A beauty for the days.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Attached to the tips of stiff stalks, the pink flowers are defying gravity, rising upwards into the pitch blue sky.

Dear reader, postpone all your plans, and head to Lodhi Garden. There, for a long time, a tree has been standing near the centuries-old Sheesh Gumbad, towards a corner of the monument-facing lawn. The tree looks unremarkable most of the year. But these days it is starkly standing out from all the other trees in the vast park. It is in a dense bloom. Not a single leaf is present to interrupt the floral cascades.

Since the flowers are pink, and are shaped into a trumpet, they are called Pink Trumpet. Per the book Trees of Delhi, the tree has no local name, and that it arrived in our city from tropical America. This said, it has to be admitted that the aforementioned Pink Trumpet in Lodhi Garden isn’t commanding universal attention. Nearby, a man in shorts is strolling about another tree, which isn’t a Pink Trumpet. This tree has no flower and no leaf, it is in fact a dead tree. The man is holding a long rod high up in the air, a mobile phone is attached to the tip of the rod. He is attempting to click a close-up portrait of an ordinary squirrel perched atop the bare tree. All this while, the man is turned away from the tree loaded with pink flowers.

Delhi’s Pink Trumpets bloom from mid-February to late March. Lodhi Garden has a few more of these trees but they lack the lush of this particular Pink Trumpet. Miles away, a Pink Trumpet within a Tilak Mark bungalow is dressed in an equally dense bloom, clearly visible from the busy avenue. You may also spot Pink Trumpets in Bharat Mandapam, and in Nehru Park.

Now a tota settles atop our tree—at once becoming a mere daub of green amid the pink. The parrot slowly-slowly moves its beak from left to right, and flies away.

Moments later, a citizen settles down on one of the green benches under the Pink Trumpet, and opens a slim hardbound (Auden’s Another Time poetry collection). She is wearing a sweater the shade of pink flowers.

Pink Lodhi

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