The Bench Under the Gulmohar Tree

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-10
• Bedtime Stories

There was a bench in a park under a gulmohar tree, and in May the tree went completely red.

It happens all at once. For most of the year a gulmohar is an ordinary green tree that nobody looks at twice, and then for about three weeks it is the most extraordinary thing in the whole park, covered in red-orange flowers with almost no leaves showing.

Then the flowers fall, and for a while the ground under the bench is red as well.

Who sat there

A great many people sat on that bench over the years.

Students revising. A woman who came at lunchtime with a book and read forty pages a day. Two old men who argued about cricket every evening for eleven years and then, when one of them died, one old man who sat there alone for a while and then stopped coming.

A man who proposed to somebody on it, badly, and was accepted anyway.

Two nurses from the hospital across the road who came in their break and mostly did not talk, because they had been on their feet for nine hours and did not want to.

What they had in common

Almost none of them noticed the tree.

That is the honest part of this story. They sat under it in May with the whole thing blazing over their heads and they read, or argued about cricket, or worried about an examination, and the tree did what it does and nobody looked up.

This is not a criticism of anybody. It is simply what people are like when they have somewhere to be.

The girl

Except once, a small girl waiting for her mother sat on that bench with nothing to do at all.

No book, no examination, nobody to argue with. She had been told to sit there and wait and not move, and she had about twenty minutes.

So she looked up.

And she saw the whole of it: the red going right over her head from one side to the other, and the light coming through it, and one flower coming down and landing on the arm of the bench beside her.

She picked it up and held it and looked at it for a while.

Afterwards

Her mother came and they went home.

She is grown up now and she does not remember the park or the bench or why she was waiting or what her mother had gone to do.

She remembers a red tree.

That is all that is left of that afternoon, and it is more than anybody else who sat on that bench got, and the only thing she did to earn it was have nothing else to do.