Delhiwale: First sighting

Look at the photo. You’ll see a few familiar Delhi high-rises, and a tree dense with leaves. Look more concentratively, and you might, with some difficulty, spot a few clustery flowers hanging like miniature chandeliers amid the invasive leaves. These are the year’s fresh saptaparnis, here at B Block in Connaught Place’s Inner Circle, a flower’s throw from the Gate No. 1 exit of the underground Rajiv Chowk Metro station.
Saptaparnis are sighted across Delhi and its surrounding regions. A tree stands close to Gurugram railway station, not far from a small wayside temple. An unusually tall saptaparni guards a dusty service lane in Ghaziabad’s Vasundhara, sandwiched between a gym and a jhuggi. A tree on Mathura Road, near the Subz Burj circle, has been covered with a prematurely early blossoming for about a month.
The saptaparni season will start more forcefully by next month, lasting from mid-October to December. Nestled among the green leaves of their tree, the flowers also look green. But their green is paler, tinged with white, and the flowers are identifiable by their small cauliflower-like tufts. They often drift down from their twigs, each Balkanising into powdery fragments during the fall.
Once, it hit a citizen’s head, making his hair appear full of dandruff.
An earnest saptaparni pilgrimage in the Capital must begin at Golf Links Colony, where the tree was first introduced in Delhi in the 1940s. In fact, Delhi’s most notable saptaparni stands close to that tony locality — at the India International Centre. A plaque wound around the massive trunk mentions it by its other names: Indian pulai, Blackboard tree, Devil’s tree, and Scholar’s tree. An earlier plaque that credited its existence to IIC’s legendary American architect Joseph Stein is missing. The tree is yet to bloom.
The saptaparni flowers are said to be very “khushbudar”, the scent grows more pervasive in evening. The “fragrance makes you turn your head, then wonder if you really like it,” remarks Pradip Krishen in his book Trees of Delhi.
In Connaught Place, a tall semal stands close to the aforementioned saptaparni. The pulpy red flowers of this tree appear in Delhi’s brief spring season. Scores of shoppers then raise their mobile phones to click its photo. But this evening, in the crowded B block, no shopper is noticing these early saptaparni blooms.