Uprooted

A giant tamarind tree stood tall behind our house. Its tiny leaves, perfectly shaped, looked viridian green on cloudy days, emerald on sunny ones. And it made a fantastically foresty Venetian Blind for our block of flats. I'd look out from my fifth floor corridor and all I'd see was green and a bit of brown-black. Occasionally a parrot or a mynah might alight, but that was all.

It made me think of my neighbour and friend Anisha’s astonished question. I’d once told her the price of land was the same in our Juhu neighbourhood as the newly developing Parel. And that my brother was buying a flat in a gigantic Parel complex. “Why would he want to live in Parel if he could live in Juhu for the same price?” she’d puzzled.

Why indeed? Maybe Juhu-Versova is far far away from the Fort-Fountain finance and heritage hubs, but it’s a most pleasant spot to live in. And wonderfully wooded as the many walkers in the area will vouchsafe.

I’d have expected coconut palms in this suburb by the sea, and they’re there too, sometimes five storeys high, like the ones that sway in the breeze outside my window.

But there are many more trees as well — the rain trees, the Ashokas, the mango trees and of course the Gulmohars. Streets in the JVPD scheme, like the Gulmohar Cross Roads 1-10, stand testimony to these leafy wonders.

They surprise me, these trees. I trudge through Juhu Market’s traffic jammed streets into the Isckon Temple and there they are. Peepul trees in the marble arched inner courtyard. One moment I’m in an unruly medley of autos, and the next I’m in arboreal heaven.

And then there’s the road I always take, no matter which direction I must go – the Juhukar Gandhigram with great big trees on either side. At its very end is the road’s most magic spot, where stands an ancient banyan whose earthy roots envelop all space. But the tamarind tree... it toppled over in last fortnight’s deluge. Smashing the boundary wall, flattening two cars. Some say it was old, 90 years or more and that it had to go. But the gnarled old Mali who tends these trees all year long, says that like the raintrees that fell last year, this too could have lived. If only its roots hadn’t been so crowded out by concrete.


This appeared in Mumbai Mirror dated August 5th