We first came by Lodhi garden through stories: how cool it was, how verdant, how effortlessly chic.
When I first went there – in the manner of a skeptic of the universally adored ‘it’ places – I told myself my neighbouring park was better. Yet, I didn’t know this to be an objective fact, because I hadn’t seen all of Lodhi gardens. There were stretches with horticulture, but also old trees that had seen it all. Like a homing bird, I returned. With friends. We played frisbee, ate finger food, looked at the trees, and wasted time. There were birds calling from the trees, and something nuzzling the ground below a large semal tree – a three-striped palm squirrel that would shoot up the trunk the moment we stepped closer.
As the years passed, Lodhi became a staple. It was beautiful yes, with its monuments and flashes of Persian blue, but it also offered something else—a melding together of wildlife and history in a manner that was organic, not forced. In the winter, the pink blossoms of silk floss trees stood out against boughs covered in white droppings of cormorants, birds with hooked bills that caught fish. On the ground, Red-naped ibis, large and confiding, hunted for snakes. Sometimes, they sat on the very top of monuments, framed by clouds, seconds after they were framed by garden rows. Mongoose families darted between snake plants, and tulips—that odd import—nodded sagely nearby.
This year, I sat beneath a semal tree and watched it as the morning expanded. Birds shrieked from above my head, intent, almost predatory. A single bole in the tree was fiercely fought over by a pair of Grey hornbills and Rose-ringed parakeets. Both wanted the space for nesting; a height of three storeys from the ground seemed just right for new chicks.
The grey hornbill played a game of tag, one staying as the other flew forward, defending the hole at all times. The parakeets would swoop in together, as loud as they were energetic, screeching their defiance as at the unfairness.
Below the large semal—which itself stood like an octopus with thick tentacles spread out—people took phone calls, stretched, sweared, and did yoga. Not far from us, a young man looped a rope between two trees and walked on the rope. Someone brought out a guitar and proceeded to sing terribly. “Let’s go home,” my back is hurting, a lady told her companion. He didn’t respond.
That morning I had also seen a man come and prostrate himself in front of a Barna, a sacred tree which is now flowering with soft, off-white blossoms. On a Roheda tree—a tree of the Thar desert—people had tied pieces of cloth, their wishes waving from between the leaves.
Back on the semal, the hornbills seemed to have won the day’s jousting, perhaps by sheer dint of size. One of the birds returned, this time with a clod of earth—this was for the nest in the tree’s hole, where the female and chick would eventually be sealed in.
The parakeets circled. Mynas shrieked. Drongos whizzed, hunting silently. People carried on their business. The man turned to the lady with the bad back and asked to stay a few moments more. This month, Lodhi gardens has turned 90 years old. We are always asking for malls and ‘development’ but one single garden in one single capital has shown us that open and complex spaces, with its own collection of avian and human philosophers, have more character than most places we build out of concrete.
Views expressed are personal