NATURE ON MAY

May is the month of the laburnum.Although gulmohars continue to blaze their fierce scarlets,oranges and yellows,you can see they are losing some of their fire and passing natures baton,as it were,to the laburnums.The laburnum or amaltas has become a great favourite of delhiwalas as the gulmohar for the simple reason that both are quick growing and colourful.Of the two,the laburnum makes the more spectacular entry.It first sheds its leaves;by the second fprtnight of april only the long,brown-black tubular fruit can be seen hanging from its bare branches.Then suddenly blossoms appear in clusters like bunches of golden grapes.The beauty of the indian laburnum defies description,NO poet or writer has ventures to put it to paper.Only painters have been able to do it justice.Alas! its glory has a very short lease-less than a fortnight-after which its leaves take over.The seed of the laburnum when crushed make s a powerful purgative and its bark,which is aromatic like cinnamon,is alsoused for tanning.

May is also the month of dust stroms,cloudbursts and hail stroms.They come with little warning.There is of course a preliminary lull;but after days of windless calm you hardly notice it.Only pariah kites wheeling in the grey sky portend that something is on the way.Then suddenly it sweeps across with gale fury,blowing dust into your eyes and nostrils.It si usaually followed by a coloudburst.The gale and rain take their toll of trees.I have seen ancient banyans which had stood for years like gigantic sentimentle on either side of parliament streer,torn up from their roots and ignominiously flung across the tarmac road.One may afternoon a weather-beaten neem on kasturba gandhi marg,under whose shade half-a-dozen cars sheltered from the blazing sun,came crashing down and broke a fiat car into two.

If you listen attentively to the koels' calls, you will notice a clear pattern.It is amongst the earlier callers.As soon as the eastern sky turns grey,male koels lay claim to their airspace by a series of staccato urook,urook,urook,repeated over half a dozen times.In human language this could be interpreted as a warning to other males;'keep off and that means you!'The rest of the ay the calls is a monotunous koo-oo,koo-oo.While courting,it is the female pursued by the suitor who emits sharp cries of kik,kik! as she courses through the foliage.One really sees koels in the act of mating.Once the female is ready to lay her eggs,her paramour takes the lead in luring crows away fromtheir nests.The female koel then quickley deposits her eggs amongst the clutch of crows'eggs and signals to her partner that her mission has been successful by triumphant cries,kuil,kuil,kuil!

I genereally see more of nature at dawn on my way to the club,in the hour i play tennis and on my way back home,than i do during the rest of the day which i spend closeted in my study.I did not realise for years,being too absorbed in the game,that the source of the fragrance that prevaded the courts was the siris.By the middle of may its pale yellow powder-puff blossoms fall and mingle with the dust to look like bedraggled fluffs of wool.It was the sme with the gulmohar under which chairs are laid out for people awaiting their turn to play.I had taken its presence for granted and rarely did my gaze rest on it till one summer the elements compelled me to open my eyes and take notice of its flamboyant beauty.