An unsettling mediation on trees, ecological grief, democracy & compromises modern man has to make

Absurdity: The banyan in our lane would run on a unity platform. All arms, no sleeves. Grandmother of scaffolds. She’d host rallies without moving, just shaking her air-roots like tassels. “I pledge shade,” she’d say, voice like a cupboard full of ironed saris. The pigeons would boo. The crows would pretend to be press. Squirrels: opposition bench, always chewing.

​

Sincerity: Last summer a worker cut three branches because they scraped the apartment wall. I watched from my balcony. Didn’t speak. I drank cold water and told myself: safety, maintenance, permits. The branches bled milk. That’s not metaphor. Sap made a slow white tear down the bark and I went inside because the refrigerator hummed louder than my spine.

​

Absurdity: The pines are libertarians, obviously. Vertical ambition. No tolerance for leaning. Vote for fewer duties, more sky. They would filibuster with needles and call it minimal government. The eucalyptus? Immigrants with a passport stamped by drought. They don’t ask, they roar up from poor soil like a fast rumor. If the trees could vote, eucalyptus would push for open borders for wind.

​

Sincerity: I sign petitions. I click. I donate money once, twice, and then mute the emails because they arrive like a hailstorm and I’m tired of the weather in my inbox. A friend says, “Come to the march.” I say, “I have a deadline.” I say, “I’ll amplify.” I say, “My shoes aren’t good for hours.” I can make a sentence into a fence. It’s easy. You watch me climb it, and I wave from the top like a tourist.

​

Absurdity: Coconut palms would insist on ranked-choice voting because they know the value of height, of sequence. First wind, then sway, then thud. They’d tally by sound: the soft applause of fronds, the hard decision of a falling fruit. Mango trees? Single-issue voters: blossoms first. Always blossoms. A mango manifesto is fifteen pages of fragrance and one sticky signature.

​

Sincerity: I once threw a paper cup into the wrong bin and thought, “Not my city, not my street.” This is private shame wearing a white lid. I think about it when the municipal truck groans through morning, collecting what I deny. I know the smell of denial: a warm mix of sugar and rot. I breathe it, then search for cinnamon in the kitchen as if spice can rebrand guilt.

​

Absurdity: The Neem in front of the clinic runs a quiet, stubborn campaign: universal healthcare for skin. Bitter pills for free. Every leaflet shaped like a leaf, stamped with tiny bitter truths. “Your body is a petition,” Neem says, “signed in rashes.” The campus jacarandas vote aesthetic bloc, purple confetti everywhere, low turnout on rainy days. They’re dramatic. They believe policy should match their bloom calendar. They’re not wrong.

​

Sincerity:  Tree names. I do not know most of them. That one. Yeah. Like a menu item. Can’t even say it right. Book still sealed. Has drawings. Too many. Every page looks like it’s judging. I think—no, I know—I should know this already. So I don’t open it. Coward move. Whatever. The book sits beside cookbooks I also avoid. I don’t cook; I reheat. I don’t study; I scroll. The phone warms my palm. The palm outside refuses my apology.

​

Absurdity: The banyan wins a local election. Her first act: outlaw the phrase “prime real estate.” Second act: eminent domain for shadows. She takes back afternoons from parking lots. Children laugh under the new law. Vendors sell lime soda with salt rims and nobody faints at noon. The banyan’s cabinet includes a bored hibiscus (culture minister), a rubber plant with a talent for budget surplus, and one bougainvillea who only speaks when the wind edits her sentence.

​

Sincerity: A developer wrapped a corrugated metal fence around a vacant lot I used to cut across. The fence had pictures of trees printed on it, a forest as advertisement. The real ground inside went bald. A man in a hard hat smoked where the banyan saplings had been. I kept walking, late for nothing. The pictures were high-res; the silence, not.

​

Absurdity: If the trees could vote, ballots would be soil-soft, not paper. Ink would be rain. The booths: hollows, cool and honest. Observers: ants with clipboards, very strict, have seen everything. Campaign finance: measured in birds. You want more funding? Make more nests. Lobbyists: vines, of course—whispery, clingy, always “just passing through” and then suddenly there’s a trellis. Scandal: an oak accepts an envelope of fertilizer. Denies it. Grows suspiciously lush.

​

Sincerity: I keep the AC at twenty-four and tell myself I’m good. “We do our part,” I say to the empty room like I’m being interviewed by a gentle god. During heat waves, I fold my conscience into the remote control. Thumb presses mercy. The compressor answers with a righteous roar and a little drip that sounds like approval. I sleep cold and dream of green votes I never cast because there was no queue, just a button.

​

Absurdity: The trees form parties: Canopy Coalition, Bark Bloc, Root & Branch. Manifesto language is weirdly precise: promises about mycelial bandwidth, trans-pollination rights, equitable cloud distribution. Slogans printed on seed packets—eat your future, throw away the slogan. On debate night, the moderator is a wind that refuses to commit to any direction. The candidates sway, then hold. The sycamore gets cut off: too many anecdotes about bark exfoliation. The cedar speaks once, smells like old wardrobes, wins by nostalgia.

​

Sincerity: When I was eight, I used to press my ear to the trunk near our school and pretend I could hear the sap. Maybe I did. You can’t prove I didn’t. The sound was slow, like a pencil learning a new alphabet. I stopped doing it when the other kids laughed. Shame is a drought you learn to maintain. No one told me to water it. I did that myself.

​

Absurdity: Policy proposal: every road must detour once a day to avoid a tree, just to teach drivers humility. Highways will zigzag at noon, commuters will swear, and then, strangely, everyone will calm down by three because the shade adjusted their blood. Another proposal: annual rings become ID. “Show us your age,” the guard says to the teak. The teak smirks. “I’m older than your map.”

​

Sincerity: I recycle. Sometimes. When it’s convenient. Talk big. Plastic bags, oceans, turtles, whatever. Preachy voice. Everyone nods. Then blueberries. Plastic coffin. Need them now. They look holy under the fridge light. Later—box empty. Feels like it started it. Like it betrayed me first. Sure. Fine. Blame the box. Contradiction looks bad in selfies. I add a filter. I say, “Balance,” like I’m not standing on a seesaw that tips toward comfort, every single time.

​

Absurdity: Election day. The neem arrives early with a list. The banyan arrives with everyone else wrapped in her fringe. The coconut palms cannot fit in the booth; they vote by proxy, send in falling votes that thud, bruise one official’s foot, apologies. The jacarandas shed purple onto the ballot, which the ants count as enthusiastic, not invalid. The tamarind casts a sour vote, lick-sticky, complains about all these children shaking her promises for free.

​

Sincerity: My city floods. Then bakes. Then floods. A television man stands in knee-deep water and says, “Unprecedented,” like he’s discovering the concept of again. A train stops under a metal bridge and turns into a sauna. We keep going. We post. We text hearts to each other and call it care. I know the names of restaurants better than the names of birds. I can tell you five delivery apps and zero wind directions. This is not confession as performance; it’s inventory. My fault drawer is full. I open it and take a number.

​

Absurdity: Trees start arguing about who counts as a citizen. The potted ficus in office reception wants a vote, cites long-term service, says she listened to so many budgets she deserves a say. The teak plantation says, “We were planted for profit, not polity,” but secretly wants the national anthem rewritten in a lower key. The wild peepal laughs, full of small gods and local ghosts, tries to enfranchise monsoon.

​

Sincerity: A boy writes “Save Trees” on cardboard and stands at the signal. He holds it like it’s heavier than it looks. I lower my window two centimeters and nod. He nods back. We both go nowhere for a minute, which is something, or nothing in traffic clothing. The light changes. We leave each other in the rearview, tiny and doomed and ordinary.

​

Absurdity: The results: a hung parliament, obviously. Coalitions forming under rainfall. The banyan refuses a motorcade, insists on pedestrians. Press conference: a woodpecker taps rude questions; the minister for Roots explains supply chains while chewing loam. Everybody boos a chainsaw. Bougainvillea throws a tantrum and a trellis. It’s fine. It’s government. It’s messy mulch.

​

Sincerity: I am not neutral. I am tired. I am comfortable. I am complicit. I plant one sapling on a Sunday like a selfie with the future and then forget to water it for three days because life got loud. The sapling droops into a question mark and I answer with a bottle. It lives. Most things don’t. News arrives like hail again. I consider the march. I pick shoes. I step outside. The street is a long throat, asking.

​

Absurdity: Final motion on the floor: grant voting rights to wind. The trees argue. “The wind is not rooted,” says pine. “Exactly,” says banyan, “neither are your children.” The vote passes. Ballots lift like startled birds. The wind marks them with fingerprints made of dust, carries them everywhere, loses none. The ants applaud, six-handed.

​

Sincerity: I put my ear to the nearest trunk. People stare. I’m older than their laughter now. The sound is still there. Slow alphabet. My head hums its small agreement. I promise—quietly, ridiculous, not enough—to show up more often than I don’t. A thin vow. A human one. It won’t fix anything. It might keep a sapling from becoming a question mark. It might not. I hold the promise anyway. Like a ballot, folded. Like it matters. Like it does.