Stalking the monsoon sky. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Dull, smoggy, grey. Almost a rotting corpse. That’s our Dilli sky most of the year. The same asmaan resurrects into life during the monsoon. It is the year’s A-1 time for Delhi nephophiles, the cloud lovers. (This is also the time to re-read Kalidas’s Meghaduta, The Cloud Messenger). One afternoon last week, a massive cavalcade of very many small clouds were seen right above the business towers of Nehru Place. The clouds were not rainy black, but cottony white. They were moving very slowly. The pitch blue sky, visible in patches from behind the cloud cover, was instead giving the illusion of motion. The same day, some distance ahead from Nehru Place,

Rain falling upon citizens [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Monsoon rains have always been a dependable muse for artists. But for us Delhiwallas, the actual lived experience of the season tends to be more complicated, especially in the landscape of our everyday life. The inconvenient puddles on way to the office, the sudden floods in the colony, the threat of (dengue!) mosquitoes at home, the snake sightings in the friendly park... the extra spendings from the hard-earned cash—take e-rickshaw driver Mushtaq. As the first monsoon showers raided the capital on Sunday, he was obliged to shell out hundred rupees to buy a plastic rain coat. So did many of his fellow drivers, here in Old Delhi. And while only a

Where the stones give no sound of water [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] No doubt, the street lamp’s glow is brighter. But these tiny lamps emit a more soothing light, casting a cool, calming glow over the faintly smoky midnight air of this central Delhi neighbourhood. These are amaltas flowers, in the first flush of their great annual blossom. Some of the flowers have already completed their life cycle and fallen on the lane, shrivelled and smashed. Among these pile of corpses, a lone flower has drifted toward the middle of the road, resembling an inverted star. It has five petals. Delhi is an arbour of very many blooming trees. There’s the red of semal and gulmohar, the purplish-blue of jacaranda,

Flames of the season. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] With utmost regards to the great poet of Waste Land, April is not the cruellest month. Certainly not in Delhi. Look around—gulmohar trees are starting to shoot out their bloom in passionate tints of red To be sure, the spring-time bloom of Delhi’s semal trees too shows up in the same colour, but the pulpy semal flowers don’t have the hot-bloodedness of the gulmohurs. No wonder the latter is also referred to as ‘flame tree.’ One gulmohur, currently in notable bloom, stands within the India Gate circle. The tree is wholly covered with flowers; the woody trunk barely visible. Indeed, under the white hot sky, the flaming red is getting too sheeny

A tree in fruit-bearing phase. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Cacao cacao cacao… the chant is discordant, yet extraordinarily soft and musical. The source of the soaring sound happens to be one of the market trees, here in a plaza in south Delhi’s New Friends Colony Community Centre. The tree stands across the lane from Nathu Sweets. This is actually the incessant twittering of birds. The mass warble isn’t slowing down for even a moment’s respite. Its persuasive force is almost threatening to lift the tree up into the air. (The drone of an airplane passing by the nearby Lotus Tower tries to outrival the swelling roar of the avian orchestra, but fails). While the tree must be teeming with

Leaving leaves. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The scene is full of descending motion expressing immense silence (like the snowfall in the Himalayas). A small crowd has gathered, wordlessly watching the surreal phenomenon, here in central Delhi, in a stone courtyard overlooking poet Ghalib’s tomb. Hundreds of leaves are drifting down from an enormous pilkhan tree, its branches spread super-wide. In the western world, the month of March is a time when new leaves appear on trees that were bare during the winter. In Delhi, the month of March is a time when scores of trees become bare, making a big show of letting go of their leaves. This is part of their annual strategy to survive the