City Beautiful where blooms spell seasons

I have watched Chandigarh transform over four decades. Its skyline may be a tad higher, its pulse a little quicker, but its soul remains unaltered. No longer the city of “hariyan jhariyan te chittiyan dariyan,” as a blasé soul once dubbed it, it still holds an ineffable charm.

What has always enchanted me about Chandigarh is the mantle of blossoms it dons through the year, its changing hues marking the seasons more faithfully than any calendar ever could.

From the sun-drenched summers of childhood spent with my grandparents, to the eager, wide-eyed years at Panjab University campus, and later, my days serving as a civil servant — this city has always wrapped me in the perfumed cloak of its myriad blooms.

Each season’s arrival is marked with flowers not months. Spring tiptoes in on the lilac breath of jacaranda, painting the avenues a dreamy lavender. Summer follows in a blaze of Gulmohar’s crimson fire competing with the golden shades of Amaltas. On way to the Lake, I have often paused beneath a pink cassia or magnolia, admiring the delicate pink blooms drifting on the wings of the breeze, almost like a benediction. The Madhumalti’s fragrant bells of red and white, and the rain lilies with their delicate heads arrive as rain drops dance during the monsoon.

Autumn drifts in gently with the gleaming white and pink plumeria and a burnished, bronze carpet of leaves on pavements and rutted paths. The fog-ridden winter is brightened up when coral and trumpet trees get dressed in flamboyant orange-gold finery. And how can anyone overlook the wild profusion of bright bougainvillea that festoons every courtyard, or the tecoma that spills sunshine in every corner?

For me, Chandigarh is not an inanimate place of brick and mortar, it is a living canvas of myriad hues and blooms. And it has most certainly spoilt me for any other city in the world.

Rachna Singh, Chandigarh