Delhiwale: A creeper that inspires poetry

A customer care manager misses the flowers she used to admire on her way to her former workplace

The famous bougainvillea tree of Lodhi Garden, in Delhi, must now be decked with papery pink flowers—and so must be the many bougainvillaeas of the Parsi Cemetery behind Khan Market. While blinding red poppies recently surfaced in the East of Kailash public park, not far from Nehru Place. Before that, there was the blood of semal trees to be seen across the Delhi region—they have just started to fade. Soon enough, the golden-yellow glow of Amaltas flowers will arrive.

HT Photo

It is that time of the year.

But who is there to share their pictures on Instagram? Now that we mobile phone photographers are exiled to languish within homes—or at least those of us lucky enough to have a home.

The city is under a 21-day-long lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. There is no knowing how long the daymare might last.

A sensitive poet holed up within a flat somewhere in west Delhi’s A Block, Vikas Puri, is feeling the frustration. But Jasbir Chatterjee is resourceful, finding refuge by reliving the memories of MG Road, a place in Gurugram where she used to go to work until late last year.

“I can still see in my mind’s eyes those magenta-colored bougainvillaeas outside my then office, and the red poppies, the white champas, the orange gulmohars, and the yellow amaltas... all laid out so nicely on the lovely MG Road—how gorgeous they looked under the morning sun,” recalls Ms Chatterjee, 54. With a day job as a customer care manager in a luxury car showroom, the “poet by hobby” is talking to this reporter on WhatsApp from the isolation of the second-floor apartment that she shares with her husband and daughter.

For two years, Ms Chatterjee would make the Metro commute from her home to MG Road in the so-called Millennium City. The morning rush would be super-crowded (crowd?! how one misses the crowd!). Ms Chatterjee was never able to get an empty seat during the two-hour-long shuttle. But it was all worth the trouble—the journey would end in beauty—getting down at MG Road Metro station, exiting out from the staircase and then.... “finally the leisurely walk to the office, as I was rarely late, through the picturesque, tree-lined, flower-filled lane of MG.”

That brief stroll was the most poetic element of her daily life shuttling between Delhi and Gurugram, she now feels. “MG Road gave words to the poetry in my soul, I would feel a sense of triumph after being through so many struggles to reach where I was at that point of time, both in my career and personal life.”

This reporter, too, has witnessed the beauty in that stretch of MG Road. A pavement there teems with frangipani trees. Dense bunches of white flowers hang down precariously from the branches. The dusty ground would be covered with these flowers, some squashed by the feet of pedestrians.

“May God bless those gardeners who toil so hard to make those bits of MG Road look like paradise,” says Ms Chatterjee. On her way back to the Metro station in the evening, “the shadows of the trees and the surrounding skyscrapers had a dream-like aura about them.”

Ms Chatterjee now works in an office in Noida. “Sometimes I do spot an occasional bougainvillea around there, the overall surroundings are drab.”

Which means that MG Road continues to haunt her. “I wonder how the flowers there are looking like these days, now that there is no one to admire them?”

She leaves us with two poems she wrote about that place.

Different lives

On a cool, pleasant evening,

On MG Road,

While a couple

hugged each other,

Another couple,

A pair of crows,

Stared into space;

Their backs turned towards each other...

Official bougainvillaeas

call them official bougainvillaeas

Because they live and breathe

Inside office premises.

They add bright, blazing colours,

Soul, poetry, innocence, and freshness

To our working hours.

And inspire us

To find joy and happiness

In our own oppressive work lives, the inevitable politics…