-Brian Mendonça
I see the fallen leaves being swept into clumps on
the ground outside my window. The trees above are disconsolate that one of
their own has now bitten the dust. The leaves still on the trees are green -- those
on the ground, yellow and gnarled.
We are like leaves. Green in our prime, withered
when we waste away and die -- a sombre lesson for the ending of the year,
because that’s where we are heading.
And I am thinking of a sprightly man in an old age
home we visited. He wanted to reciprocate our visit and declared that he would
sing this song for us. And he began:
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold . . .
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold . . .
That was the time
dad was with us. Today he has been swept away with time. This song sung by
American jazz pianist and vocalist, Nat King Cole in 1945 was a favourite of
mum. It has also been interpreted in jazz style on the guitar by Eva Cassidy in
1996 in her album Live at Blues Alley.
But is it autumn
now? Autumn is signified by the shedding
of leaves. Autumn is a transition season between monsoon and winter.
In Delhi it appears
during early or mid October and stretches to early December. Like Spring in
February before the hot summer, autumn is another pleasant season in the
capital when the breezes are kind before the bleak fog of winter. Starting this morning, Delhi is hosting its
Autumn Fair exhibiting home, lifestyle, fashion and textiles between 14-18
October 2018 at the India Expo Centre and Mart.
In Goa the blaze of
red and yellowing leaves in October is not so prominent. The state careens as
it were in an undefined miasma of heat and dust, having said goodbye to the
last rains. The tourist season is officially open and the cavalcade of
festivals about to start.
Yet autumn is
redolent with nostalgia and a sense of an ending. So we speak of ‘the autumn of
his life,’ i.e. as life draws to a close. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel of a
paranoid patriarch, viz. Autumn of the
Patriarch (1975) shares this view. Leaf
Storm (1955) - also by Marquez - has multiple narrators across three
generations coming to terms with the death of a mysterious man.
‘To be free from
all sin / take a name that is a synonym of green,’ ‘to turn into a sage / be
born in the age of foliage,’ advises Sarabjeet Garcha in his poem, ‘Lines from
a Lost Leaf.’
At any rate, with
the wanton destruction of our repositories of green, the time is nigh to mourn
for the passage of the leaves that were.
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
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