I’ve never been very good at identifying trees even after having been taken on innumerable ‘tree walks’ around the city. The (lazy) mindset works like this: “Ah, they’re not going anywhere in a hurry so I can always come back to check them out — but what the heck was that bird that just blustered out like Nirav Modi flying away?”
Of course you never go back to check on the poor tree, so in your books it remains like someone without an Aadhaar card. But the recent debacle over trees in Delhi has made me sit up. Now I tell myself: “Hey, you’d better take the trouble to identify and say hello to every tree you come across because, who knows, tomorrow it might just not be there any more, thanks to some harebrained scheme that the maniacs in charge have cooked up.”
In this recent case in Delhi (involving the potential slaughter of 16,500 trees for a housing project; the plan has been put on hold by Delhi High Court), when the bird droppings hit the fan big time, so to speak, and Delhi’s citizens rose up in arms (see, this kind of issue provides such a better outlet for bottled-up rage than when someone stupidly cuts in front of you in traffic), the authorities quickly backed down and pointed fingers at each other, claiming ‘it was their idea!’ Like kids do when they paint over your only Husain — though most kids ultimately do have the grace to finally own up and take their medicine stoically. Now we’re told by the major authority that the trees won’t be cut. This has primarily been done to bring your temperature and blood pressure back to normal (Elections are coming! Elections are coming!), and hope that you (and the media) will quickly forget about this whole sorry episode. Oh, they all claim, we love trees and the environment and they’re part of Delhi’s culture and blah-blah-blah. Well, if so, then the mere fact that anyone could have even dreamt of conducting this kind of wholesale pillage in the first place beggars belief. Either they were taking their road rage out on trees, or they needed to quickly be wrapped up in straitjackets and locked up in the Red Fort — or a lot of people were hoping to make the kind of money Nirav Modi ran away with. Maybe they foolishly thought that city-dwellers would not notice if most of the trees in their city were suddenly cut down — being too happy to picnic in malls and shopping arcades, sucking up sugary energy drinks. But here’s the thing about city-dwellers and trees:
I’ve lived in big cities all my life: Bombay (not Mumbai), Madras (not Chennai) and now Delhi. And I remember every city in relation to the trees that were our neighbours in those places. Growing up in Madras, I spent hours and hours playing in the mud under (and sometimes a little way up on) a huge neem tree that grew just outside the bedroom window. It was cool and dim and green, and the neem berries had that tantalising bittersweet taste — you couldn’t make up your mind if you liked them or not. Here I learnt which ants would bite you viciously and which were friendly. There was a dark brooding grove of casuarinas that bordered the grounds, which we were forbidden to go to because it was supposed to be the haunt of cobras. So, the perfect place to safari-ride your bicycle — carpeted casuarina needles could be slippery, so you learnt how to control bike skids. Yes, there were many holes at the base of these trees — surely the lair of cobras and vipers — but we never saw, let alone get chased by, a single one. Then there were the gigantic tamarind trees and there was nothing better than sucking the sticky gleaming brown fruit on a hot Madras afternoon.
As for Bombay — you’d think it would be hard to forge a relationship with trees in such a city, with skyscrapers and art deco buildings maybe. But Bombay too had its grand old trees, many of which were neighbours of art deco buildings. (Like the rain trees at Kala Ghoda — umm — at least they used to be there.) Our own building was perched right on the top of Cumballa Hill and outside our verandah there was this rustling old peepul tree that grew virtually at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the whole of central Bombay. I hold this tree responsible for triggering my interest in birds. When I focused my brand new pair of binoculars on a flitting speck on this tree, the first bird that sprung into view looked (and behaved) like a clown! It was a dumpy little thing, greenish, about sparrow sized, with a face like a clown. It stood on tiptoe, pointed its stubby beak upwards to the right and hiccupped, ‘tuk-tuk-tuk’! Then it turned to the left and did the same thing. It was, of course, the coppersmith barbet — and it got me hooked. That peepul tree yielded more than 15 species including the black-shouldered kite and white-throated kingfisher and a nesting pair of black kites that would dive-bomb me every time they had chicks. Another peepul on the other side of the building was the refuge of a colony of huge fruit bats, which, at dusk, would set out on what looked like bombing sorties.
Trying to enter the verandah was a dark, glossy mango tree, in whose depths crows hid their nests from koels. But every summer, when the mangoes dangled temptingly I’d take my catapult out. It was wonderful when you finally managed to knock a ‘kairi’ down: you scampered down into the garden to collect it and then, with salt and red chilli powder… Finally there was the Borivali National Park (a better option than college), where you could wander around at will, admiring the enormous wood spiders and the rampant greenery during the monsoons.
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Then we came to Delhi, which was astonishing because it had huge trees everywhere. The avenues had these disciplined rows of trees, neem on one, laburnum on the other, arjun on a third and so on. The parks had groves and thickets; India Gate was studded with trees. Then, of course, there was the mysteriously rustling Ridge, which, I learnt only later, was ruled by a villainous alien — the Prosopis juliflora or ‘vilayati keekar’. This Mexican tree, even in its home country, has been called the ‘devil tree’, so I’m not behaving like President Trump here. Juliflora grows rampantly, and refuses to let anything else grow in its vicinity.
Back in time, around, say, when the Revolt of 1857 took place, Delhi was quite barren tree-wise. When the British forces got entrenched on the Ridge in the summer of 1857, they pretty much got roasted and broiled. (From the Flagstaff Tower you could see all the way down to the old pontoon bridge near the Red Fort.) Afterwards they swore this would never happen again, and began planting trees in the city. And it’s been said that they deliberately planted ‘civilised’ trees like neem, peepul and arjun in the ‘civilised’ areas of Delhi (where the gora sahibs lived) and let loose the thorny, aggressive juliflora on the Ridge, where the junglees and natives heaved and sweated. But anyway, Delhi had trees, and when I came to live here in Civil Lines, I was doubly delighted.
Right next door was the Nicholson Cemetery, which back in the 1980s was like some dark, impenetrable forest. There were huge stands of grand old trees, decades old, and from my balcony I listed over 60 species of birds. Inside, you could ‘get lost’ and it was almost unbelievable that the shuddering, honking Kashmere Gate ISBT was just across the road. Of course, it was too good to last (which, in Delhi, alas, always seems to be the case). In the early ’90s, the great felling began. At the time official permission was not required to cut trees on private property and so nearly every large mature tree was brought thudding down by axemen. When I rang to ask why this was happening, I was sullenly told, “You don’t know how expensive it is to maintain a cemetery!” When I asked the axemen why they were cutting the trees, I was told ‘they were rotten’. And what were they going to do with the huge logs that were taken away by bullock carts every evening? Store them in a godown. Who in their right minds stores rotting wood in a godown unless to breed termites?
There have, of course, been other much greater mass fellings in Delhi since, and the Metro has been one of the chief villains laying barren many a once-tree-shrouded avenue.
But wait, all is not lost! When an old, long-dead fishtail palm in the garden was knocked over by a summer thunderstorm, instead of falling flat it leant tiredly against our building. It had to be brought down lest it fell and did serious damage. But that needed official permission and, being excessively law-abiding, I trundled off to the forest department at the Ridge nearby to acquire it and fill in all the forms. A ‘tree inspector’ would be sent to examine. He — and a sidekick — turned up several weeks later. He hummed and hawed around the tree, taking pictures, and then, pointing at the cheese-plant creeper still clinging to the trunk, declared that it was alive. His sidekick gave it one look and said, “ Mara hain , nikalo (It’s dead, bring it down)!”
Eventually the letter of permission arrived. It had rigorous conditions. Such as, the tree had to be brought down within a month’s time (else it might come alive again and run away?), the wood had to be sent to a cemetery and the receipt submitted to the authorities (to prevent me from making a killing), and I had to do penance by planting 10 saplings… Wow! So much trouble for bringing down a single dead tree! But you can condemn 16,500 living ones without batting an eyelid and hope to get away with it?
It’s constantly being drilled into us by environmentalists about how good trees are for us and our health; they produce oxygen, cool down the city and are spiritually uplifting and so on. Well, here’s testimony from a source as unlikely as they come. Years ago I used to drive an elderly Ambassador. She felt the Delhi heat immensely, and on the Ring Road her temperature gauge would be nudging the red line and she’d begin to falter. The moment I turned into Yamuna Marg, which was shrouded by trees and adjacent to Qudsia gardens, the gauge plummeted and the car perked up. It was as if I had offered her an ice-cold gin-and-tonic or tankard of beer on a torrid afternoon.
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Apart from the environmental reasons why we need trees, another vital one gets overlooked. Instead of getting our children a personal trainer, we need to get them a personal tree. Of course, there’ll probably be more children than trees, so the kids would have to share, but that should not be an issue. Allocate a tree to a child — where she can go and kick its trunk or rip up a few leaves when she wants to throw a tantrum, or climb up and sulk in its branches, or read a forbidden book (or the equivalent of what kids do with electronic thingies these days): A place of refuge, a place to take a friend, have a snack, even perhaps exchange a clumsy first kiss; a place from which to watch the world beneath, to check out the parakeets and owlets nesting in it, and making friends with the squirrels that chase each other around its branches. You see, because, unlike so many harried parents and teachers and miscellaneous caregivers, a tree will always be there when the child needs it.
But be warned: If you spot po-faced officials sniffing around it and squinting through theodolites, self-righteously muttering ‘it’s for dev-lope-ment’, it means you have a Code Red situation. Get your placards ready!
Ranjit Lal is an author and environmentalist