Sharat Ritu: The perfect excuse for a lotus pond boat ride

What is the best thing about Sharat, you ask? For me, it is the change in the city's breeze, in the soft, golden rays of the sun, and yes, the clear azure sky, with floating white fluffy clouds.

Sharat Ritu is the name for the early Autumn season in the Bangla calendar. After the stifling, humid late monsoon days, Sharat gives us respite with its iridescent white light and soft hues of nature.

This is when we bathe in the beauty of lotus and lily ponds, scattered on the outskirts of Dhaka. A boat ride in the lotus pond, losing yourself to the calmness of nature and colouring your soul with lily and lotus colour, is maybe the best excursion of the season. If it drizzles, it just means the fairies have showered you with luck.

Photo: Sazzad Ibne Sayed

However, for me, the evenings under a parijat or sheuli tree take centre stage for the season. It intoxicates the gardens with its divine scent and caresses your senses. Sheuli, also called night jasmine -- with its creamy white, pin-wheel petals, and a saffron-shaded soft stem -- this heavenly bloom is a favourite. Drenched in dew drops, the petite sheuli blooms in the evening and falls off the bough at the first light of dawn.

All sorts of fragrant blooms make Sharat special -- for example Bakul phul, said to be a sign of purity, divine beauty, and spirituality, because of which, they have a special place in rituals like puja. Our Ramna

Park is filled with the heady scent of this beautiful flower. The park has several very old Bakul trees and you can go and pick them from the green carpet of grass or buy garlands from little girls selling them.

Photo: Sazzad Ibne Sayed

Mallika and Madhobi leave an impression, but that tiny bunch of white stud-like kamini or orange jasmine fills you with a sense of love and harmony. And yes, the dirty white kash phul or kans flower in places like Uttara third phase, 300 feet, and Notun bazar area has made Dhakaites ecstatic. Visiting kash phul grounds for photographs is trending in Dhaka now. 

These sharat flowers have mesmerised the cityscape. There are many poetic myths surrounding sharat because it is a season of auspiciousness, and new beginnings and coincides, with harvest time in the middle of autumn in most of the Asian culture.