Purple prose.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Plop!

That’s the sound these berries make after they fall from the tree, their purple juice sometimes squirting out in all directions on hitting the hard earth (see left photo).

The stains explain that why the Walled City hawker Kishore is no longer hawking the bananas. He is instead carrying a basket of these berries on his head, walking all day from gali to gali, hoarsely crying, “jamun walla, jamun le lo.”

Say hello to Delhi’s jamun season.

This evening, in a central Delhi roundabout, scores of men have gathered around a jamun tree, violently shaking its branches, causing the berries to fall one after another. These jamuns will later be gathered for an impromptu feast.

Some distance away, street vendor Mahaveer’s cart is left with only a tiny pile of neatly arranged jamuns (see other photo). He gets them every morning from Azadpur Subzi Mandi, where they arrive from Punjab, he says.

But our own city-state is full of jamun trees. Crisscrossed with leafy avenues, the beautiful Lutyens’ Delhi is rich with eight so-called avenue trees, one of them being jamun. (Others are: neem, arjun, imli, sausage tree, baheda, peepal and pilkhan). Each year, the authorities auction the rights to collect the jamuns from these trees. In fact, scores of hawkers are currently conducting business along Ashoka Road, the avenue rich in jamun trees. These men and women line the roadside with baskets and buckets filled with the day’s harvest, plucked freshly from the very jamun trees under which the hawkers sit awaiting customers. Other jamun-dense margs in the vicinity are Rajaji, Ferozeshah, Tughlak, Tyagraj, and Motilal Nehru.

An exceptionally luxuriant jamun stands in Connaught Place’s N-Block. The tree is huge, its shade much appreciated during the hostile sun-drenched summer afternoons. Waiters from a nearby restaurant sit under this tree for their smoking breaks.

The nearby Central Park used to have scores of similarly huge jamun trees. They were sacrificed for the greater common good, after the park was taken over by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in early 2000s. All the park trees were uprooted, the grounds dug up to make way for an underground rail terminus (Rajiv Chowk!).

Whatever, as soon as the jamun season will end next month, aforementioned vendor Mahaveer says, he will switch to selling coconut slices. In winter, he will switch to shakarkandi, which he hawks around the India Gate circle.

Meanwhile, miles away in Ghaziabad, two men are repeatedly striking a tree branch with a lathi. Finally, something falls on the ground with a thud. It is mango, which too is in season.