Goodbye, green guardians: Experts highlight why Mumbai's trees are important and how they need to be treated

Representation pic

There is a hollow silence where there was once the rustle of leaves and the frantic chatter of nesting birds. In the last two weeks, Mumbai has been defined by this silence. According to civic data, 1516 trees have toppled in just 14 days.

To walk through Mumbai today is to pass the jagged stumps of what were once the city's oldest residents.They are not merely casualties of the monsoon's temperamental winds; they are the final victims of a city that forgot how to let them breathe.

"It is a power dynamic failure," says Abhishek Khan, designer, storyteller, and host of Mumbai Vann, a tree-walking experience. For Khan, the collapse of these giants is not an accidental casualty of weather, but a symptom of a society that has relegated nature to a visual luxury.

"They are a symptom of a view of the collapse of the space that we are not able to utilise," Khan explains. "We need a lot more open soil in the city; we need to soak the excess water. We have an excess of water every year, a gift that can be transformed and utilised for trees, but we have treated them like decorative ornaments."

The trees we've lost were our city's living history. Whether it's the towering rain trees, the sturdy copperpods, and the sacred peepal, or the bright gulmohars. Most are non-native to the region, but have been residents - like the rest of us - for decades.

The fallen trees are the final victims of a city that forgot how to let them breathe. File pics

Sananda Mukhopadhyaya, a theatre maker and tree-walk host, believes our relationship with these beings has become transactional. "In the first couple of days, when that child died [when a tree fell on a schoolbus in Chembur last fortnight], there were a lot of headlines with ‘the tree killed the child' narrative," Mukhopadhyaya says. "I was thinking, now we want to anthropomorphise it to villainise the tree, but the rest of the time, we don't grant them any bodily autonomy."

This is the central grief: We only acknowledge these beings when they are in our way, or when tragedy strikes. At other times, we ignore the silent, subterranean struggle of a banyan whose roots are being slowly strangled by the relentless, suffocating tide of urban concretisation.

Tree walk participants view a cannonball tree near Bombay Gymkhana in Fort. It is known for its woody, cannonball-shaped fruits. Pic/Sarmaya Arts Foundation

When a tree falls, it isn't just a trunk hitting the pavement; it is the death of an entire, unseen ecosystem. It means the displacement of the magpie robins, the sunbirds, the lizards, and the bats that call those complex, wooded branching systems home.

Mukhopadhyaya adds, "We speak about trees the most at their downfall and not when they were thriving," she reflects. "I would personally thank them for being the only thing of beauty that I rest my gaze on anymore in the city. When I saw a copperpod get hacked down in my building, I was devastated. But the next day, a flower fell from the remaining stump. It hadn't stopped blooming. It just picked itself up and did what it does best."

Abhishek Khan and Sananda Mukhopadhyaya

Khan urges us to look beyond the immediate fall and toward the work of water experts like Dilip DaCunha. In his seminal work Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary, DaCunha argues that Mumbai's history and its future is defined not by land versus water, but by an aqueous terrain that we have spent centuries trying to deny.

We are fighting a losing battle. A 2019 study published in Nature Communication by the research organisation Climate Central, and later cited by the BMC's own climate action planning, warns that by 2050, large swathes of Mumbai, particularly the historic downtown core and the suburbs, could be below the high-tide line.

"If your child is born this year, by the time they're 23, this place will be untenable," Khan says, referencing the accelerating revisions of these climate reports.

"We're looking at how we abandon the space in the city. We have inherited a failing large bungalow, and we're acting like we have time to pull out. There will be no time."

We bid farewell to the 1516, and the many more that will follow. We are the poorer for their absence, and the city, stripped of its emerald veil, is finally beginning to look exactly like the place we designed for ourselves: hard, grey, and dangerously unbreathable.