Living Green
Morning walks
The Park is alive with the sound of bird song
There is a colour on the peepal tree leaves that is beyond exquisite.
On our commutes today, to school, college or office, if we switch off our mobiles for a time, and look around us, we will be less inclined to parrot what we are told about there being no trees left in Mumbai.
We have a cell-phone-forward-induced glaze in our eyes that we need to snap out of, if we wish to see living green. And we need to open our eyes. Wide.
There are trees, everywhere.
In some places, the mango trees are still flowering, in others, they have come out in fruit, and the mangoes are pendant from trees. In others, there is a riotous profusion of yellow-mustard flowers beckoning from EVERY street. These are the copper-pod flowers, and if you were to walk beneath the trees, you will be walking on a carpet of golden flowers that the wind has dislodged and, which have wafted to the ground.
Whole rows of laburnum trees are in bloom. They hang down from their branches like living chandeliers and I feel faint when I see them, they are so ethereally, extravagantly beautiful.
There is a colour on the new, tremulous, bashful peepul leaves, that is beyond exquisite. There is not a single flower that I have seen, with just that blush-red colour, with warm pink overtones. Near the Metro station that I pass by, every day, just near the stairs, you have peepul, mango, copper pod and jack fruit trees. You see flowers and fruits on them. And near the Star Bazaar Mall, there are silk cotton trees. The fruits have shed their green sheath and the every stalk has fluffy cotton pendant from it.
I look around me, when I go for my morning walk: and everything is happy and flowering. The birds, in a series of cheeps and chirps, flutes and lyres sing hallelujah, to the rising sun. Every thing that can fly is flying around in drunken ecstasy.
And somewhere among them, completely inebriated, intoxicated, high, is my heart, too. When I walk back home, I can see passing strangers skipping smartly out of my way, and I can sense them turning around and looking back at me : and I realise, to my own inward amusement, that I was probably smiling widely and my eyes were aglow.
I just can’t get Spring out of my head…or out of my step.
Come, walk with me.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Shoutout to Jonah Malin for this powerful piece about Joan Didion and her razor-sharp words about words and writing, language and life.
