Pink tour.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

It must be 5 o’clock, for a translucent gold light has again filled up the vast Lodhi Garden. The evening sun must be setting behind the centuries-old Sheesh Gumbad. The debut stars of the moment, however, are two trees standing by a walking track. Barely noticeable during the rest of the year, the trees are dressed in pink.

The five-petaled flowers of floss-silk have started to show up across the city. Today we take these trees for granted, but when India became free in 1947, the big wide Delhi did not have even one floss-silk. A native of South America, the tree is also known as Mexican Silk Cotton. It was brought to the capital in the 1950s, and planted in a great number of parks and roundabouts.

Late October is the floss-silk’s time to sparkle. You may start the sight-seeing tour with this brief field guide. A row of floss-silks skirts the driveway to a Gurugram mall, near the Delhi-Haryana border. A lovely floss-silk stands close to the Lok Kalyan metro station, outside a high-security bungalow. But the most glorious floss-silk in the whole Delhi has to be the one standing beside the Kamani Auditorium in Mandi House. It always gets adorned with an unwieldy canopy of very many flowers, though for the moment the pink buds are just beginning to show up. The tree might take a few days to regain its crowning glory.

The floss-silk at the India International Center is special. It has the sanctity of a stand-alone shrine. Standing close to the foyer where Delhi’s bhoole-bhisre VIPs wait for their chauffeur-driven cars, the tree is already in vivid bloom. (A giant photo of the same tree is currently installed atop the IIC’s foyer!). The decaying petals of one of the flowers fallen on the grassy lawn is radiating the fuchsia tint of a hot (pollution-free) evening sky.

Actually Lodhi Garden has quite a few of these trees. Some stand beside the park’s lake, where each fallen flower fleetingly floats on the water, over the reflected image of the tree it was once a part of.

As the evening lengthens in Lodhi Garden, two visitors in red—make-up artist Tithi and Rabindra Sangeet singer Rikti—come to a stop under the aforementioned floss silk trees (the ones facing a walking track). They start to snap their selfies.

Love from South America

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