As I walked down the road that leads to my home last evening I saw them lying on the road, butchered, slaughtered, limbs lying asunder. All of Perry Cross road was lined with its old residents badly wounded with people passing by as if nothing had happened.
On the one hand I thought to myself, can you bandage a tree and make it well again? But looking at their condition I don’t think you can do much to help the trees that are broken from the trunk.
The stormy winds of the previous night were mostly the reason for the predicament of these trees, but somewhere deep inside me I realized that it was not all the fault of the wind. What had caused all that terrible weather here in Mumbai was the same reason that places like Yorkshire in England were under water. Flooding and terrible winds seem to be the happening all round the planet. And who’s to blame for all of this if not we?
It happens so innocently, we wake up late because we slept late, so we need to take the car or a rickshaw to office. Gradually we get used to it and then that is the only way we know how to travel. Pollution that is emitted becomes an annoying thought to be pushed away at the back of our mind where it cannot bother us. But pollution does not disappear because we want it to go away. It goes away all right, to the upper part of our atmosphere where it stays.
All that emission that has been elevated to the top layer of atmosphere traps sunlight and warms the Earth. It’s been happening for so long that we never realize how slowly we are being suffocated by our own insensitiveness to the needs of the planet. The warm atmosphere causes the ice caps to melt. So when it rains what is happening is that rain water is actually fighting for space with its distant relative that has just melted from the ice caps. The sea can only accommodate that much water, before it decides that land will have to make some place for the excess water. So you have the rain water and the freshly melted water from the ice caps all draining into the sea and spilling over to the land causing flooding.
That’s not all the warm atmosphere has turned our planet’s seasonal clock all haywire, thunderstorms and galling winds have become a sort of common event all over the globe. And while we who have contributed to all this havoc can sit in the comfort and safety of our homes, it is these unmourned heroes, our wayside friends who supply us with fresh oxygen and shade, who bear the brunt of the furious winds. They along with the little birds, stray animals, and the not so well off of our own species, who are left at the mercy of nature on a rampage.
I grew up admiring these trees, as each summer they would bloom in their radiant hues. Tomorrow they won’t be there anymore, and there is no one who will give them a worthy farewell. The BMC will come in and hack away at their dead bodies, as if they are mere things. And somewhere it was because a road had to be built or cables laid that the roots of these majestic beings were hacked when they were alive. Now dead, they have become a ‘hindrance’ – to be hacked and thrown into the garbage.
Yet life goes on as usual; as people walk past by these dead trees, some go on hailing rickshaws, and those with their Mercedes Benzs honk away at little school children avoiding puddles as they make their way to school. As for the trees, no one even notices that they are gone.