No tree is an island…

…The death of one diminishes us all

‘I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree.’ – Joyce Kilmer

Mumbai has turned more prosaic –because of the very monsoon which once stirred such sublime poetry. Meghdoot to mega-death. This time’s apocalypse claimed 830 city trees in its first fortnight compared to 855 during the entire 2025 season, 500 last Monday alone. 

The biggest victim is the gulmohur whose orange flames had both matched and countered the blaze of that unending summer. Its roots spread outward like its canopy, but alas not deep enough downward, making it monsoon ‘prone’. The city’s so-called minders add their blow, ‘killing us (un)softly with their (non)song’ of concretisation. Horizontally with re-laid roads; vertically via re-written rules which junk old safeguards against over-construction. With parched and hammered roots unable to hold on, the unanchored giant falls with a prolonged groan, then the wet, final slap of canopy hitting ground. The death rattle isn’t just that of the tree. 

Mumbaikars love or hate the monsoon depending on where they live. But for our gorgeous gulmohurs, the season’s storms are a great leveller. Literally. They brought down the one at lush Willingdon Club as mercilessly as those in suburban slush. In the same 24 hours, an uprooted tree halted the family motorcade of India’s richest man as uncaringly as it stopped a  teen biker’s life forever. Like a heartless landlord, each fall summarily evicts an entire ecosystem: birds, bats, bees, butterflies, barber beneath its boughs; crawlies, creepers, clambering urchins. The suddenly stripped street stands shamed, no longer able to hide that concrete soar which shelters only for a price. 

The loss hits closer home. The gate-side tree wasn’t just GSP landmark, but emotive sentinel too. Planted by your nana-nani to mark the birth of their first child, the sapling grew with the family, welcomed the arrivals of  brides, grooms, grandchildren; then silently wept over departures. In place of that precious memory bank, now only a rain-splattered  wound, and a small square of unfamiliar sky where a life’s worth of shade once stood.

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Alec Smart said: “ The monsoon hands us a landslide defeat.”

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