So surreal, yet so real.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

A large long-armed tree is standing by a park gate in south Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village. A small crowd has gathered beneath it, this sunny evening. A band of boys—one with a guitar—is singing love songs, and mostly young listeners are standing transfixed. Others go past without stopping. No one looks up at the tree.

This is not done!

The tree’s leafy canopy being so magnificent. It is glowing in a shade that is neither green nor brown, but a sort of rust.

The leaves do not hold just a single shade. Some leaves bear a burnt tinge, some are pigmented with a kind of faded rosiness, a few are edged with faint gold—an effect perhaps owing to the strong evening sunlight.

The tree is pilkhan—Ficus virens, or pakad/pakdi/palakh/ram anjeer. Its leaves are showing these shades, because the tree is undergoing a brief transition, making it currently the most dramatic among all of Delhi trees. This is of course an annual show. What always happens is that the pilkhan tree sheds its older leaves by mid-February. By March, new leaves shoot up in shades of purple, which later pass through red and bronze, before turning into the conventional green.

The drama is unfolding across Delhi, and can be sighted along the smoggy roadsides. Near Raj Ghat on Ring Road, a rust-coloured pilkhan stands among dense green trees. The sight is surreal, yet so real.

In Connaught Place, the trees lining the Inner Circle are punctuated by these same tones. Same shades have surfaced along the avenue trees of Neeti Marg, Zakir Hussain Marg and Nyaya Marg. A row of many pilkhan trees line a back-lane in M Block Market, Greater Kailash II, though The Delhi Walla is still to check out the state of leaves there.

The most theatrical encounter of pilkhan leaves in shift lies in the aforementioned park in Hauz Khas. Here, a few pilkhans flamboyantly disrupt the green of the surrounding trees. One especially large specimen rises to the height of an adjacent multi-storey with glass-fronted restaurants. The colour of its massive canopy is leaning towards almost red, although many leaves are half green. Beneath this tree a woman is standing, looking at her phone screen. By ignoring the tree’s current colour, she has taken the phenomenon for granted. But this coloured phase is brief. Within weeks, the shades will be replaced by a uniform green. That has already started: one pilkhan tree elsewhere in the park is all rust, but another, a few steps away, has turned fully green, its golden era gone.

Fret not. The coloured phase will be back again—not next year, but a few months later, during the monsoon rains. The July–August colouring is in no way comparable to the lushness of March. Even so, something is better than nothing.