Lalbagh

Lalbagh is the Central Park of Bangalore. It is an island of more than 200 acres of trees and parks, surrounded by some of the city’s most congested neighborhoods.

Many people go to Lalbagh to see its absolutely unspectacular flower clock, or the glass house that hosts a kitschy flower show a few times a year. During the flower shows, tens of thousands of people line up to look at potted plants and carved vegetables, and leave kilograms of litter in their wake.

The flower show is something to do once, just to experience the flutter a city can go into over a bunch of flower pots, even as glorious, storied trees with pachyderm trunks tower quietly just yards away.

Lalbagh is best enjoyed when you think of it as a remnant of Bangalore’s vanishing past. The few benches in the park are taken by lovebirds turning their stiff, guilty backs to people strolling by and vendors selling roasted peanuts, puffed rice and sliced cucumbers. Climb the rock hill, said to be 3-billion years old, and catch a view of Bangalore’s skyline. Then take the path that does the outermost circuit of the park.

We passed a lake carpeted with lotus pads but boasting more plastic bottles than blossoms. We saw only three lotus flowers, and even these were a beautiful consolation. A delicate pink flower standing shyly on a greenish-blue stiletto of a stalk, still water and moving clouds in the sky. My husband points out the pearly sheen of the rain clouds gathering in the distance. Walking about amidst nature has us prospecting for beautiful things and spouting poetry unrehearsed.

The best part of Lalbagh is a chance to get close to its trees. Frowning guards materialize when you get close to the roses (which give the garden its name, "red garden") or look like you might be enjoying the grass. I don’t care for the pampered grass. The flowers have enough adorers to flirt with. I scout for the garden’s step-children: its marvellous, brooding trees.

My favorite are the Bombax trees, whose massive, rippling girths rise up into infinity. Like so many of India’s historical monuments, some of these old trees are carved with the initials of vandals. The names have grown bigger along with the diameters of these limbs. You can read these ugly tattoos meters away.

There is something menacing yet gentle about these Bombax trees. My children swore they were enchanted like the Whomping Willow encountered by Harry Potter. They patted the tentacled roots with wary delight, as though petting an animal.

It is easy to believe there is something mysterious about these powerful trees. Maybe they are petrified rakshasas clawing out into the air in a futile effort to escape. I tried to play a fast-motion movie in my head where a seed churns out a stalk that dances up to the sky for more than a hundred years, getting thicker as it flings its branches out in magnificent mudras up towards God.

Or maybe it’s like witnessing Sita’s fire ordeal. “Have I not endured enough?” the trees beseech the skies. “Take me away from this wretched city that rapes me and lusts for metal and concrete.”