Encroachment

The black grille of my window cuts the whitish-blue sky and its soft, cottony clouds into triangles and rectangles. Airplanes, steely, glinting in the sun, pass these co-ordinates. An occasional black crow zooms by.
My window used to usher in a jamun tree into my bedroom. Its branches bent with unripe and ripe jamuns in summer. We spent many a summer afternoon reaching out and plucking these fruits, filling baskets. The tree sprouted new purple leaves in monsoon which turned green during the year. This monsoon, there are only sepulcharal branches. The tree is picked to its bones by our housing society. Punished for dropping dead leaves and ripe fruit in the compound. The middle branches were cut. The lonely leaves at the top tried in vain to nourish roots 30 feet below. They dropped, exhausted. The spectre is white now; visited by some squirrel on her travels. The birds who nested here have abandoned it for spaces in concrete. Who is encroaching whom?