Summer's Redemption

Wish there were orchards and orchards of it. Mango. Come summer. And you find golden, pink, peach tender blossom on Mango trees obscuring its leaves and branches from view. The colour of the blossom depends on sunlight, and the stage of the blossoming – just blossomed, turning into fruit…

The otherwise quiet inconspicuous mango tree suddenly becomes the most special tree.
In an urban surrounding full of glass finished buildings, the lone mango tree seems to assert that ‘this is still India’.
It brings fond memories of your grandmother’s ancestral house, the backyard of which had a mango tree. Essentially. During festivities, when you needed mango leaves to make festoons to embellish the entrance to your home, you didn’t have to go far in search of the mango tree unlike today. You just had to go to your backyard.
Those afternoons spent in its cool shades! You did not count those afternoons. Who knew they were numbered?
You suddenly miss the cuckoo. When you heard its calls as you ambled in the garden, you craned your neck and searched the mango tree’s branches and leaves to see where it was. You returned the call of the cuckoo, trying your best to imitate it, to hear it coo once more, so you could locate it. The thick foliage made it so difficult.
It’s been so long since you heard the call of the cuckoo. Now you will have to travel several miles, away from the city, to find the cuckoo.

The mango tree. It fills you with anticipation. Anticipation of the mango fruit. The flavor, the colour, the taste. Such an exotic fruit. The fruit of summer.
Yes. The fruit is the redemption of summer.

Ah! The untimely rain that destroys mango crop!
Whatever happened to ‘Prakriti Dharma’? We have lost the right to ask that question now.
I pray anyway. May it not rain…not now…

These were pictures taken at work.




These were pictures taken on the way to work. I got down from the cab, took pictures from different angles even as passersby looked at me askance. And then I walked to the nearby bus stop, boarded the bus to office.