Every evening, when I manage to be back home - in Islamabad – I go out into the streets and roads of my beloved city and sometimes I even venture into the lovely green hills, up north. I walk. I run. I jog. I think about this town which is mine and the best years of my boyhood, which I have spent thus. As the sun sinks behind the hills, I see it off in the calm assurance that tomorrow, when this stately being gets up once again, with the will of God, it shall see my city and my love for it, as young and green as ever.
This evening, just a walk was turning into a jog, and I was passing the edge of the jungle-cum-park which was my childhood ‘enchanted woods’, I saw three bearded (like me) young madrassa students ( I could tell that by seeing them and also because I know that they come out to play there). They were carrying a long black thick cable, the kind that is now used for cable tv. They were a little taken aback to see me. I slowed down and looked the other way. They got back to doing whatever they had been up to. But I couldn’t resist the suspicion. They shied again, and I looked the other way. The third I saw them at it. At the edge of the park there is a sick tree. The cable was a noose and they were trying to fell my tree.
I went to them, shook their hands and told them that perhaps it was O.K for the residents of the ‘colony’(the huge festering slum of F-7) to be woodcutting because they CDA has cut their gas supply and they need to cook, but at least ‘they’ shouldn’t be doing this. It was understood, without saying, that ‘they’ meant madrassa students who will soon become comprise a huge portion of educated Pakistani.
They replied: “ Right bro. We aren’t doing this for ourselves. The ‘colony boys’ failed at it earlier so we are only helping them.”
“No, he’s right. We shouldn’t be doing this”, someone interjected.
Another one spoke: “It’s dead anyways.”
I replied: “It’s autumn and who know if God will revive it this summer” I looked at him and then at the others and I could see that they were convinced. I added “ This one’s sick
but it’s still public property and if YOU fell this one, people will see you and start felling healthy ones.”
“This is only my advice, but the choice is yours.” We shook hands, said salam, and parted.
Back on the road I began to run. The evening has far advanced so I picked pace. On my right the cars were many and noisy and further right was a huge, filthy, dusty construction site. Two years back, there was a lush green forest patch here. I would run in it and sometimes get stuck in the wild grasses. On summer days, I shaded me. Today the trees are gone except for a few sick ones on the edges – everywhere else, there reign supreme, bulldozers, earthmovers, and other grizly engines of war( against nature).
I looked again at the sun, dark and low now, and that old calm assurance was missing from my heart. I wasn’t running now; I was lingering. And in this state I walked past another woodcutter, this time a colony dweller – a man in the thirties, but so emaciated and sick that he looked twenty years older. His noose was stuck in the neck of old, stooping tree. For many years it has lain uncared for by the CDA’s forest department, while termite infested it. They its started wasting away and soon it was hunched. Countless times I stood by its side, held it tight in embrace, and prayed for its health. Now a poor and sick-looking man was stripping its bark. My broken heart, and the man’s miserable condition left me no courage to talk to him or stop. I didn’t even want to stop him. My mind was split.
“He has to cook dinner tonight, doesn’t he? He needs it.” Thus spoke one part.
“Must the tree die, if man is to live?”, replied the other part.
“But how would man live, if all the trees die? And even if he could live thus, what point would there be in living?”
“Couldn’t we live together, man, trees, grasses, animals and birds, all of God’s creation”
“ For ages, they have lived thus. There was once a city called Islamabad where they could all live together. You used to love it. But that city is dead.”
“Don’t tell me its dead. It is all that I love. The urban man living in harmony with the natural world, like someone riding a tamed beast, but a living, wild beast nonetheless. That was my dream, my first love.”
“So it was. But it shall be closer to a man eating morsels of meat from a slaughtered beast. You see, the rich need cars, and cars need roads which can only be built on dead earth. The poor need firewood and street trees are best for it. A few years down the lane, one autumn they will fell all the trees, one after the other, and by summer time there shall be left none to blossom back into life. They are all after the trees, my boy” This last line reverberated in my mind. “They are all after the trees, my boy.” And I felt warm tears joining the water on my face, as I was performing wuzu in what has now become a roadside mosque.
As I left the mosque after Maghrib, I retraced my steps. Passing across the old stooping tree, I saw that it was still there but parts of it were gone. Every evening I had stood by its side, seeing it fall but never had I doubted that I would see it the next day. The sun was gone now and that old, calming assurance with it.
“Tomorrow the sickly woodcutter would be back to finish the job.” That discomforting thought flashed in my mind. I tried to picturize the place as it would like without this tree. Another thought came “Today this one is gone. Tomorrow others will go. So try to picturize All of it without the trees.” So I tried to visualize this newer scenario. Unhindered view of the hills behind, once the trees go. Oho, but then the hills wont be green either. Plain grey earth with buildings here and there, and grey mountains behind it. Wrong again, because hills will erode once the tree are gone. Grey earth, stubs on it and nothing behind. But wont the mountains will leave behind a ghost or something. So grey earth covered by bitumen and concrete and a ghost of the erstwhile mountains lingering behind. But no…… I kept correcting my mental images until they turned close my idea of hell, which when I realized that the walk had ended, and I was back home.
“Its not that they have felled so many trees, it is that they have shaken our belief that the trees would still be there when we wake up tomorrow, a year later or a decade later.”
That troubling thought returned, “Tomorrow, the woodcutter will be back to finish the stopped.” “Tomorrow, Islamabad will be gone.” That veritable picture of Islamabad-turned-hell returned to my mind, this time merged with images of a sandy desert.
But then, at last, a comforting thought flickered: “Tomorrow, the sons of Islamabad will rise up, and take affairs in their strong and young arms. Tomorrow they will say: Stop! Enough on big money and big city. We want Islamabad back, so that our generations will grow up in the same great, green vision-of-a-city that we grew up in.”
Will they rise, dear reader?
