Green was never zoned
Urban Bystander
They came for the trees again last week, not with axes, no, that would have been honest, but with officialese and cement mixers. Machinery that hums like spreadsheets and crunches like development proposals.
This time, it was an ancient peepal, near the curve where F-6 forgets it was once forest.
I knew that tree. Its trunk held rainwater and whispered secrets. Black and red threads still clung to its limbs, prayers from those who had loved too deeply or lost too early. A wandering saint once sat under this mighty tree for forty nights, healing a child, cursing a landlord, and vanishing like all inconvenient truths.
No one remembers when it began its watch. Only that it stood vigil over lovers who never met on time, children who played among its roots, and pigeons who held council on its branches and never resolved anything.
And then, last Tuesday, it was gone. Turned to mulch. Replaced by a signboard that read: Coming Soon – Tandoori Republic: Where Fire Meets Flavour.
Alas! Across Islamabad, this green purge continues. Trees fall daily, banyans bowing out, kachnars chopped mid-bloom, amaltas felled just before their golden spill. The Capital Development Authority, ever efficient, issues permissions like horoscopes: vague, hopeful, immune to logic. Want a plaza in a greenbelt? Call it “Beautification.” Need to erase a park? Try “Mixed Use.” Forest into a wedding marquee? Easy, rename it “Eco Farm.”
Since 1990, Islamabad has lost over 2,800 hectares of tree cover. Between 2000 and 2020, green space shrank from 656 to 420 km². In return: novelty milkshakes, glass-fronted plazas, and AC exhaust pouring onto whimpering shrubs.
Meanwhile, we complain about heat waves from air-conditioned cafés, compounds, and cars. Roasting ourselves gently, lovingly, with our own breath.
On one of my wanderings, I found myself in Ratta Hotar, where a banyan still stands like a quiet refusal. In its arms, a parliament of birds gathered. An old myna whispered stories — of a Sheesham that kept a girl’s diary, a Dhak that bore bees and a kiss, an Amaltas heavy with red threads tied by mothers with nowhere else to pray.
Then came the breeze, the kind that travels across oceans and remembers what we forget. It carried the voice of a Hornbeam from Regent’s Park:
“They cherish us here. In London, we are mapped. In Paris, counted like citizens. In Hong Kong, preserved beside steel. In Tokyo, roots are protected beneath glass. In Singapore, we grow into buildings. And in Islamabad?” The banyan didn’t answer. Just swayed, not from wind, but resignation.
I stood there, holding a leaf that had landed on my shoulder, uninvited, but oddly familiar. Its veins ran green still, though the tree it came from no longer existed.
It didn’t speak. But it didn’t have to. Because here’s what no one puts in their Environmental Impact Assessments: Every tree felled in Islamabad takes one sentence with it, a story unspoken, a memory uprooted, a breath undone. We used to build cities around shade. Now we build cities, and the shade files a complaint. So if you walk past a stump this week, don’t just look. Listen. You might hear the last sigh of a banyan, or the hush of an Amaltas still holding on to a thread. And if the wind catches just right, you may hear it too, the quiet voice of something that was once home, whispering from the earth beneath your feet: “I was here. You forgot. And I remembered anyway.”
