Delhi in red alert.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

On the morning of Holi, colour becomes a universal language. Water thickened with powder flows across terraces. Colony get-togethers dissolve into red and pink; Mummy and Papa look unrecognizable. By late afternoon, the work of body-scrubbing begins. Skin holds magenta in its pores. Nails are rimmed blue. In short, synthetic colour outlasts the fun. It is worth asking why the city’s Holi revellers do not make use of what the city already has by that time: the red semal.

Though Holi is still a week away, the red semal flower has arrived. They are already falling on the roadsides. On Lodhi Road, outside a super-fancy hotel, the pavement is thick with semal. The flowers lie splayed open, five fleshy petals cupping a bunch of stamens. Outside the India International Centre, the flowers are pressed into the paved stone, entangled with fallen leaves of the peepal. (These flowers are very slippery; never ever step upon them.)

The semal, also called silk cotton, marks Delhi’s itsy-bitsy spring. For most of the year, the semal tree blends dully into the city’s 252 tree species. By late February, the ordinary-seeming thing transforms the view of the city. A semal sighting then requires no expert. The tree stands decked in red. These flowers tend to fall straight, their heavy weight landing on asphalt with a “plop.” In the morning, municipal workers are obliged to dispose off the piles of fallen flowers.

The flowers show up across the capital region. In Shastri Nagar, Ghaziabad, near a petrol pump on a dusty expanse, a solo semal tree stands at a corner. Its red crown lighting up the grey-brown sprawl. On Gurugram’s Dividing Road, a semal similarly stands alone on bare ground. At the Subz Burj roundabout on Mathura Road in central Delhi, three tall semal trees flank the Subz Burj monument. When in bloom, the constantly falling flowers of the three trees transform the monument’s circular lawn into a red carpet. For now, the branches are still to stage their mega show. However, a metal banner clamped to the roundabout’s fence is displaying an old photo of the monument at peak semal blossom, as if telling citizens what to expect.

Then there is the matter of two benches in Buddha Garden. They are located far apart from each other but meet a similar kismet. One bench lies under an Amaltas tree and gets covered in yellow flowers during their summer bloom. The other bench lies under a semal and is receiving the same treatment now, of course with red flowers.

The flowering semal shares its bounty as generously in private spaces as it does along the public places of the city. A small terrace on a second-floor apartment in south Delhi’s Khel Gaon lies beneath a gigantic semal tree. Each spring, when the season arrives, the terrace is littered over with semal flowers (see photo, snapped during another season). As every year, the semal flowers will vanish by the ides of March.