On the Flyover. Part 2.
The trees, as always, offer a distraction from these mournful thoughts of crumbling buildings. The rain trees are making a come back after that awful infection from a few years ago. Delicate little pink feathery flowers nestle amongst the thick foliage. I wonder if the small and subdued flowers are nature’s way of being cautious. The flowers are playing a waiting game with the fungus. Perhaps if this season passes without an attack, then next year the blooms will be bigger, more vibrant. It’s very encouraging to see the rain trees bounce back. Many are beautiful old specimens, generously offering the coolest shade under their spreading canopies.
I’m partial to a spreading tree. The anatomy of the upper branches is elegant filigree, best seen from eye level. As a friend observed, we don’t look up often enough at the trees under which we lead our lives. Driving in fits and starts on a flyover gives one a chance to make amends. There is a childhood memory too. Our school had a gorgeous rain tree spreading its branches over our basketball court. I lived only a few lanes away and vied with another friend to be the first kid to reach school. If it had been a breezy night, the court would be carpeted with the fallen blooms. There would be a faint, not quite pleasant fragrance in the air and insects going crazy over the nectar. Here in Mumbai, my adult nose can no longer catch that distinctive fragrance.
Rain trees are that deep green that nourishes the eyes. The new leaves on the karanj (Indian Beech), in contrast, are bright and brash, an electric green that shimmers in the sun. Down a stretch of dusty, often dull green canopies, the karanj stand out in defiant bravura. The Karanj finds it very hard to grow in a line. It curves and bends at the most impossible angles. It is a cheery and hardy little tree.
The peepals are putting on their annual Oh Is It Autumn In Mumbai? show. Except these aren’t dry and dead leaves that give the gorgeous colour – palest pink and translucent so that the sun shining through them turn them a rose gold Monsieur Cartier would have died for. These are the baby leaves, the new growth. So delicate it’s hard to believe they’ll grow up sturdy and a shiny dark green. Each peepal is a bronze beacon just now, hard to miss in the midst of the green.
The Rusty Shield Bearers are loving the heat. At flyover level, the canopies are bright yellow with blossoms. I like the shield bearers. Mumbaikar like, they are often ignored and taken for granted but when they bloom, they are a glorious sight. They too have a distinctive fragrance – elusive and best captured after the first rain a few months away…
Right at the end of the flyover is a towering white champa at the zoo entrance. It stands sandwiched between a beautiful old clock tower, of elegant proportions and subdued colours, on one side and the ugly new archway over the zoo gate, with strangely disproportionate, garishly painted cement animals and reptiles crawling over it, on the other. Something about the juxtaposition of the old and the new is jarring but that beautiful champa tree soothes the spirits just before the next traffic jam at Byculla punches in.