Delhi: A Nature Journal
By Anuradha Kumar-Jain, with Illustrations by Bahaar Meera Jain
Rupa Publications, 240 pages, Rs 695

Delhi not only has a great variety of landscapes, but it also has different faces for different seasons. Khushwant Singh captured it memorably in his ‘Delhi through the seasons’. But the richness of this theme could not have been exhausted in one book. Published earlier this year is another book, a nature journal of Delhi by Anuradha Kumar-Jain, who offers a more personal, lighter touch, along with water-colour illustrations by Bahaar Meera Jain that have a matching lightness. Together, they follow the changing seasons as they play out day after day in an uncompromisingly urban landscape.

Delhi, while lying in the tropics, is sufficiently distant from the equator to enjoy largely distinct seasons, each of which brings with it its own flavour—from the golden cascades of laburnum in summer to the indigo skies of monsoon, the riotous blooms of winter and the nesting birds of spring.

Life and nature thrive everywhere; birds sing, trees burst into new leaves, flowers bloom, butterflies flutter by, clouds scud across the sky; each at their own pace and at their appointed hour, as if keeping time with some unsung melody. This book urges the reader to stop, listen, observe and maybe even reconnect with this magical performance that is enacted everywhere, every day, even in a bustling metropolis like Delhi. It is a reminder that nature is all around us; in the chirping of house sparrows, nostalgia of petrichor, fragrance of jasmine on sultry evenings, fluttering down of leaves in March. It is our oft-neglected friend, our haven of tranquility.

Anuradha Kumar-Jain, a writer based in New Delhi, has a lifelong love for the natural world that motivated her to get a PhD in geography and has culminated in this nature journal.

Once Diwai festivities are over, Delhi enters a special phase that last till the onset of summers in April. It’s from the early December that we have chosen this excerpt:

2nd
December is a beautiful month in Delhi, a time for cold clear days, the January fog not having set in yet. The temperature hovers between a low of about 9°C and a high of 20°C or so, making for an average of about 12°C. Afternoons are sunny and bright with rainfall limited to a couple of days at the most. Technically, days start getting shorter and the nights longer after the summer solstice in June, but in a city like Delhi situated in the subtropical zone, the change is barely perceptible till the end of October. That’s when I suddenly noticed that the dusk is coming in much earlier and it is dark by 6 o’clock, the trend continuing till December, which is the month with the shortest daylight period of 10 hours.

The festive mood that steeps into the city before Diwali flows through December as well, continuing right up to the start of the new year. Markets are strung with fairy lights, shops decked out in torans, Santa toys belting out ‘jingle bells’, ‘Happy New Year’ banners available at every nook, baskets filled with chips and chocolates and other treats, heaped outside grocery stores. Add to this the buckets of fresh flowers at every florist’s and the delicious mince pies and plum cake on sale at every good bakery!

6th
A cold, overcast winter day, but a light wind has picked up in the last half hour, driving away the last of the morning fog. The leaves of the goolar, dry and brittle, clatter down noisily with the slightest breeze.

Since morning I have been noticing a battle for supremacy between two warring clans of jungle babblers and as I write this, there are more than 20 of them in the garden, keeping up a constant noisy conversation punctuated with much squeaking and scolding. A fragile peace has been brokered for the time being, after a long bitter fight between rival gangs, complete with tumbling, screeching, falling to the ground, mid-air sorties, et al.

Just after sunset, towards the west, I observed a beautiful crescent moon (waxing) very near a spectacularly bright Venus. December this year will see the moon conjunct with five planets, and while it will not be possible to observe all, I hope to see the moon–Saturn conjunction after two days and the moon–Jupiter on the day after that. Last year on the day of the winter solstice, the planets Jupiter and Saturn were the closest to each other they have been in the last 800 years, just a 10th of a degree apart when viewed from Earth. The light from these planets combined to form a bright point, creating the same star of Bethlehem that guided the three wise Magi to the birthplace of the infant Jesus!

8th
Lots of butterflies these days! They start visiting just before noon when the garden is drenched in sunshine, and the flowers have turned their faces fully to the sun. Today, seeing an unfamiliar butterfly flitting about with a tortoiseshell and a couple of common gulls, the amateur lepidopterist in me rushed inside to consult my copy of The Book of Indian Butterflies that informed me that the stranger was a Danaid eggfly, common in the region.1 To my surprise, I also learnt that the tortoiseshell-lookalike was actually a female eggfly!

December is the month for poinsettias and I always get them in different colours. The only problem is that they don’t repeat flower the next year even if you manage to keep the plant healthy through the summer. I did that, and although it grew bushy come winter, the leaves did not change colour even in our coldest spells.

9th
After the near doldrums of October and November, the wind has picked up slightly, leading to clear blue skies. It is not much movement of air really, but it feels like a lot and my rustic wind vane is going crazy. It’s a dried leaf that got caught in a piece of twine some weeks back, and now hangs in a corner of the bamboo fence and twirls crazily in even the slightest breeze. It hardly moved at all the entire last month, a final proof of the suffocating windless days we’ve had.

For the last couple of days, we have had new guests at the feeders; a pair of white-cheeked bulbuls, the least common of the bulbuls in our area. They do visit the garden sometimes, though not very often, and this is their first time at the bottle feeders. They are shy birds, flying up at the slightest disturbance and settling on the overhanging branches of the allamanda. I have tried to lure them by scattering some bajra on the ground in a secluded corner near the water pot. Let’s see if it works.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]