Rosa Mystica

When we moved to the suburbs of Pune we bought a nice apartment. There was one thing missing about the place. It was not green.

When we moved to the suburbs of Pune we bought a nice apartment. There was one thing missing about the place. It was not green. But that did not matter, for the trees in the vicinity hang their boughs over the boundary wall, almost making them our own.

The bedroom to the east looked out on a lovely jacaranda tree that blooms in March and sheds its colourful lilac blossoms copiously so that there was a lilac carpet beneath our feet. When we looked out of the kitchen, the majestic peepal greeted us as also the mango with its flowers of dainty white, peeping forth in February. By March the flowers have disappeared to be replaced by tiny mangoes. As we relaxed on our sit-out to the west we admired our neighbours’ eucalyptus trees across the road and in May envied their flaming red gulmohar.

To the southeast, a charming little pink bungalow outlined in red, called ‘Rosa Mystica’, once stood at the corner of the road. It belonged to two old ladies who had served in the army’s medical units. When they retired, they decided to live together. They fulfilled their need for a child by adopting a physically challenged baby whom they nurtured with great love. They nurtured their garden similarly. Every morning they swept the place clean and every evening they watered their plants. The great big jamun and mango trees would be laden with fruits by May, when urchins would try to down them with stones. But the most attractive trees were the frangipani with its clusters of pink, the bottlebrush with its hanging red blooms, and the champak with its pretty white flowers.

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One day, one of the old ladies passed away. The other soldiered on. But soon the effort overcame her. She sent her adopted son to a home for the disabled and she herself moved into a convent for care. The bungalow was sold. The champak tree came crashing down one monsoon. Nothing happened for a while. Recently, when we returned from a holiday, the bungalow had disappeared to make way for a large complex. The place was teeming with construction workers. But the lovely trees stood their ground.

Recenty we were out for a couple of hours. On returning, we were stunned to see the trees had been hacked away. There is a feeling of benumbing loss at the thought of nature’s bounty having vanished before our eyes. It is a savage price we pay when the new replaces the old!