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

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 silenceAccording to civic data 1516 trees have toppled in just 14 daysTo walk through Mumbai today is to pass the jagged stumps of what were once the cityrsquos oldest residentsThey are not merely casualties of the monsoonrsquos temperamental winds they are the final victims of a city that forgot how to let them breatheldquoIt is a power dynamic failurerdquo says Abhishek Khan designer storyteller and host of Mumbai Vann a treewalking 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 luxuryldquoThey are a symptom of a view of the collapse of the space that we are not able to utiliserdquo Khan explains ldquoWe 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 ornamentsrdquoThe trees wersquove lost were our cityrsquos living history Whether itrsquos the towering rain trees the sturdy copperpods and the sacred peepal or the bright gulmohars Most are nonnative to the region but have been residents mdash like the rest of us mdash for decadesThe fallen trees are the final victims of a city that forgot how to let them breathe File picsSananda Mukhopadhyaya a theatre maker and treewalk host believes our relationship with these beings has become transactional ldquoIn 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 lsquothe tree killed the childrsquo narrativerdquo Mukhopadhyaya says ldquoI was thinking now we want to anthropomorphise it to villainise the tree but the rest of the time we donrsquot grant them any bodily autonomyrdquoThis 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 concretisationTree walk participants view a cannonball tree near Bombay Gymkhana in Fort It is known for its woody cannonballshaped fruits PicSarmaya Arts FoundationWhen a tree falls it isnrsquot 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 homeMukhopadhyaya adds ldquoWe speak about trees the most at their downfall and not when they were thrivingrdquo she reflects ldquoI 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 hadnrsquot stopped blooming It just picked itself up and did what it does bestrdquoAbhishek Khan and Sananda MukhopadhyayaKhan 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 Mumbairsquos history and its future is defined not by land versus water but by an aqueous terrain that we have spent centuries trying to denyWe are fighting a losing battle A 2019 study published in Nature Communication by the research organisation Climate Central and later cited by the BMCrsquos own climate action planning warns that by 2050 large swathes of Mumbai particularly the historic downtown core and the suburbs could be below the hightide lineldquoIf your child is born this year by the time theyrsquore 23 this place will be untenablerdquo Khan says referencing the accelerating revisions of these climate reportsldquoWersquore looking at how we abandon the space in the city We have inherited a failing large bungalow and wersquore acting like we have time to pull out There will be no timerdquoWe 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