Misplaced Thought. Misplaced Time.

When you walk down Southern Avenue in the summer the Gulmohar trees are in flower, and there are fiery blossoms everywhere. You recall old lyrics from songs – mostly Gulzar – and realise that you’re wading through a stream of molten lava, with little sparks falling onto your cheek. You lose track of time, trying to locate each blossom as it wafts through the branches, and it is so easy and so necessary that suddenly you can disregard everything else. The various vendors you can overlook, the cigarette sellers and paanwallahs cease to exist. The breaks in the footpath are mere annoyances that you have to cross as quickly as possible, holding on to the memory of the footpath that left off a few seconds ago so that you can bring it out and sew it up with the footpath that now begins again. You create an uninterrupted little motion picture of glowing orange and red, and give yourself the starring role.

Vivekananda Park is now but a field of lovers and football matches and shady characters with shady smoke hanging about them; they matter not. Even the prim, fortress-like building with the mysterious signboard that declares (very quietly, in two languages) that it is the Polish Consulate loses its charm. It is in the sudden wetness of the cloth sticking to your back that the magic lies; it is with the hasty breeze hitting the nape of your neck that the Gulmohars fall.

In summer Southern Avenue is a name so mundane that it shrieks to be re-christened. You call it Flameflower Street, and get out of the house early so that you can walk slowly and aimlessly to art class – it seems the right thing to do, to walk down a blazing street and into a room with a canvas waiting to be coloured. Every time you walk a little slower. And you keep promising yourself, every summer, that you will spend an entire afternoon there with just your camera and the truant breezes for company.

But it is only in barren winter that promises are remembered. Which is why you are writing this – there are three months till summer, and your memory isn’t clockwork, and you hope that you will remember it. And that maybe someone will remind you.