HARIPUR: The uprooting of a 400-year-old banyan tree for construction of a road have saddened the residents of Mughalabad village.

They told this scribe that British authorities used to give Rs5 per month as pension to its owner. He received the money till his last breath, they added.

According to the residents of village Mughalabad Mohra Muhamdu, their ancestors had planted the banyan plant some 400 years ago and its grown-up trunk and branches served the people for decades to take a siesta under it during hard labour in their agricultural fields.

“My grandfather died at the age of 100 plus while my father lived for 80 years, who used to share the background of the tree with us,” said Babu Younas, a retired Pesco employee.

He said that it was the only tree that lived for a long time providing shadow to the villagers. He said that he was one of the lucky villagers, whose roofs of the houses were covered by its shadow, making them to feel as if they were sitting in an air-conditioned room.

He said that his father told him that the tree used to be called Pension Wali Bohr (local name of Banyan tree) that was entitled to Rs5 per month pension till the partition.

He said that his father told him that during a hot summer day in 1886, a British deputy commissioner of Abbottabad, whose name he did not remember, was on an official visit to Mankraey and Sera-i-Nehmat Khan villages when he stopped near Mughalabad village and spent half an hour under the shadow of the tree.

“He was so impressed by the cool and soothing shadow of the tree that he called its owner Bahadur Baba and fixed Rs5 prize as monthly pension for the tree, asking him to take good care of the tree,” he said.

The owner, he said, used to draw Rs5 from Haripur Post Office till the last breath of his life as monthly pension.

However, it stopped when he died but the tree continued to oblige the area people with its shadow till a couple of days ago when a contractor uprooted it for making way for a two kilometres-long road project.

Mr Younas said that locals had to give go-ahead to the contractor as there was no option left with them. “Either we had to abandon the road project, which was also of great importance in the given development era or protect the centuries-old village’s heritage,” he said.

Waheed, another villager, said that the villagers were in a quandary about whether to have a road for their future generations or to protect Pension Wali Bohr. “Wish for development defeated our love for cultural-cum-environmental heritage,” he added.

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2021