The Gulmohar tree is one of the oldest trees in my memories. We call it "krishnochura" in Bengali if my memory severs me correct. My earliest memories are of my school where we would eagerly wait for the tree to blossom. The red flowers look spectacular and they mark the onset of the most pleasant time of the year......
The buds were of special interest to us kids. We would pull apart the buds and use the anthers to fight. Quite childish, but in a girl's school where physical fights were not that plenty, it was one of the unadulterated fun to have during classes. Especially after lunch time. When the social studies teacher would drone about how big is Punjab and how many rivers are there in the south of India.
I was never more than an "above average" student in school and could "always do better" according to everyone I knew. It was therefore very surprising to end up with the cream of the class (academically) in college. Still cannot believe my luck. I would have to hand it to my dad to choose a subject few take up and therefore was easy to navigate through with a decent score and be there among the top of the class.
Here too the Gulmohar tree refused to leave me. It haunted me in a not so scary sort of way, especially towards the end of the year. Being a part of a B.Sc. course, we would always end up in the college campus when everyone was gone. We did have a sports section which went on post college hours but they never bothered with the boring red bricked courtyard. Which was good as the peace and solitude of the place was rarely disturbed but by faraway cries of "out" or "score". Those afternoons I would sit under the shade of a Gulmohar tree waiting for the photocopier to finish copying some things for me. And as I would sit there and watch the winter sun streaming through the branches of the Gulmohar tree I would think of the passing of time, the coming of exams, the dread it would fill me with and also the memories of unclaimed moments. They would give me a Deja-Vu feeling of having been here and done this a million times in the era's gone by. Of sitting under a Gulmohar tree and waiting. The time passing me by but at that moment nothing else mattered as much as the wait. The wait for the wait to be over? Or the wait of something else to wait for? I guess one would never know. But sitting here in Bern under the sunlight, strained from a ginko tree with bright yellow leaves I am reminded of my Gulmohar tree and all those moments spent waiting under it.
