NATURE ON MARCH

March is an unpredictable month;one day can be as any in winter,the next as warm as any in spring.It may be as dry as a desert one morning and by sundown as wet as a monsoon night.Fresh falls of snow in the mountains o kashmir or himanchal bring chilly winds to the capital.Strong winds push clouds up to freezing heights,convert raindrops into ice,toss icelets up over and over again till they are too heavy to bear and let them descend on the earth as hail.Take a close look at a hailstone and you will notice that it is of a milky white colour and consists of frozen layres of water like skins on an onion.I used to wondr why hailstorms did not occur in winter months when it is cold but in spring when it is warm.Now i know it takes strong winds to make hail.

Human are not the only once to be fooled by the weather.Insects,said to be endowed with an extra sense of forecasting the weather,suffer heavy losses.Mosquitoes,flies and months which come out of hiding to pester humans suddenly find the weather turn inclement and are frozen to death.In my diary i record the first time i hear cricets chrip.This is usually in the second week of march probably somewhat earlier in my apartment than in other homes as i have a log fire burning every winter night.The vagaries of the weather make holi, the festival of colours,a chency affair.It usually falls some time between the latter part of february and the end of march.Some years ony the young are out with their long tube syringes,bouckets of coloured water and red powdr to figt mock battles yelling,'holi hai!holi hai!Other years it is warm enough for the middle-aged and the old to risk beign dowsed.

In march both birth and eath are much in evidence.On the one hand you can see the grape vine and madhumalti-quis,qualis,indica,a name given to it by a dutch botanist because of its eccentric manner of growth-add new leaves every day;on the other there are neems,mahuas,jamuns,peepals and banyans shedding their foliage.For the next weel or two gardners will be busy sweeping dead leaves into mounds and making funeral pyres of them.While the pyres still smoulder,those very trees will come into new leaf.Of the dying and the reborn,peepals and banyans have the most delicate of new leaves;pale pink,silky-soft and beautyfully shaped.If you want an offering from nature as your book mark,you cannot do better then press their leaves in your album.The peepal is bit of a sponger.It will begin to spourt out of cervices in walls,even out of boles of trees where there is a little mud.There is a speldid example of a peepal almost strangling its host tree in the lodi gardens west of the bara gumbad mosque.The peepal is a speldid example of an epiphyte.

In the last week of the month,spring vegetables and fruit flood the market.Cucumbers and kakree are on lunch menus.Watermelons,both cantaloups or musk melons are available.In recent years their quality has improved.In younger days you had to be able to tell the sweet melons from the tasteless and omly bought kharboozas said to have come from tonk or saharanpur.Today you have to be unlucky to bring home a flat tasting melons;most of them are sweet and succlent.Closely following on the heels of these'earthy'fruits come loquats and mulberries,both the white and purple variety.Mangoes from the south and the much fanciedd alfanoso from the konkan coast can be had for a price in fruit shops catering to the rich.But for locally grown varieties of this king of fruits you have to wait a few more weeks.