Shade
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(Written in March 2019)
March has arrived in Mumbai. A long low growl. A warning of days to come. Walking from Churchgate via Oval Maidan to Regal this morning was not pleasant. The trees helped though. I had shady pavements all along except when cutting through Oval of course. There, the cricket was still sleepy, the desperate calls of Catch it and Ball, Ball! to passersby and team mates alike muted and half hearted.
Our beautiful old trees along University Road, Cooperage and in Colaba kept the temperature down and the breeze cool. It reminded me of years ago, walking down a similar shady pavement along BSNL. Walking ahead of me was a knot of white kurta clad men, who looked and behaved like corporators out for a stroll. (You know the fellow, exuding a sense of power so minuscule in reality but inflated in ego..) One looked up irately at the trees and commented: Ché I hope I don’t get shat on. Should cut all these down and put up a plastic awning instead.
I remembered him today. Bhau, I’ll match your fancy plastic awning against my trees any day…
Anyway, what got me thinking was the number and variety of people who use the shade a Mumbai tree provides.
There’s the ever increasing sight of a cow tethered under a tree (yes, this is megacity Mumbai, not a sleepy village), having created a mess of urine and shit all around her. She placidly chews on the food devout passersby purchase from her owner to feed her and swishes her excreta encrusted tail in blessing. The smell and the happy breeding ground for flies form a little miasmic cloud around the holy creature.
The point isn’t whether she should be on our pavements at all. That’s for our wise pundits in the BMC to ponder. The point is each of these lovelies has a shady tree overhead.
Then there are the dogs. Lying in complete abandonment, ticks and genitalia taking in the breeze. Or curled up in a defensive knot, nose tucked into tail. All along the road, a couple of strays have appropriated each patch of shade and loll there, sultans in their serigalios.
And what of the trees’ best friends? Us Mumbaikers? The paanwala who has set up shop next to the illegal little temple, both genteel in their tussle for the most shade offered by the gracious peepal.
Or the cobbler, who rarely seems to have work, lying there with his cell phone held up to the sky. He has tied his tent like shop to two conveniently low hanging branches of a kadamb tree.
Then there’s the migrant family, adding one or two more children to their pavement dwelling every year. The babies sleep in cradles made of soft, faded sarees, strung high enough between two rusty shield bearer trunks to keep rats away.
Many trees on strategic corners have been staked out by our men in khaki. Benches under their shade donated by long forgotten philanthropists are used as temporary canteens or even to catch a quick forty winks.
College kids eating their morning fix of fast food, dabbawallahs strategizing their next conference at Harvard, drunks sleeping off the night’s excesses, the very old and the very poor, the weary: all find an impartial solace under the shade of our trees. Trees don’t ask for your gothra or caste or political affiliation. They bloom beautifully in a pure vegetarian enclave and equally beautifully over a muttonwallah’s shop. Their shade remains magically unpolluted by the humans who spit, shit, litter and live there.
So why is it that when our trees, the same ones whose shade we seek out every day in this hot, humid, dusty city, when our trees are threatened and chopped indiscriminately, the people who come out in protest are the same handful of environmentalists and activists and the few middle aged people with ‘nothing else to do’? Why don’t our cops and beggars object? Why don’t the migrant families raise their hoarse voices in protest? Why don’t our cows lower their horns and bellow in defence of the trees?
And our young people? In another time, they would have poured out into the streets, and enacted impassioned street plays and shouted slogans. But today, they only twirl their hair and pout for selfies and show off their Abercrombie and Fitch tees….while the trees still stand sentinel, providing the shade that Mumbaikars rarely, if ever, acknowledge make our lives a little bit more bearable.