Ballygunge Place: A Calcuttan who witnessed the daylight slaughter of a tree on Thursday and protested in vain recounts what she saw and how helpless she felt.

As I was leaving my home at Ballygunge Place around 7.30am to drop my daughter at her school, I noticed two men hacking at the branches of an ashwattha tree that stood on the pavement across the street, diagonally opposite my house. I thought of asking what the matter was, but stopped myself.

My daughter was already late, and the ambitious mother in me, more interested in furthering the interests of her child than in the prospects of a tree, left for the school. I eased my conscience on the way by thinking that the tree cannot be cut down like that; maybe they are trimming the branches, which is less unbearable. Otherwise, someone from the neighbourhood will intervene.

When I returned half an hour later, the tree was gone. Only its large stump remained. The rest of it, its tall branches and a load of leaves, had been hurriedly packed into a waiting truck. Some leaves remained scattered on the ground.

The comparison was inevitable. This was murder, and the body was being hushed away.

In any case, the sight of a felled tree can give you that same sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that comes from seeing a dismembered body.

One among two residents from a building close by - the tree had stood on the pavement adjoining 21/1 Ballygunge Place - asked the workers, now busily removing the small branches and the leaves, if they had obtained permission to cut the tree down or were carrying any papers to show. The men knew nothing. After a little bit of probing, they said that someone called "Bishu" had done it.

We wanted to meet "Bishu". A gentleman, reported to be a resident of the neighbourhood, arrived, answering to the name of Bishu. He said that the tree had been "rotting" and had to be cut down; he was doing it on order from " oportola (higher-ups)". He would not give names, but kept implying that the order had come from people more powerful than him.

What about the papers? The West Bengal Trees (Protection and Conservation in Non-Forest Areas) Act 2006 bars felling of trees without the forest department's permission. Permission is given only after those planning to cut trees undertake to plant five for every tree felled.

Bishu promised us that he would show us the official permission by 11am. He also promised to plant five trees on the spot; one of them would be a bakul tree, with high branches. Then he disappeared. And so did we.

I felt a little snubbed, as I always do when I take up some such cause. No authority other than the Calcutta Municipal Corporation can fell a tree in a public place. The local councillor, Sudarshana Mukherjee of the Trinamul Congress, said she had informed the police.

But even as the day unfolded, and cars poured into the street, as did the smoke and the honking, the area resumed its familiar, everyday look. The spot where the tree stood had been perfectly cleared. Except for the stump, there was no evidence that the tree existed. It was just another tree, around which only rickshaw-pullers or vagrants gathered, and which was causing some obstruction to "someone up there". Who, we will probably never know.

I somehow wish I had stayed back in the morning to ask the men what they were doing to the tree, at the risk of my daughter being very late for school.