Ami Krishnachura

photo credits: www.bigstockphoto.com & www.youtube.com
Memory tags: Summer and Delonix regia

Outside the long glass doors, the two graceful golmohur trees spread their resplendent blossoms on feathery beds of green leaves. The one closer to the doors was covered in rather unusual orange blossoms and the other wore its regulation summer scarlet gown. These beauties did not seem disturbed by the taunting summer heat; they were actually glorying in it! Their five petals opened out to the sun with one even absorbing the colours of the sun and becoming golden yellow freckled with red and white; could adulation be more eloquent? Sunshine on their petals made them happy like the giddy crowd underneath, chattering over ices from traveling refrigerator vending ice cream. It made the trees whisper to the air around and blow an impish breeze scattering drops of ice cream amid boisterous laughter! As suddenly as it had blown up this storm in an ice cream cup, it became quiet, the blossoms were once again. demurely bobbing amid the sea of undulating leaves!

A whole group of glistening sunbirds hovered above their blossoms-was this their summer specialty food fest? And did their beauty make even the boisterous tree quite or was the tree just to catering these important customers and offering them a fine dinning experience? It could even be that the sunbirds brought back memories of home, of Madagascar, from where the golmohor traveled to my doorstep. Memories go back a long, long road when Madagascar split from the Indian subcontinent about 80 to 100 million years ago and became the world’s fourth largest island. Cradled in the waters of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar was a near Garden of Eden. In this garden, the flowers kissed by the sunbirds, loaded with pollen, metamorphosed from deep within into life transmitting seeds. These small nascent kernels of life were protected inside one foot long pods. The seeds were so talkative that the noisy pods were compared to gossiping women; were the seeds longing to be free, longing to play on the warm earth saying to the pod, chanting,” will you move it, move it”, in unison ? Did these seeds know then that they would leave their homes to migrate all over the world from this ocean island? 

In retrospect this seems to be a blessing in disguise for the golmohor or Delonix regiahas become endangered in Madagascar. They were taken by Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy(1583–1660) governor of the then French West Indies, to be part of a Xanadu he built for himself. So in this new home the tree also carries the name Royal Poincinnia. Most names, scientific to common relate to its magnificent blossoms. The yellow and red apparel only serve to remind us of the celestial piper and hence the name krishnachura; which is immortalized in a hundred songs and poems. And finally, inside the glass doors we humans who ceaselessly scurry, are forced to take a stop , for we cannot but be touched by the same immortal joy that all true beauty brings. Did John Keats ever see a Krishnachura?

Main resources:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica
2. Blatter & Millard, “Some Beautiful Indian Trees” Bombay Natural History Society Publication,1977
3. Wikipedia