GULMOHAR IN THE TREE

NOVELLA

"Gulmohar in the tree"

By-

For all who experience first
"Love"

"Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain. "
-Rabindranath Tagore

Author's Note

I literally began writing this, inspired from an unconscious experience of feeling a cherishing warmth watching the gulmohar trees grow in front of my house. The unbearable beauty of seeing the trees and pale pink tinted sky led me to write this. It had such strong impression on me that I couldn't resist to write keeping it the centre of title. It's a love story, dealing in the beautiful experiences of being in love as a teenager. Though in present it's hard to find so, but if noticed with the most delicate and intricate feeling, it's one of those embellishments of youth. Ved's story is written that way, leading to his own world full of insecurities that almost all teenagers experience, but never reveal.
I hope you all will like it.
A

ll the rights are reserved under @shaswatwrites. Any breach of content will not be tolerated.

Chapter-1

What does happens, when you cross certain age? You fall in love?
May be? May not be?

What happens when somehow people around alienate you......that too without an effort......? What happens when the creatures around you hold your past, somehow forgotten in the hills?

What happens when love becomes an endless mystery, and a discovery of thrill that keeps your love lit inside you and so does you...............??

Let's see.___________________________

Ved knows it. ..........

VED
___________________________________

In an absent mind ,in late winter evening of January when there is no Sun for the whole day ,and warmth only in Ved's breath, he is sitting idly in his small two person balcony alone on a wooden swing, wiping his nose now and then.
The clouds and mist have mingled like cold smoke, with trees under them pinching off their leaves. There are variety of trees more than his fingers count ,in his Sanjay Nagar Colony of Varanasi; but the gulmohar ones are the only he ever sets his eyes on ,envys them.

It seems there is nothing for him to be restless about, to be concerned.
But ,it's an eye straining job to do now, there are no flowers of red flame and so the gulmohars have become indistinguishable, probably, there is no gulmohar in the trees.
It is getting dark now, as the last leaves of a nearby gulmohar tree fall off ,Ved wondered the gulmohars will not bloom this year ,after months so harsh, that leave trees scorched on branches and his own lips chapped to flesh pink and blood soaked in cracks.
And why are they beloved to him ,is a mystery. To his solace ,he has got enough gulmohar trees in his colony ,unlike the busy addresses and roads of Varanasi, where no breaths are countable, not even people, and counts do matter for him. He looks at his watch showing 4:52 p.m ,a time when most of his peers flee to coaching at around 17 years in 12th grade .But he doesn't, and never regrets it even. There's no stable reason, he could find to regret even, the syllabus; or parents pressure; or peer pressure. .....Nothing works on him.
There is a complete eerie silence ,and he can hear his slow long breaths ,still wanting to wait for a while and be lost where no one else can. And then, he recalls his vow of never loving anyone and staying single. And Ved himself is unclear with the reason why ,maybe because he was not interested, maybe because he didn't trusted and didn't wanted to, and maybe because there was no one ......! And he wonders for a while how the thought crossed his mind ,when he hasn't ever thought of it ,a vow like the winter gulmohar trees , which seemed they won't bloom again.
He wipes the slight oil pierced out of his face with his right palm, lifting up his specs ,then scratching his newly growing moustache, gives a sigh and looks up in sky .For a moment he thinks, how isolated he and his feelings are from rest of universal elements, and how isolated his feelings become if he looks out in the world always .
Ved at 17 feels better in solitude, and doesn't knows when he started to feel so.

He feels it as if the most treasured thing for him in the world, and wonder of having oneness with them, that no one else's aware of, feelings unnamed. A calm satisfaction of having only "You" with yourself. Seeming as if it slipped in him like an unidentifiable piece of him, like one falls asleep without ever noticing, swirling in and in in one's own consciousness and unconsciousness. He sips his coffee, not bothering however cold it might have turned, swinging on the cushioned bamboo swing, smiling or smirking every now and then, humming the music of 'Senorita', admiring the couple in the song, the only couple he has admired till now, giving unidentifiable expressions to his thoughts. The next moment he is startled by the voices of colony children shouting over a lost ball, frowns and places his coffee mug down on the floor, then closes his legs to his chest and lines his eyes with the horizon, below the faded Prussian blue sky, slightly covered in clouds, the Sun already set leaving unconscious shades of burnt pink in the west, the trees sketching over it.

It gives him shivers to watch it all that way. Then too he prefers to lie like a lax body, and just wonder. Soon there is a faint call of his name from downstairs, she's his mother. Ved gets up, pulls his creased pullover down slips in slippers and runs in hastily.