It is true that many had come to think of the casuarina grove as an eyesore, but the credit for actually making this declaration goes to our municipal commissioner, F. X. Fernandez. When he won the election and announced that his first task as public servant would be to destroy the grove to build a park, everyone applauded him. He proclaimed it was just the first step in his elaborate plans to transform our town into a modern city.

Municipal Commissioner F. X. Fernandez’s enterprising nature ensured that the grove was soon destroyed and the park built. In doing so, he found an everlasting place in people’s hearts. Asan took leave of this world before witnessing the grove’s wondrous—or I should say hideous—transformation into a municipal park, but I got to see it.

It is still fresh in my mind—watching from the side as the casuarina trees toppled. My friend and classmate Chakrapani Rao was the one who dragged me there forcefully to watch it happen. The trees fell down one after the other, their trunks buckling and screeching. In the shock and impact of the branches crashing and shattering against the ground, the tree would rise up slightly in the air before falling back on the earth with a thud. The place looked like the corpse-ridden battlefield of Kurukshetra after the Mahabharata war. The pathetic sight of a lone tree lying on the ground reminded me of the loneliness and misery endured by a widow. I stood there and watched it all, but I was distressed.

I kept thinking of Asan. He had described with pride how he had cunningly intervened to save the tamarind tree from being cut down. How painful it would have been for him to witness hundreds of axes working in unison to fell a tree a minute! There was a difference, though. This time it was not one man’s action. It was an order from the highest office of the government! A government that had been elected by the people for the people. In such an arrangement, where the instincts were embedded in everyone’s pulse, who could challenge whom? Even so, if Asan were alive, he would have tied up his veshti and jumped into the fray for a fight, not realizing how much the times had changed.