Uprooted

Illustration/Uday Mohite

I'm a tree - a Banyan tree, massive, overarching, sprouting and sporting many variations of green, with my extensive canopy, with leaves and branches and figs, and aerial roots. I'm a Bombay tree, planted over 500 years ago. One of 2.73 lakh trees in the maximum city of Bombay, trying to survive in the minimum city that has become Mumbai.

I'm in Dadar East, at Kings Circle. In Virar and Versova. And Bhayandhar and Bhuleshwar. In New Bombay and Naigaon, in Shivaji park and Santa Cruz. I am spread all over the seven islands - I have stood in parks, and leafy neighborhoods, I have overhung roads, shrouding lanes, we have defined areas. There was a time when Bombay treated us as hallowed and valuable, we were "heritage", a cherished tourist attraction. I have provided shade, and shelter from the rain and sun, from thunderstorms, and offered quiet and oxygen. I have provided a constant cover - you never hurt us, no one wanted to injure us, we were protected, we were respected, we were revered, the only irritants were urinating dogs and pen knife graffiti "Sanjay luvs Pushpa".

But, all that changed a few years ago. Real danger lurked around the corner.

Under the guise of urbanisation, we trees became the low hanging fruit, we can be dispensed with. Who needs nature when we have "new age-ism", cruel contractors and unthinking bureaucrats, trucks run by corporations and contractors, showed up. "Let's concretise Mumbai" was the axiom. Skinny men jumped out of jeeps with machines, and large pruners and cutters and shears and buzz saws shimmying up our trunks to cut our slender branches. They snip snipped like roadside barbers, as if they just knew "how to maintain trees", self-made "arbors", they've relentlessly chopped at my well-being, in the name of progress. A little snip here, a chop there, sometimes bringing down the mighty oaks.

And now were an endangered species.

Ignorants, uncaring ignorants, blissfully unaware that cutting off our "arms" renders us imbalanced, making us hugely vulnerable to winds and storms.

On July 6, as gusty winds blustered across the city, 523 of us fell, in one day, we lost 500 of our brethren - we just keeled over in the raging winds, not of old age, but we're weakened considerably at the roots.

One soulless neta said, "It happens".

It amazes me that all these corporators, and contractors and corrupt builders don't consult the conservationists- they prune, they pedicure, the pulversise, they chop, they cut, they serrate.

And we've become the villain, my colleague, a Peepul tree, fell in Chembur, he had been weakened , he'd been pruned mercilessly, chipped away at his roots, to widen some road, some pavement with paver blocks. After much struggle, to stay upright, he finally landed on a bus, killing an innocent 11 year old. Another merciless corporator said, callously, "the fall of trees is not in human hands". And so, who concretises the road, who widen the pavements, we seem to stand in the way of progress, roads that continue to be re-paved, buildings that are redeveloped over roots. Electricity cables, gas connections, fibre glass wires need dug up roads, and dug up roads means dug up roots -leaving us that have withstood hurricanes down the years imbalanced, and in a precarious situation. We're old trees, bravely trying to "push back", often lifting tiles or paver blocks in our bid to survive. But it seems hopeless.

And so, it is true that I, the mighty Banyan tree, I am India's national tree. I am mythological.

I am sacred. But I am scared. And I am definitely scarred.

Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, filmmaker and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com