Ali’s Amaltas

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Winters have begun. The year’s summer has matured into a memory, along with all the aspects associated with it, including the city’s Amaltas trees that blossom in the time of extreme heat.

One of the most picturesque Amaltas spectacles this year was witnessed on the smoggy Mathura Road. The tree stands beside a fruit juice-and-shake kiosk. This summer (and monsoon as well), it was packed with so many golden-yellow flowers that their combined weight made the showy branches droop. All day long, the flowers would keep falling on the pave, and yet the tree wouldn’t show even a hint of this continual loss. As if the falling flowers were being instantly replaced by the new. One afternoon, during that season of plenty, the kiosk’s young attendant took a break from work by sitting on a chair thar he had placed directly under a canopy of the Amaltas flowers. It was purely by accident that Ali’s shirt happened to be of the same colour as the flowers. See right photo.

Now, in the winter, the tree has lost all its flowers. It is utterly bare, unlike many Amaltas trees elsewhere in the city that are holding onto their leaves. In its unusually ruined state, the Mathura Road Amaltas is inadvertently evoking the spirit of Delhi, a city that has bloomed and decayed many times over in recorded history.

As it happens, this afternoon, the same Ali is sitting on the same spot on that same chair under the same Amaltas. Except that there are no flowers. It is purely by accident that his grey cardigan somewhat resembles the shade of the bare tree (see other photo).

“But flowers will again come,” he says, looking up at the Amaltas’s skeletal configuration. “I have been at this place for some years… the flowers come out every summer.”

Ali resides in the kiosk, sleeping at night in a small alcove atop the roof, sharing the space with a few other colleagues, who work in another juice kiosk. “During summer nights, waiting for the sleep to come, I see the flowers glow like light bulbs… but these flowers don’t smell of khushbu.”

Ali’s village in zila Sambhal doesn’t have these trees, he says. He discovered the existence of Amaltas after arriving in Delhi, 15 years ago. Since then, he has always worked in the city’s juice kiosks. “Earlier I was in a juice ki dukaan near the Lal Qila.”

While the tree has drastically changed over the months, has Ali’s life changed in any way over the same period? He looks amused, saying, “No change.”