafy trees, relative quietude. Yellow-and-green autos phatphating along the avenue. Plus the façades of cultural institutions. A poster is announcing an evening of live ghazals with singer-composer Sanjoy Ghosh.

Then you look up at the pink.

Flowers spread across the branches, some above Kamani’s glowing red sign. Against the dark-dull green of the surrounding trees, the colour seems otherworldly. Celebrated in these pages in earlier seasons too, the tree demands an annual pilgrimage. For its pink brings out Delhi’s peculiar beauty at a difficult time of year, when so much of the city grows hazy in deathly pollution. Some flowers have fallen to the ground. Pick one up and look closely. Each has five long petals, the pink fading to a brownish shade at the base. One marvels how such exquisiteness can be born in such toxic air.

At the India International Centre, a metal label clamped to a floss-silk’s cracked trunk records its planting year as 1993. This evening, lanterns, perhaps left over from the Diwali decorations, are hanging among the flowers on the tree’s branches. Fallen flowers are scattered across the lawn. Another impressive floss-silk of IIC is wearing the season’s pink in Gandhi-King Plaza, on the other side of the curving driveway.

In neighbouring Lodhi Garden, three floss-silk trees are standing together like siblings. They might as well be Olga, Masha and Irina in a garden staging of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, the drama following us from Mandi House. One tree has more flowers, another more bare twigs. Below, a brown dog is occupying a green bench.

Back outside Kamani, perhaps because of the fading daylight, or due to the angle of the setting sun, the pink of the flowers is looking less pink than earlier in the day. Now follow the branches down to the trunk. Turns out that the tree actually stands not in Kamani, but in the compound of the adjacent Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra. The performance has been coming from next door.