Delhiwale: Winter’s garden

Nehru Park in Delhi offers a serene escape with its unique light, sounds, and landscape, blending nature with city life since 1965.

Here you see something otherworldly: Variations of light transposing through pools of shades. Entering this garden is almost like walking inside a painting by Rembrandt, the artist known for his deft manipulation of light and shade.

This moment, a helicopter is flying over the park (HT Photo)

Winter days in central Delhi’s Nehru Park are full of diffused luminescence, that makes the silence and solitude of the garden feel even more solemn than they do the rest of the year. This weekday afternoon, a man is lying sprawled on a bench, another man is resting under a cluster of palms. One solitary figure is perched atop a rock.

The remarkable thing of the park is its soundtrack, which of course is not exclusive to the cold season. The place is full of bird chatter, something you expect from any park. It is the other kind of sound that is more unconventional. The park is surrounded on all sides by busy avenues. The traffic sounds from those roads spread evenly upon the sprawling park during the day, and hang over it like an invisible cloud cover. The faint roar is unexpectedly comforting, assuring us that while we are momentarily marooned within a world of trees and grass, the familiar world of our city life is gently audible, and within reach. This moment, a helicopter is flying over the park, see photo.

On a different note, one of the ideal places in the capital to ascertain the fact that the seemingly flat Delhi is also built across the ancient Aravalli hills is by visiting parts of the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, which are full of slopes and rocks. Nehru Park bears a somewhat similar landscape, and here too you may easily gain a sense of one of the world’s oldest mountain systems. The garden is interspersed with hillocks and rocks of the Aravallis. It is thrilling to sit on these stones, while being conscious that they date from millions of years ago. That said, Nehru Park has no centuries-old monument. What it has in place of monuments is a plaque marking the park’s foundation day in 1965, when it was inaugurated by then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Sadly, the Hindi inscription on the yellowing marble has mostly faded. (The place could have as well been named after Lenin—the park has the Soviet leader’s statue, but not of the man after whom it was actually named—our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru).

The garden also contains a little San Francisco, in the form of a multi-coloured suspension bridge, evocative of that city’s iconic Golden Gate bridge. It is said that, until some years ago, lonely men would come to this bridge to cruise for companionship. This afternoon, the bridge is deserted.