India, Jan. 12 -- In the first year of moving to Mumbai, the mangroves made a slow, unassuming but distinct claim on me. Each time I encountered them, I learnt something particular about them. First, the mangroves were part of the everyday life of this city. Often when returning on the metro to Mira Road, where I live, I could see the golden spire of the Pagoda rise up from the vast bed of the mangroves near Borivali. That was my signal that I was nearing home. The mangroves gave a sense of return, a minor welcome back at the end of the day. The second thing I learnt was contradictory. The mangroves were threatened by that very everyday life of the city of which they were a part. Loitering on my scooter once, crossing magnificent hull-shaped houses near Carter Road, I noticed the thin slice of mangroves that dot its western coast where the walkers and joggers and reel-makers and the canoodlers hang out. Just when I was about to romanticize this bit of urban scenery, my tendency was quickly checked. Almost every branch of the mangroves here was hung with strings after strings of plastic bags. As if to prevent our poison from entering the sea, the mangroves (behaving like gods) had drunk it themselves. Each of their branches bore the weight of our refuse. A poet could have seen a contradictory image here of wish threads that people tie in shrines to ask for minor gifts such as job promotions or reunions with lovers or timely comeuppances for nasty relatives. But the thousand plastic bags hung on mangrove branches - what wish could they hold but a death wish that we as a city have called upon ourselves. As time passed, the mangroves met me again and again. The next thing I learnt about them was how they were also a home. To a slew of non-human lives, crustaceans, and fish, and birds. Once returning to Mumbai via the Trans Harbour Link, I noticed again, in the distance, those familiar fluffs of green, the same resilient forests of the city's salty coasts, growing in the tricky intervals between land and sea. As the car sped on the bridge, I found it difficult to focus but I thought I noticed an adjacent scattering of small white and pink dots. Flamingoes. It was the first time I had seen them in the city. The fourth learning, then, was inevitable and one which I was hurtling towards all along: how heartbreakingly beautiful the mangroves were. Recently, on a family trip to the same Pagoda in north Mumbai, I returned home via the Borivali jetty. On the Gorai side, the jetty is fed by a slim road that cuts through the mangroves. I had never seen such a sun-dappled surface in my life. Below its leathery green leaves, a surreal world of light and shadow materialized on either side of me. No photograph can capture what it is to be under such foliage. The shifting light was as crazily menacing as it was heartbreakingly beautiful. And beautiful, afterall, is the right word for the mangroves. Along with vital. Along with life-line. Along with armour. How else can mangroves be understood and described? Home of herons and kingfishers, kites and cormorants. Floodguards of a fragile city that knows the danger of rising sea levels. Guardians of an island city that keep its coastlines intact and thriving. Giant wind and wave breaker. Monumental air purifier that sucks four times the carbon dioxide than other kinds of forests. Nest and home, shelter and playground for mullets and tiger shrimps, mudskippers and pomfrets, fiddler and swimmer crabs. Kitchens of the sea, nurseries for schools after schools of estuarine and marine life on whom the lifeworlds of the fishing communities depend, those first inhabitants of the city who do know better, who have seen their occupation threatened each passing year, their coastal landscapes built upon and altered beyond recognition within a single generation, and their fish haul shrink dramatically in size. But heartbreaking is also the right word. When a court grants permission for a coastal road to run from Versova to Bhayander, allowing the felling of 45,000 mangrove trees, how do we begin to understand such a decision? What choice have we made as a people? Is this not a deathwish made real by those plastic threads we tied? The answer is clear. Don't cut the mangroves. Let them live so they can let us live. If at all we are concerned about the movement of people, then find a way to further increase the frequency of local and metro trains that already ply this stretch. Or do we think people of our city move only in cars that need sterile stretches of grey roads to move about. Or better, ask them to step out of the cars and take the local. The mangroves will approve....