Mumbai loves naming things after men. Chowks, roads, flyovers, even the odd traffic island. The families feel happy, and rightly so. But when did you last give directions using one of those names? Or write it on an envelope? Exactly. The autowallah has never heard of them either. Once the ribbon is cut, the honour is left to fend for itself. Perhaps it is time for a different kind of legacy, one that rewards those who nurture and protect, rather than those who have been remembered.Take a leaf from the sea. Every new ship gets a godmother, a woman whose name stays tied to the vessel, from Norway’s coastal ferries to Britain’s great liners. The US Navy takes it furthest: its sponsors are told the role is a lifelong relationship with the ship and her crew. Caroline Kennedy was nine when she christened the carrier USS John F. Kennedy in 1967. In 2019, she christened its successor. Captains rotate. Sailors come and go. The sponsor stays.Mumbai has residents that have outlived far more captains than any ship. Its banyans and rain trees are a century or two old. One of our favourites stands beside a goalpost in the back garden of Campion School, where schoolboys have ducked into its shade between classes for decades. Trees like it predate most of the buildings around them and will outlast most of the officials who sign off on what happens near them. They have silently watched the city grow, its neighbourhoods change, generations come and go. They have seen it all and said nothing, which, in this city, is a rare virtue. Yet not one of them has anyone whose job is to speak for it.The state has already done the harder half. Since a 2021 amendment to Maharashtra’s urban tree law, any tree estimated to be 50 years or older counts as a heritage tree. Local tree authorities must run a census every five years and count these trees separately, and a proposal to fell one older than 200 years must go up to the state-level authority. Good. But the law does not name a person who answers for a particular tree when a felling notice is pinned to its trunk at short notice, or when a contractor’s trench cuts through its roots.Mumbai is a city that is constantly rebuilding itself. Old buildings make way for towers, open spaces shrink, and roads are widened in the name of progress. In this relentless race to modernise, trees often become the first casualties. We celebrate a new flyover or a glass-and-steel tower, but rarely pause to acknowledge the magnificent old trees that give a neighbourhood its character and shade its streets. Perhaps we need to recognise that a city’s progress should also be measured by what it chooses to preserve.So here is our proposition. Begin with Mumbai’s 40 or 50 most significant trees. For each one, appoint a mother, and say so in public, on a small plaque at the base: “[Name] is the mother of this tree.” Then give the title a job. She is told when the tree is pruned or when work is planned near it. When anyone applies to cut it, the relevant authority hears her before it decides. That is the whole power: a right to be heard, attached to a named person, for as long as she holds the role. Any citizen can already object to a felling notice, if they happen to see it in time. A mother would hear before the notice goes up, and the authority would have to answer her by name.Whimsical? Less than it sounds. In 2013, Melbourne gave its city trees ID numbers and email addresses so residents could report damaged branches. People wrote them thousands of love letters instead, and the councillor in charge said the scheme had given citizens a far greater sense of ownership of the urban forest. Attach a living thing a name and people start to treat it as someone’s. Attach a person, and that care finds a voice.Why mothers, and why women? Look at our street signs. Mumbai’s honours have gone overwhelmingly to men, as rewards for what they have already done. A mother’s role would go to a woman in the middle of her working life, and she would keep it only through what she does for the tree and the street around it. The idea is also deeply Indian. In our culture, the mother has long stood for nurture, protection and continuity. We call our rivers ‘maiya’ and our earth ‘mata.’ Of course the tree needs one too. In 1974, the women of Reni village in the Garhwal hills put their arms around the trees, and Chipko gave the world its image of who stands between a forest and a saw.The obvious objection, and we can already hear the pencils being sharpened: this will become patronage, a plaque for the well connected. The design can guard against that. Let residents of the ward propose names. Let the first term run three years. Renew only based on her record—did she raise the alarm when the tree was threatened, is the street better tended because of her presence? A mother who never turns up loses the title, and the plaque comes down. Because the title can be lost, it will be taken seriously, by the mother and by the officials answerable to her.Trees are the right place to start because everyone can see them and nobody can replace them in a human lifetime. The same logic could later reach an old building facing the wrecking ball, or a stretch of promenade. A mother would hold no veto. She would only have to be consulted. And a city that must look a named person in the eye before it demolishes something tends to think twice.A chowk sign is unveiled once and then fades into the traffic. A ship’s sponsor is still turning up for her vessel half a century later. Mumbai has handed out plenty of the first kind of honour. Our oldest trees deserve the second. The tree by the goalpost at Campion has outlasted every captain the school football team ever had. Surely it can have a mother.
