Autumn Scenes

Nostalgia

When Autumn Cometh

ZGM

My siblings, my mates and I happily said goodbye to ‘stunning summer afternoons.’  That ‘soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,’ did not bother us, and we never lamented as some poets have done. And ‘in the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ we no more looked for songs of spring’ but eagerly  waited for listening grandmother’s stories in cozy corners of the kitchen.  The blonde and brownish leaves falling from the towering poplars, giant Kikkars, and majestic Chinars, dancing like whirling Dervishes had mystical ecstasy for us. Many times, we jumped and jostled like jumping jacks to catch a rusty leaf falling from a chinar tree. Sometimes, putting our school bags on the ground, we vied for catching as many as leaves as we could. To celebrate, the grand season when ripe quinces temptingly turned yellow, and pomegranates in a small garden on the way to our school drooped from mud-walls like a damsel’s earrings; sometimes we waited under a Chinar tree for the gentle wind to shower golden leaves on us. For our love of making a great noise of rustling Chinar leaves, many times we changed the route to our school walked to our school through the Jamia Masjid, entered through the gate in the North and left from the entrance opening on the side of our school. Those days, in autumn hundreds of years old majestic Chinars, as many as thirteen in number in the vast courtyard with their leaves changing from gold to russet to scarlet to brown added a magical aura to the splendid architecture of the Masjid.  The brown leaves carpeting the lawns produced lilting tunes as one walked through them- running like rabbits through rustling leaves gave us incredible mirth. Occasionally, unmindful of getting cane charged at the morning assembly for donning a spoiled uniform, we rolled on these rusty leaves as Hindu devotees do before the deities’- Shayana Pradakshinam.   One of our best pastime on the lawns was looking for molted flight feathers of kites and eagles for making a quill pen not for writing but fun.

In autumn, the magnificent Bremiji kul, nettle or hackberry trees that during summers hosted migratory parakeets attracted us most not for its foliage turned yellow but for copious Bremiji brownish nuts.  Perhaps magnificent full-sized canopy Bremiji kul was planted on graveyards and near the mausoleums of native and immigrant saints for shade during summers and shelter during showers.  On the way to school, there were many of these shady trees on the graveyards- and gigantic one was on the western side of the Jamia Masjid- perhaps on a gravesite of some on revered. Unlike, the mulberry trees that for our belief of being abodes of genies and fairies we never stoned, nevertheless,  like great marksman we shot down bunches of dried small nuts and enjoyed them to the hilt. The crusty shell of Bremiji with a little nut inside lived true to an old Kashmiri proverb about crows, ‘put some in the pocket and eat that in winter; it was tedious to hit those on top branches with stones, as it snowed these could be knocked down with stick on the white carpet.

My sibling and I had a great fascination for colorful small birds in the cages of the bird seller in our Mohalla, some hundred yards from our house. I had bought some beautiful pair pigeons from him but never dared to buy a caged bird for fear of my mother. In summers, I would often spot hoopoes, Tsini Hangur (Starling), Her Waatij (Shrike, Long-Tailed)  Kukil (Dove) , Wan Kukil (Dove Oriental) ,  shoga (Parakeet) in and around home   but the small birds in cages . My younger sibling, my friend and I devised one after another noose-traps (Valawashi) out of horse tail hair for catching these birds, but except bulbul, we could not catch any of the birds- the thrushes with their brisk movement always evaded the traps.

While we enjoyed autumn with all its beauty and thrill, elders at home had their pastimes, as ants remained engaged in filling their stores with all the stuff for the winters.