Delhiwale: Parading the pavements in pink

Notes from the ‘bougainvillea season’

You have to be in this place in Ghaziabad to believe it, even if your home is far away in Gurugram or Faridabad, or even Uttam Nagar.

This is probably the most surreal roadside sight these days in the entire Delhi region. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

This is probably the most surreal roadside sight these days in the entire Delhi region. Here’s a vast shrubbery of pink bougainvilleas, and amid the luscious bloom lies the charred remains of a car.

This scene on Indirapuram’s Sucheta Kripalani Marg is like a nightmare, but in a most pristine setting. The nearby vendors have no idea how this car etched its afterlife in this gorgeous spot, but a sugarcane juice seller points out that it has been here “since some time”. The pink colour of the bougainvilleas, however, keep “coming and going” with seasons, he says.

Indeed, this is that time of the year when bougainvilleas bloom across the National Capital Region. An unruly cluster is aflame along the roadside in Sector 35 in Gurugram; the shade is so deep pink that from a distance they look like cotton candies. Another lush row of bougainvilleas is stealing the show at a Phase 5 pavement in Gurugram’s Udyog Vihar. Occasionally, a passing pedestrian looks up in awe, seeming to breathe in the air, as though trying to smell the bougainvilleas, unaware that they are not fragrant.

Indeed, bougainvilleas seem to be perfectly suited to Delhi’s dust, heat and smog. Dr SS Sindhu of the Bougainvillea Society of India, head of floriculture and landscaping at the Agricultural Research Institute in central Delhi’s Pusa, describes bougainvillea as “most hardy plant that blooms not only profusely in rocky and degradable land under moisture stress, but also throughout the year, except in the extreme cold of December and January.”

Yesterday, as a nod to the season, the Pusa institute’s bougainvillea garden threw open its gates to all citizens until March end, from 10 am till 5 pm every day. Here you can see more than 150 varieties of bougainvilleas in red, pink, white, yellow, magenta, blue, and also multicoloured versions.

But, start your tour with that surreal sight in Indirapuram. The entire road there is generously laden with bougainvilleas, turning that particular Ghaziabad stretch into an idyllic midsummer day’s dream.