Having been wary of the yellow funnel like flowers of Cascabela Thevetia since 2003, on 53rd day of lockdown, the tree was looking radiant in full strength of its lime-green and honey-yellow.
During those days of summer's arrival, purple sunbirds would frequent the neighbourhood. Around 5:30 p.m. a small black colour would dash into the heavily flowered tree of Kaner, a fast and direct way of flight getting lost inside those yellow oleander flowers, as the flight rested on one of the petals, and relayed high metallic calls of chwing, chwing, chwing... Upon seeing the sun behind the tree at 6:45 p.m. I would finally detect their companions already nearby, on one of the trees that has become habitual of residents looking with 'what a waste of space' as they tell their evening walker mates: "Why haven't they cut this dried up Mango Tree yet". The sunbird may have brought summer, guarding it from the month of May.
On Day 63, I went for a walk.
Before stepping out I changed to jeans and kurta, put on my socks and shoes, a blue mask, and pocketed phone with no balance. The roads were quiet but not silent on the walk. There was this crunching sort of sound from road sides. Frontline workers came with their sweeps and swept roads with fresh spring. Brown leaves that deserted trees from the sky above were still petioles away from making food in the world when they were dropped down.
In such dense thoughts, there are times while walking when the walk becomes adjective to life that day–like look how the leaf just dashed away from Peepal, forming a collection from old brown to new green, refurnishing some caterpillars below. There is a certain softness in the world when I got out for a walk. No talks. No conversations. No thoughts. Ok, some thoughts. But it all flutters. As if a tube light is learning to engage with sparks at the end of Tehri Dam in our drawing rooms. If the world could have learnt to walk, we wouldn’t even be here. At this time in the evening, the sky is a revolving door. There is light all around. There is smell of grass. There is smell of crows nearby. If trees could walk, they would have stayed.
Apart from noticing nature and movements—jerk of hand, buzz of jhingur, clasp of myna, bounciness in air, trees growing up—it is always the growing up that is hard for me to see. Parakeet-green of parks is changing, grease-black of roads is altering. It is always the change that really throws me off. Sameness never had a better nemesis.
These days when I cycle, I stop after a few rounds. Then I walk back home. Although I miss the freedom of my hands to wonder at the sight of a squirrel, there is still a quite gumption for slowness that never fails to show up while walking. My senses are heightened. It is as if I could just put one foot after another and reach my place. Possibly because I am familiar with movements. My body has developed a memory of the senses and the intensity for green in grasses.
Walking saves time.
There are so many things happening—writers writing with brilliance, children discovering yellow funnel like flowers, people getting laid off, mothers reading Feluda for the first time, students watching potassium permanganate titration online, internet becoming a commodity, Yamuna getting the toxic froth back, clouds returning water to oceans, dust crumbling on my porridge—that, in all this, certainty has a new name—Walking. I am not even a regular walker but I think about outside a lot when I am inside. Even in those thoughts, I am always walking. I am never bound on trains, flights or buses. I might have reached the destination by one of those but when I imagine myself outside, it is always, walking. There are so many things happening in a moment. Walking makes me walk with those moments. Then I do not feel casually hit by a year that was out on the back of a comet, which dropped by to catch a climate breakdown experiencing earth. This comet still remembers the visuals of multi-story apartments wasting water. It does not put houses behind bars for not installing rain water harvesting structures underground which were once in course books of class 4 and every child had to make a model about it. This comet dreams and explodes.
I walk and walk because that it what slows me down. To walk is to move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, never having both feet off the ground at once. There is much rhythm in walking that all my poems land on ground first. The words find the crack between black tar and stare at gap with curiosity, like crows at the passing bulldozers. Hope is a thing with feathers – Walking is a rhythm with memory. It is the pulse with which my memory practises hope I think.
When on Day 63 I passed by the main gate of the colony, I also rounded around a giant green dustbin, big old Peepal tree, newly shaded Neem tree, spread out Ashoka tree. Walking has become an exercise in remembering nature as it was, as it is and as it could be.
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So on Day 65 I entered the colony park again to take five rounds, only to slip on a remarkable image—Mynahs crackling near a hose pipe in the centre of the park. A rotten smell hung near the roots of old trees. Mynahs sniffed grass. Squirrels skipping around the red brick boundary wall of the park were retreating from roots that were receiving the untreated water from pipe. At the entrance of this NDMC park, is a board whose bullet point 5. reads:
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For the park who is an outsider? But then we never put boards in parks for parks. In the next few evenings, a pair of red-wattled lapwing, rosy starling, coppersmith barbet, black-neck stork come to stroll in the empty park.
I walk round the park, taking those fixed five rounds. But on that day, no bird flapped or flew past close to my head. This was quite a bummer to my belief: Outside always surprises. It was then that I heard a bird stepping out.
At 6 p.m. cars were returning from offices. Their tyres splashed dirt around. The upturned noise from engines was making a dent at all the ways poems advice you to be quiet when suddenly for two new minutes there was complete silence under the bright golden bridge made by sunset and two Peepal trees across the old trees' path. Squirrels forget caution on such trees and just jump from one tree to another.
A crow was pushing its beak into a small depression in the middle of the road. It reminded of ‘The Thirsty Crow’ and how this crow might be a relative of that story. It picked up a grain of stone, gazed at a mirage in the distance and pushed the stone back only to pick another one. And then, just like that, it flew away!
The thinnest laburnum plant of the colony had been flowering lemon yellow. Summer of Delhi in May was being discussed when none of us could see blooming amaltas by our windows. By the time I finished walking that day, I had noticed three laburnums. With this sight memorised, I walked upstairs and rang the bell. One week later, Setu had shown cases inside colony. Later, a thunderstorm busted the night cover of most of my trees in the colony, bringing down branches of Jamun tree, and large giant trees who had been walking there for the last fifty years. I was reminded of someone shifting furniture in the clouds above. The cut stump stood few metres away from a pearl-silver coloured car.
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Somewhere, around Day 86, when a six-year-old was playing with those yellow-funnel shape flowers, along with his two-year-old brother under the tree, he was transferred a strange fear that comes from tales of caution, as he was told to shift away from the tree saying, "the flowers are poisonous." He too had noticed the small sunbird dipping its beak inside the flowers on Day 63.
This essay was later published with Pif Magazine with structural and editorial changes.