Nature has No Time for Despair

It is early summer and many Indian cities are scorched with tomato red and golden yellow.

- Neha Sinha Conservation biologist and author

The gulmohar, a foreign tree with red petals—four tomato red, and one white, flecked with red and yellow—is in full blossom. The native amaltas, also called the Indian laburnum, is heavy with golden chandeliers of flowers. The trees have gained so much popularity as avenue treasures that most Indians identify summer with flaming gulmohar red and simmering amaltas gold, sometimes watching the two merge into each other as two trees stand side-by-side.

This summer, I watched the gulmohar in my colony cover itself in radiant red blossoms. One day there were buds on the boughs, and the next day the entire canopy was covered in flowers, blooming together, looking endlessly fresh day after hot day.

A Common myna, a brown bird with a yellow mask, would sit on the branches of the gulmohar and sing. And sometimes, it would scold, railing at other birds, guarding a nesting site—the top of a drain hole—from intruders.