Conditioned to believe that everything one finds beautiful must have been paid compliments already, I turn to literature, the archive of odes and praise, when I see the year’s first laburnum. Yellow, golden and radiant, every petal claiming itself as the original yellow, Plato’s ideal yellow as it were, standing like a reminder behind the petrol pump near Tenzing Norgay Bus Terminus in Siliguri, where I live.

This is where I see it first every year — it’s an appointment that it never fails to keep.

The rest are gone — martyrs to ‘development’, ‘widening of roads’ and ‘superhighways’. Like the rectangular marks on walls where a photo lived once but is now gone, leaving only the tan of its presence, the bare sides of these roads, now always a chemical equation waiting to solidify into laid-out roads, stand like an accusation. If it were a moral linked to the death of the world it would be easy to understand. But it is not just that — it is about the loss, even extinction of beauty, from our lives. And our lackadaisical attitude to the preservation of beauty, except the exaggerated lathering of anti-ageing creams on our faces, resulting in the loss of everything old, houses, art, trees, and the temperament that valued the nature and experience of that beauty.

Is that why, I wonder, literature from English India, where morality often overrides beauty, both in craft and content, has turned the Indian laburnum into a metaphor of accusation? In Aruni Kashyap’s novel The House With a Thousand Stories , a love story set against the liberation movement spearheaded by the United Liberation Front of Assam, the laburnum, mentioned for its striking beauty in the first half of the novel, returns as a trope for violence. In this scene, for instance, a group of army personnel have just left after a security investigation.

“It was then we heard the scream. Mamoni ... sat in the courtyard and started to scream. She wouldn’t stop, she kept screaming like a lunatic until she fainted. I saw the whites of her eyes; the irises of her eyes had disappeared. She was still sitting. I saw the pale yellow trail of urine sliding down on the courtyard. I had never seen anyone so scared. ‘What happened to her?’ I asked Brikodar, but he didn’t say anything. I asked Binod, but he kept quiet as well. Later, on the way home, Mridul told me she had been raped by four military men when she had gone to wash clothes in the Pokoria River last year. I didn’t want to think about those white eyes, and tried to focus on those golden laburnum flowers that I loved so much. But the more I tried to think about the golden flowers, the more they reminded me of the yellow urine.”

Journalist Nandini Nair, writing about Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , notes this about the laburnum: “She writes... of the amaltas flower blooming a defiant yellow each summer, ‘it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, F*** You.’ Roy’s non-fiction writing has been just like that, it has risen from the page with similar defiance and looked up at the big and the powerful with the same insouciance.”

Maaz Bin Bilal, in his ghazal on amaltas , almost mocks this metaphorisation:

“Delhi’s very own harvest, for the tired lover, what rest?

Crackdowns, protests; what’ll he take in this season of amaltas ?”

Given the nature of the world we live in, I see more laburnums in my Facebook newsfeed than I do outside the screen. Rare is a Delhiite who won’t post a photo or mention the amaltas in May or June. Pradip Krishen’s entry about the laburnum in Trees of Delhi mentions its medicinal use in curing ulcers and leprosy, its habitat, “all along the base of the Himalaya from the Indus eastwards and throughout C (central) and peninsular India”, and “Amrita Shergil Marg, Shanti Path and Akbar Road... and Shakti Sthal’ in Delhi”. “Common as crows in every park and large garden”, and “in danger of becoming... so common that we stop noticing it,” writes Krishen. Even in the ‘ecological gardener’s’ words — his self-description — is the awareness of the new Indian’s indifference to ‘commonplace’ beauty.

As I look around me and find the gradual substitution of morality for beauty, in life and literature, whether it’s the old chestnut about development or middle-class India’s unease with the supposed uselessness of beauty, I wonder, without purpose, whether the yellowness of amaltas is a moral itself — for yellow is the colour of spring, and its appearance in summer, with its golden sun, is almost bling, an overdose, near-tautology. A moral, a reminder, about the hardiness of beauty, its ability to survive in spite of lack of patronage.

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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