The title promises a celebration, but the poem opens with an accusation. "Did you know? / They are cutting down the old trees" sounds less like a tribute than a tap on someone's shoulder. A speaker who has walked under these trees for forty years turns to a well-off listener, addressed only as "sir," and tells him what his comfort costs. The central idea is that shade is not decoration. For many people it is the thing that makes a city bearable, and those who ride past in comfort never see what is lost when it goes.
The poem is built on repetition rather than rhyme. It is free verse with no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, and its short lines sound like speech, as if the speaker is stopping the listener mid-stride. Three stanzas begin with "You wouldn't know, sir," and the phrase works like a drumbeat. On the surface it is polite, even humble, but each repetition sharpens it. "Sir" starts as deference and ends as an indictment, because each time it reminds us that the listener has chosen not to know.
The imagery sets two ways of moving through the world against each other. The driver is "cocooned in your air-conditioned car." A cocoon is sealed and padded, and nothing gets in. The line break also isolates "In contentment" so that the phrase hangs there, and "contentment" echoes "cantonment" a line earlier, as if the two words were naturally linked. The walker's experience, by contrast, is full of alternation: "On and off, not everyday / On and off, light to shade / From hot to cool / From peace to strife and back." The repeated "on and off" mimics the rhythm of walking in and out of sunlight. By the end of the sequence the shade has become more than weather. It is relief from the "strife" of life itself.
The third and fourth stanzas turn the trees into a community. The details are small and exact: sellers of "Seeds, cigarettes and fruit juice," and an old person "Wiping their faces with a fraying piece of towel." The word "Resting," sits alone on its line, so the reader gets a brief pause too. Then the list widens: "the crows and sparrows / The squirrels, the kites / The tramps, the dogs / The beggars and / The likes of me." People and animals share one sentence, and the speaker puts himself last, among the overlooked. This can be read as sad, but it also makes a point about fairness. The tree gives its shade to all of them equally, which is more than the listener does. The word "lives," repeated in "lives about which you never wanted to know" and "Lives, sir, you really wouldn't care about," insists that these are people with lives, not nuisances on a pavement.
The last stanza shifts from memory to warning. "If you stepped on to the tarmac at noon / From shade to sun / You would feel the heat." The speaker asks, "Do you feel the heat, sir?" and the question is both literal and moral. Without the trees the road really will be hotter, but the poem suggests a larger reckoning too, in "the day everything comes to a halt." That phrase is deliberately open. It might mean death, or a breakdown of the way we live now, or simply the point where the car runs out of road. The poem ends on "Where is your car going, sir?" and gives no answer. A car stands for speed and progress, and the question asks whether anyone has decided where all that progress is headed.
The poem matters because it makes an environmental argument without lecturing. It never mentions climate or pollution. It stays with one stretch of road and the quiet, ordinary dependence of the people who use it. Its plain words, patient repetition and final question leave the reader holding what the listener refuses to hold. The place and date at the top, Trivandrum, 31-12-2008, make it read like a record of something witnessed, and its concern still fits any city where the old trees come down for a faster road.