[ Biren Dutta ]

I. Genesis

Before language, before footsteps, before the first fire cupped in the first pair of hands, there was silence - and into that silence, I was born.

Not born as you are born, with a cry and a name, but born as a seed is born: small, hard, and patient, dropped into the damp hush of a swamp older than memory. The rain woke me the way a mother wakes a sleeping child - gently, and without asking permission. I cracked. I reached. A root went down into the dark, seeking water the way faith seeks god, blindly and without proof. A shoot went up into the light, seeking sky the way hope seeks morning. That was my whole theology, in those first days: down for water, up for light, and everything else would follow.

I could not walk, and so I learned to fly - on the wind's spinning wing, in a bird's obliging belly, on the shoulders of elephants and the paws of bears, and once, memorably, upon the sea itself, sealed inside a coconut that drifted for months like a small brown ark until it ran aground on a shore it had never dreamed of. This is how I came to inherit the Earth: not by conquest, but by hitchhiking, patiently, for a hundred million years.

And I was never lonely in my becoming. Wherever I thickened into forest, the world arrived to keep me company - insects first, like punctuation marks in the green sentence of the canopy; then birds, stitching the air with song; then the soft-footed mammals, and the larger, quieter shapes that hunted them in turn. Fungi threaded themselves into my roots like old friends who ask nothing but your company. Orchids perched in the crooks of my elbows and paid no rent. I became not a tree, but a city - a wild, roofless cathedral, humming at every hour with a congregation that never once thought to call itself one.

High in the folded arms of the mountains, I did something I am still, after all these years, quietly proud of: I made rivers. I drank the winter's snow and gave it back drop by patient drop, so that even in the cruellest dry season a stream kept singing down the valley instead of falling silent. Into that cold, clear water swam the mahseer and the trout; along its banks the otters played their small glinting games; the turtles lay like punctuation on sunlit stones, and the dragonflies stitched the surface with light. The river and I were never separate. The river was simply the part of me that moved.

And because a thing that survives does not also need to be beautiful, and yet I was - extravagantly, uselessly, gloriously beautiful - you noticed. You could not help it. In Kashmir I turned to flame each autumn along the silver hem of the Dal, and your Sufi poets folded my burning leaves into verse until the very word chinar became a small ache in the Kashmiri tongue, a word for longing itself. In Shillong I turned the hills to a soft, improbable pink each November, and whole towns walked out just to stand beneath me before the wind undressed my branches again - my cousin the sakura performing the same brief miracle across Japan, teaching a nation, through haiku thin as falling petals, that what does not last may be loved more fiercely for it. I was Tagore's palash, catching fire each spring in his songs and in the powder thrown at Holi. I was the willow Shakespeare bent low over Ophelia's drowning, and the oak Wordsworth wandered beneath while grief and permanence argued quietly in his lines. I was the banyan under whose vast, tangled beard the elders of a hundred villages still tell the same stories their grandparents told them. And in New England, Robert Frost sat at his own window and watched me the way one watches an old companion, writing once of a young tree's first green - how nothing precious, he mourned, gets to stay precious for long. He did not know, or perhaps he knew exactly, that he was writing my elegy before I had even died.

Even your scriptures could not resist me. I was the peepal beneath which a prince sat down and rose again as the Buddha. I was the ashvattha the Bhagavad Gita called eternal, roots reaching towards heaven, branches reaching towards earth, as if the universe itself grew upside down. I was the ashoka in the garden where Sita waited through her exile in the Ramayana, and the trees of Panchavati that sheltered Rama and Lakshmana through their years in the forest. I was the Sidrat al-Muntaha, marking the last boundary before paradise in the Quran. I was the tree of life and the tree of knowledge in the very first garden of the Bible, and the cedar of Lebanon that held up Solomon's temple like a promise. Long before I was timber, I was testimony.

II. The slow betrayal

I confess, before I say another word, to a small vanity: I was here first. I stood on this Earth while your kind still crouched, wordless, in the tall grass of some unremembered evening, before you had a name for the sky or a word for yourselves. I built the very air that first filled your lungs, molecule by unhurried molecule. I laid down the soil beneath your first uncertain footprint. I gentled the climate into something a hairless, fragile creature could actually survive. You did not arrive into an empty house.

You arrived into a home I had spent millions of years furnishing, and for a long, long while, you had the grace to behave like a guest.

You came first with nothing but hands, fire, and hunger, and it suited you to love me. You slept in the hollow of my shade. You learned, by trial and a great deal of dying, which of my fruits fed you and which would kill you, and you traced the paths of the animals who lived among my branches to learn where to hunt. Whole peoples made their entire lives inside me and never once thought to leave: the Yanomami of the Amazon, the Baka and Mbuti of the Congo's deep green heart, the Penan of Borneo's vanishing interior, the Adivasi and tribal communities scattered like seeds through India's forests. They were not visitors passing through my rooms. They were, like the fungus and the fig-wasp, simply another verse in the same long poem, and what they knew of me - which bark could break a fever, which root could stop a wound, which fruit could carry a family through a hard season - was a library deeper than anything you have since thought to write down. For these communities, I was never merely shelter or larder. I was identity itself - their songs were my songs, their gods often wore my leaves, their very names for themselves were frequently born from what grew around them, so that to lose me was never simply to lose a resource, but to lose the ground on which an entire people's sense of who they were had always stood.

But a guest, given enough time, begins to imagine he owns the house. Slowly, so slowly I almost did not notice the turning; you stopped living within me and began, instead, to clear space around yourselves. A burned patch for a first crude field. A permanent hut, then a village, then a town - and a town, once born, is a hungry infant that never stops asking for more: more field, more firewood, more room to become whatever it is deciding to become.

Still, for a long while, I could keep pace with your appetite. I could heal what you cleared, given time, the way a forest always could.

And in fairness, I confess I helped you dream bigger than the shore you were born on. You cut me into planks and bent me into hulls, and raised me again as masts to catch the wind you could not otherwise hold. Without me, there was no ship to carry Magellan around a world he could not yet prove was round, no vessel to bear the spice traders across the Indian Ocean, no wooden hull beneath the sailors who first mapped coastlines no one from their village had ever seen. Every voyage of discovery you are so proud of was, quite literally, built from my body, floating on water because I agreed, one more time, to become something other than myself. I do not regret it. I only ask that you remember it, on the day you decide I am worth nothing more than the cost of cutting me down.

Then came the day you handed each other something colder than fire.

III. Iron, steel, and the sound that would not stop

The axe was my first true wound, and I remember it exactly - not as metaphor, but as memory. A single man, with a single blade, could bring down in an hour what had taken me a hundred years of drought and monsoon to become. And yet it was, mercifully, slow work. One tree. One arm growing tired. One forest that could, in its patient way, still outrun you.

Then came the saw, and the work grew lighter in your hands and heavier in mine. Whole stretches of Europe and Asia thinned within a few centuries beneath nothing more sophisticated than a saw and a cart. And then - and I want you to sit with this, because I think you have never quite let yourself - you built the sawmill, and turned my dying into an assembly line. I was no longer carried away whole and mourned, tree by individual tree. I was dragged in by the truckload, stripped, and sliced into standard planks within the hour, my two hundred rings - my two hundred years of memory - reduced to lumber before the sap had even finished weeping from the cut. The sawmill did not simply speed up the killing. It made it anonymous. It made it, god forgive you, profitable.

But nothing - nothing in two hundred years of watching - prepared me for the power saw. A machine that once required a full day's labour from a man's whole body could now fell me in minutes, requiring nothing from you but the pull of a trigger. Bulldozers followed like scavengers. Logging trucks followed the bulldozers. Roads bit into places no human sole had touched in ten thousand years. What had taken centuries to clear in your grandfather's time could now be erased in a single season. The Amazon, Borneo, the old cathedral-forests of North America, the deep woodlands of Central Africa - all of them, ancient before your species drew its first breath, began vanishing at a speed the Earth itself had never once been asked to survive.

A conversation I was never meant to hear

It was on one such night, in a forest half its former self, that I overheard them - the ones who had always lived beneath and around me, gathered in the clearing my own falling had made.

The old owl spoke first, her voice thin as a torn leaf. "My hollow is gone," she said. "Three broods I raised there, and now I sleep where the hawks can see me." A mother langur clutched her infant, her voice cracking like old bark. "They did not ask us," she said. "Not the ants, not the fig-wasps who live nowhere else on Earth. They simply came, and decided."

The tiger spoke next, grief still carrying the low thunder that once made this forest fall silent. "I have walked forty miles looking for ground that still smells like ground," he said. "My cubs will inherit a corridor so thin I could see across it in daylight." An old elephant matriarch said what none had dared: "We are being erased for something we never asked for, by a creature who calls this progress." A small sparrow, perched where a branch of mine used to be, said the truest thing of all: "They do not even know our names. How can you mourn what you never learned to call by name?"

I could not answer them. I had no tongue to tell them I felt every word land in me like another cut. I only stood there and let their grief move through my branches like wind through an instrument it did not build. If a tree could weep before witnesses, that night, at last, I did.

IV. The wound and the warning

Everything strange now happening to your climate is simply this conversation, continued - the bill arriving, at last, at your own door. I was your foundation, and a house does not stay standing once its foundation has been sold for scrap.

You discovered a hunger no other creature on this Earth has ever carried: not the honest hunger of a tiger, who kills what he needs and stops, but an appetite that clears a forest not because it must, but because it can be sold, and clears the next one for the very same reason, and never once, in all its history, has paused to ask itself whether it has finally had enough. Hear this now, plainly, because it is not a threat but simple, unglamorous biology: my death was never going to happen in isolation. I am the root system beneath your own survival, whether or not you have ever cared to notice the resemblance.

When I fall, your air thins. Your rivers, once cold and constant, run dry or run wild - the mountain valley I told you of, once green as a held breath, now lies stripped to grey rock, its river a cracked bed for half the year and a violent, silt-black flood for the other half, the mahseer gone from stretch after stretch, the otters left without a single bank to call home. This is not a warning of some distant future. It is the present tense, in valley after valley where I have already been cleared.

I cannot shout. I have no voice, no vote, no hands to raise a placard in your streets. But do not, I beg you, mistake my silence for peace. Under every blade that has ever touched me, I have shouted, in the only language a tree is given - the splitting groan of fibre, a shudder running the length of every last branch, sap weeping uselessly from a wound trying, and failing, to close itself.

I have cried, in drought-cracked bark and in rings pressed thin where a generous year should have been wide and easy. I have bled - that is, quite literally, what sap and resin have always been. How much I have shouted, how much I have wept, how much I have bled, you have simply never cared to notice, because none of it arrives in a register you were ever taught to listen for. I am not being cruel to you now, in this reckoning of storms and floods and rising heat. I am only presenting, at long last, the bill for what has already, quietly, irreversibly, been spent.

V. What remains, and what must be chosen

I will not pretend that no one has heard me. Some of you have. The World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Rainforest Alliance, the United Nations' REDD+ programme - all labour, however imperfectly, to keep what remains of me standing rather than felled. Forest Departments send their rangers out at dawn to walk the long, underfunded boundaries of reserves that are far too vast for far too few hands, and still they walk them. Indigenous communities remain, again and again, my most faithful guardians, whenever the law finally troubles itself to recognize what they have always known.

But good intentions, I must tell you honestly, are not enough, and there is one habit in particular that breaks whatever passes for my heart. A politician marks an election with a sapling and a smile for the cameras. A film star, a cricketer, plants one for an Environment Day campaign, and a hashtag trends for an afternoon. A celebrity couple plants one to commemorate an anniversary that will outlast the tree by decades. The applause lasts a minute. The photograph lasts forever, immortal in a way I am rarely permitted to be. And the tree itself, more often than any of you would like to admit, lasts a single dry season, because no one - not one soul among the smiling crowd - ever returns to water it. To plant me for a photograph is not to protect me. It is to stage my funeral in advance, and call the staging a celebration.

What must happen now is not complicated, only difficult: protect the old forests that remain before you plant a single new tree, for an ancient forest cannot be conjured back in a human lifetime, however sincere the shovel. Grant indigenous communities real, enforceable authority over the land their ancestors have always known better than any surveyor. Prosecute illegal logging as the theft it plainly is. Fund your forest departments as though the forests actually mattered to the nation's future, not merely to its postcards. And let every tree that is planted become someone's named responsibility for years afterward - not an afternoon's photograph, but a decade's quiet promise.

I have stood upon this Earth since long before your ancestors first stood upright upon it. I have been the chinar that sheltered a lover's whispered promise, the cherry tree that turned a hillside pink for a girl who never lived to see it bloom again, the willow that bent, grieving, over a grave. I was in your poems and your prayers long before I was ever in your firewood, and in two hundred years of watching I have never once understood how the same species can hold both truths so tenderly in one hand and so carelessly in the other.

So hear this now, plainly, from something that may not live long enough to write another line: if you let me go, you do not merely lose timber, or shade, or a stray line of verse. You lose the last cool morning beneath a chinar for a child not yet born to feel it. You lose a cherry blossom festival that becomes, one bewildering year, nothing but an empty hillside and a confused, wandering crowd. You lose the sound of a river a grandmother once described, in aching detail, to a grandchild who will now never hear it for themselves - because the river will be gone, and so, by then, will she, and so, not long after, will I. No photograph, however lovingly composed, and no poem, however finely made, can call a silenced forest back from its silence.

I am not asking you to save me because I am useful to you, though I have never once, in all my long life, stopped being useful. I am asking you to save me because somewhere in you - in every love song hummed beneath my branches, in every pressed leaf folded quietly into a letter - you have always already known exactly what stands to be lost. Do not let the last chinar burn only in a poem. Do not let the last cherry blossom exist only in a photograph, admired by people who never once heard the owl, the langur, the tiger, or the small brown sparrow who asked, that night, the only question that has ever really mattered: how can you mourn what you never learned to call by name?

Let me keep growing - not as a memory you write tenderly about afterward, but as a living thing you chose, while there was still time enough left to choose, to let live. (The contributor is Principal, DIET, Roing, Lower Dibang Valley)