Nature’s Palette
About sunlight and birdsong
There was magic in the air today, in the Park, in our avenue of trees.
Our Park has paths and walkways, ascents and descents, arches and avenues.
A team of gardeners with magic in their hands, and love in their souls trims, plants, nurtures shrubs, plants, seedlings and trees.
There are little groves of pine and casuarina, a meandering line of champa trees, sharp bamboo borders, feisty circles of laburnum trees, and the ubiquitous fig, banyan and peepul stragglers.
Waiting in the wings for a chance to burst into glorious efflorescence, is a band of Scholaris Alsthonia, or the Sapt Parni trees.
‘Sapt’ means seven, and ‘Parni’, leaf, in Sanskrit. The leaves are usually in bunches of seven around the stem. Hence the name. It is known as ‘Ezhilam Pala’, in Malayalam, for the same reason. ‘Ezh’ is seven and ‘ila’, leaf. ‘Sapt’ is also ‘sept’, the ‘sept’ of September, since March was the first month of the Roman Calendar.
A carpet of fallen, squashed figs, liberally sprinkled with tiny mauve fallen flowers of another tree lie beneath the wild fig trees. They perfume the air with a heady mix that sends my senses reeling. There is a troupe of dark drongos sitting on one of the trees, alternately gossiping, and snapping at hapless insects as they fly by. There is a hooting call of the greater coucal.
The egret walks, with ponderous pomposity among the tufts of grass, casting stern, jaundiced looks at the madly twittering sparrows.
From behind the Inorbit building, the Sun sends messengers of pink and purple clouds, before bursting out in all his beatific glory.
'Lord of light, and life and love and laughter,' I tell Him, 'dispel the darkness in every heart and every life, remove blight and blisters, wake slumbering souls, touch with light the darkest places of the human mind.'
For a second, after my words wing their way upwards, the sun gleams at me. "Yes,” he says, "Righto!"
I have sent some rays into some lives and hearts and souls.
Did you feel them?
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
A shoutout to Bronwen Scott for her affectionate story of the koel in her garden:
