Two people dominated our lives, and I hadn’t met either of them: my father, who deserted my mother barely a month after he married her, and Bade Chacha, grandfather’s older brother, whose mysterious disappearance a quarter of a century ago remained unexplained and therefore open to much conjecture. 

Grandmother recounted the story of Bade Chacha’s disappearance with such frequency and gusto that I believed that I had witnessed the whole affair myself, which was impossible because I wasn’t even born when it happened. Her story would vary in its minor details every time she told it, depending on the situation and her mood and the argument she was trying to buttress: spiteful, if she was quarrelling with her nieces, my aunts; wistful, if she was in a better mood; haranguing, if she was grumbling at grandfather, expressing the facts in such a way as to apportion blame for the unfortunate event on the object of her anger. ‘Bhau-ji just left; who knows why? Could he have lost his memory? It happens.’ Or, somewhat maliciously, ‘He’d been a widower for so long, poor Bhau-ji. Maybe he merely wanted … not many would blame him.’ But not in the habit of letting anyone off the hook, she’d add: ‘Still, irresponsible, very irresponsible.’ More often than not, she was spiteful and by some convoluted logic insinuated that my aunts were responsible for their father’s disappearance. ‘If a man is saddled with two daughters — not one, mind you, but two’ — this with a dramatic roll of her eyes.  

In spite of the variations, in broad facts, her story was consistent. Far from reducing its credibility, her varied retellings served to build a rich and rounded picture that was embedded in my mind like a clear memory, even though it had happened more than a decade before my birth. 

The gist of it was that very early one morning Bade Chacha upped and left. That’s it. Noticing his absence, grandmother sent grandfather in search of his brother, but, despite strenuous efforts, grandfather was unable to locate him. No word was heard from him or of him after that, ever. 

He took none of his belongings with him, which made his departure all the more baffling. And what was even more perplexing was that he had only recently begun what were delicately called ‘negotiations’ towards fixing up marriages for my aunts to a pair of brothers in Bodwa, a village in the neighbouring tehsil – negotiations that naturally fell through after the shocking incident. 

Grandfather was so distraught by his brother’s absence that he could neither eat nor sleep. That very night the goddess, our kuladevi, patroness of our clan, spoke to grandfather in a dream. She commanded that the family desist from consuming tamarind and in particular that the fruit of the tree that grew on the edge of our property was to be reserved for her alone. And so grandfather took his terrible vow and imposed it on his family. ‘Until my brother returns’, he declared, ‘none of us shall eat tamarind.’ 

When grandfather said this, he would have been much younger, for my father was only a child then. But it is difficult for me to imagine grandfather as a young man. To me, grandfather had always looked like a dried up eucalyptus tree – thin, tall and skeletal. His skin, smooth but patchy, was pulled so taut over his gaunt face that in spite of his great age, he had no wrinkles. He seldom spoke, but when he did, his voice was crackly, like dry leaves burning. 

Anyway, that is how tamarind came to be anathema in our kitchen. It took all of grandmother’s ingenuity to add the required tang to our food – kokum, lime, dried mango powder, even vinegar – but none of them was quite like tamarind. I knew because I’d tasted it and longed for more of it. Not from our tree, of course; but when I went to the movies with Amma, she’d give me two rupees to buy myself something, and I inevitably bought bhel-puri, slathered in tamarind chutney. 

And once, in the market, I espied my aunts, Kanta-akka and Kunti-akka, furtively glancing up and down the road lest they be spotted tucking into a plateful of dahi-vada swimming in tamarind sauce. 

My aunts, Kunti-akka and Kanta-akka, were twins but were so unlike each other in appearance as not even to look like sisters. Yet they were united in their bickering and were possessed of a sourness of disposition that contrasted oddly with the absence of tamarind in our family’s diet. They were not my father’s sisters but his cousins; their mother had died delivering them. They’d always lived with us – or, more correctly, we’d always lived with them, since their father was the older brother and, until his disappearance, the head of the household. After that, of course, it was grandfather who took all the decisions. 

No one dared openly challenge grandfather’s diktat, especially at home, and we all ate our daily meals faithfully abstaining from the forbidden fruit. In the house, the Solemn Vow loomed over us all like a great big bird of prey, silent and ominous, with the stench of overripe tamarind on its foetid breath. 

*

Amma was a Bollywood widow. Less than a month into their marriage, my father had packed a suitcase with his best clothes, taken the modest amount of gold jewellery that my mother’s parents had given her in dowry and the cash received as gifts for the wedding, and left home without a word to anyone.  

Not knowing whom to blame for her son’s disappearance, grandmother, quite illogically, blamed my mother – when, in fact, it was Amma who was the chief victim of my father’s silly ambition.  

‘Vasant always had this idea of becoming an actor. Like Dev Anand, he said he wanted to be. Marriage should have cured him of the notion. But—’ here grandmother would pause to look meaningfully in my mother’s direction and then go on as though she wasn’t in the room at all, ‘clearly there was something lacking. Otherwise, was my son a fool that he should leave his parents and go off to Mumbai?’ 

Amma endured all this and more – the jibes of the village, and the taunts of my aunts – with stoic silence. Only one thing excited her: the appearance of new posters announcing the latest film to show in Pandurang Talkies, the solitary movie theatre in Hakimpur, the nearest town to our village. She’d squeal with girlish delight and insist I accompany her on the hour-long bus journey to Hakimpur, for she couldn’t possibly go alone. We’d stand for ages in the queue to get the tickets, since Amma was what my classmates called a first-day-first-show sort of a person. 

This passion of my mother’s was proof enough for my grandmother and aunts to assume that it was indeed she who had egged my father on to seek a celluloid career. Only I knew the reason, which I kept to myself lest it become grist for further ridicule. Amma cared neither for the story nor the songs, not the glitter nor the thrills. Her sole purpose in seeing every movie that came her way was the vain hope that she might catch a glimpse of my father, even if just as an extra – a waiter, a shopkeeper, a thug or one of several dancers that gyrated about the hero and heroine in the dozen or so songs that every movie boasted. 

‘Look, Manu’, she’d say loudly and point at the screen, oblivious to the shushing and angry hisses from the seats near us. ‘Do you think that is your father?’ And then a couple of scenes later, ‘Or him?’ Mother always pointed to young men in their twenties. In her mind, my father remained the same age as when he had left her. In Bollywood, perhaps, the passing years didn’t wreak their relentless havoc on its favoured denizens as they did on the rest of us mere mortals, or so Amma seemed to think. 

Truth to tell, Amma had no clear memory of what my father really looked like. She saw him for the first time in her life on their wedding day and had him as a husband for less than a month. In that month too, as a new bride, she was obliged to keep her gaze averted and her head modestly covered the day through, with her sari pallav drawn four inches below her brow. My grandparents were certainly not ones to keep a photo album; so, when my father vanished, there was nothing to remind anyone of what he’d actually looked like. 

Grandfather and Amma seemed to be at peace in each other’s company; they barely spoke to each other, but there was a companionship of silence born of great loss. Amma rarely went into the kitchen, except sometimes to make tea. She loved animals and plants and so happily spent her time tending to Kajri, our cow, and to the vegetables she grew behind our house. This kept her out of the constant squabbling that went on in the kitchen between grandmother and my aunts, their acrid words mixing uneasily with the pungent smoke from the cooking fire, the one stinging the ears, the other the eyes. 

*

The only ones who spoke in my family seemed to be my aunts and my grandmother. Their words floated around the house, turning corners, permeating walls, perching themselves on the rafters of our tiled roof, nudging themselves into the crevices between doorframes and into the little holes between floor and wall through which mice came and went. The words stayed there, ready to be plucked out and used again, then setting out on fresh journeys to fresh domestic destinations, sometimes colliding with each other, sometimes moving past each other quite deftly. In this way, the words churned themselves into a froth, like fermented toddy, and, when they had nothing else to do, they slipped into our dreams, in broken bits. 

Off the kitchen was a little alcove, where I stored my schoolbooks, my uniform and my PT keds, which I painted white with a paste of chalk each Monday and Thursday. Rolled up in a corner was a reed mat, which I’d spread out every night to sleep on. A floral-printed cotton curtain drawn across the alcove afforded me some privacy but barely concealed the voices from the kitchen that filtered through in muffled snatches, and sometimes I didn’t know if I’d actually heard conversations or just dreamed them up. 

‘Your father left because he was fed up with you both — dumped the whole responsibility on us.’ 

‘That can’t be the reason. He was considerate and loving. He’d fixed our marriages – to brothers so we wouldn’t be separated.’ 

‘So why didn’t he follow through? He couldn’t be bothered to arrange dowries, so he just vanished.’ 

‘But he said he would arrange our dowries somehow. He always spoke the truth.’ 

‘And why did Uncle not get us married? Did he not get Vasant married?’ 

‘You think money grows on trees? Getting a son married is not the same as getting girls married. Sons don’t need to be given dowries — and in your case, no small dowries would do.’ 

Grandmother could be very unkind. She never missed an opportunity to remark on my aunts’ lack of looks and throw it in their faces. Kanta-akka was fair, but fat; Kunti-akka was slim, but dark. They were, of course, now in their mid-forties, but grandmother constantly reminded them that they’d never been attractive. 

‘Uncle could have sold the land, could he not? After all, the land was – is – in our father’s name.’ 

‘Sold the land? Sold the land!’ grandmother would retort sarcastically, her pitch rising an octave with each rhetorical repetition. ‘And what would we live on? Tell me, what would we live on?’ 

When I look back on it, I pity the miserable lives my aunts led; no matter how much they argued with grandmother, the insurmountable fact of their abandonment and being left to live at the mercy of their dour uncle and shrewish aunt must have enveloped their minds with a sense of profound defeat and wrapped their hearts in a blistering frustration. 

*

In spite of grandmother’s stout defence of not selling our land in her frequent acerbic exchanges with my aunts, in recent years I had overheard her trying to persuade grandfather to do just that. 

‘It yields us a pittance now’, she’d remonstrate with him. ‘With the tamarind tree, it’ll fetch a good price, and the interest will allow us to survive comfortably.’ 

But grandfather was resolute in his refusal. ‘The tamarind tree cannot be sold, and the land connects us to it.’ And then his trump card: ‘The goddess would be offended.’ 

But grandmother was not one to give up so easily. She colluded with the patwari, the village land-records keeper, and arranged a deal which by all appearances was quite lucrative. Grandfather was furious when he learnt of it. 

‘Don’t you fear divine retribution, woman?’ he thundered. 

Little things began to go wrong – or at least, every little thing that went wrong grandfather attributed to grandmother’s perfidious attempt at the sale. 

Matters reached a head when Kajri, our cow, was poisoned. She cried all night with her head in my mother’s lap, her stomach swollen and a greenish foam dripping out of her mouth. And by morning she was dead. 

Grandmother never broached the topic again. 

*

The tamarind tree was planted at the far end of our land, away from the house. Valuable as its fruit was, everyone knew that wandering ghosts loved to rest a while beneath tamarind trees at night, and witches – the ones with their feet twisted backwards – slumbered there upside down, hanging from their branches like bats. 

My classmate Kishu Masih’s family was the solitary Christian one in the village. Some years ago, Kishu’s father experienced a miraculous healing after an itinerant pastor prayed over him, and his family ‘found Jesus’, or so Kishu said. ‘Where?’ I asked, in all seriousness. Kishu only grinned in response and cuffed me on the ear, leaving me none the wiser. I suspect he didn’t know either. 

It was he who told me the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden tree. ‘And when the serpent gave them the apple to eat’, he said, ‘do you know what happened?’ I shook my head. ‘Their clothes fell off!’ he said dramatically. 

As if roving ghosts and wicked witches weren’t enough to keep me away from the tamarind tree, this new idea captivated me and gave me the shivers. I often wondered what I’d do if a snake slithered from a branch and offered me a pod of tamarind, and I took it. Would my clothes really fall off? What if I secured my trousers with a belt first? 

Sometimes at night I’d climb onto the roof and risk a glance at the tamarind tree, so breathtakingly beautiful in the day – its huge green branches with their pale pink and orange flowers, contrasting marvellously with the yellow bark of its trunk, streaked with red – yet so sinister in the moonlight, its colours reduced to a play of shadows and slate. 

More than once, I saw grandfather sitting alone in the darkness in the armchair that was always left in our verandah, staring fixedly at the tree. I wondered if he too was waiting to see a ghost. 

*

Each year, in mid-May, we witnessed a ritual of such extravagant profligacy as to leave the village amazed, no matter that they’d seen it before. We were by no means rich; in fact, I’d say we were almost poor. Apart from our house, all we owned were the four acres of land in front and the tamarind tree that grew at the far end. We had no servants, and my grandmother and aunts worked their fingers to the bone to keep up the appearance of a middle-class gentility – but of course, in a village, everyone knows everything. 

The only earning my family had was from what was grown in the field. And ever since grandfather became too old to cultivate it himself, we’d had to depend on sharecropping, which meant even less income. The tamarind should have – could have – tided us over, but for the goddess’s craving for its fruit. She demanded, grandfather told us, the entire yield of the tree, and if this offering was denied to her, who knows how she might satiate her hunger? It was too terrible to contemplate. 

And so each year, when the tamarind tree was laden and the curly green pods hardened to brown and the plump shells cracked open in their ripeness to reveal the delicious flesh within, encased in a delicate trellis of fibrous veins, at once sweet and sour, grandfather would engage two labourers to pluck the tree clean; not a pod must be left even for the parrots. The whole operation was supervised by grandfather himself, while grandmother wailed ineffectually from the kitchen. ‘What madness! What utter foolishness!’ she would rail, ‘To squander this bounty on a whim!’ When she felt she’d gone too far in her complaining, she’d shut up, fearing the wrath of the goddess, but she couldn’t shed the sullenness from her face. 

This annual event seemed to be the only issue on which my grandmother and my aunts were in accord. My aunts would burn with anger and mutter inaudibly below their breath about the preposterous waste, as grandfather got the labourers to load the hired handcart with the dozen or so gunny sacks of fruit and then set off towards the river. 

My mother alone was unimpressed by all this. She behaved as though it didn’t concern her at all and busied herself in the vegetable patch, humming some snippet from the latest film song. I found it too fascinating to keep away from and, when I was younger, darted around, entangling myself with the labourers as they went about their business. In more recent years, I watched sedately, even helping to load the cart and then accompanying grandfather to a point downstream where the Chakuti fell some twenty feet into a rocky defile. The spot was ideal for grandfather’s offering as the little gorge was inaccessible and so safe from the predation of village folk looking to make a fast and easy buck with gleanings from the dump. 

There, our procession would stop. The clutch of village children who’d joined us on the way waited eagerly to witness the spectacle they’d heard of from their older siblings. Despite having seen it again and again, ever since I could remember, my stomach would tighten with anticipation, as though bound by a knot. The labourers were directed to rip open each gunny sack and empty its contents into the river over the rocks, where the frothing water hit the jagged stones. As the luscious fruit tumbled out and got swallowed up in the spume, there would be collective gasps of wonderment, enhanced by the belief that the oblation would, in some mysterious way, be conveyed by the river to the mouth of the goddess. 

Once, and only once, had I succumbed to the temptation of picking up a pod of tamarind and stuffing it into my mouth while the men filled the sacks. I must have been about eight. Ever vigilant, grandfather saw me. I had never seen him so enraged; he pried my mouth open and shoved a bony finger into it, twirling it around, scraping my gums and removing every little bit of pulp he could feel. My jaws locked with shock and fear; grandfather, his face suffused with anger, spittle spurting out of the side of his mouth, his voice dripping with menace, said: ‘Never, never do that again. This tamarind is never to be eaten.’ I never did it again. 

*

I remember quite clearly the day events were set in motion that led inexorably to the awful end – because it was my fifteenth birthday. I was getting ready to go to school when the patwari, most unusually, came to our house. He pasted a printed sheet of paper on our front door and then asked for grandfather, to whom he handed a yellow envelope with a government stamp on it. ‘Here, sign here’, he said, indicating a spot on a tattered register. ‘Receipt.’ 

‘What is this?’ inquired grandfather. 

‘The government is acquiring your land.’ 

Grandfather was stunned into silence. 

‘Don’t worry, Baba’, the patwari said in a consoling tone. ‘You’re not the only one in the village whose land is being taken. And it’s not being snatched for free. You will be paid twice what it is worth. That’s the new law.’ Then he added, ‘You should be grateful that your house has been spared. You’re lucky that it is out of the alignment.’ 

‘Alignment? What on earth is this “alignment”?’ asked grandmother, her voice edgy with consternation. She’d come up behind grandfather to hear what the patwari had to say. 

It transpired that the government had decided to build a bypass to the highway, slicing right through our village. No one had consulted us; apparently there was no need, since it was, we were told, ‘in the public interest’. We should be proud, we were told, to be part of this great nation-building exercise undertaken by the government. We didn’t know how to respond – not that any response, except quiet compliance, was expected from us. 

Many weeks passed after this, and we believed that the government had forgotten all about the bypass, like so many other projects and election promises. But then, three months later, the patwari turned up again, this time with a bunch of officious looking people in tow. They immediately set about fixing what I was later to learn was called a theodolite and laying down chalk lines right across our land. 

The compensation, when it came, was indeed handsome. Grandmother was ecstatic. ‘Finally – the goddess has paid us back for those hundreds of quintals of tamarind we’ve fed her all these years!’ Grandmother and my aunts believed that this was a windfall – the best thing that could have happened to us. Only grandfather was despondent. 

*

There was a great hullabaloo outside out house. Workers were lopping branches off the tamarind tree mercilessly. Grandfather watched on from the verandah in stolid silence. But tears stung my eyes; it felt as though my very limbs were being sawn off with every hack of the axes. 

Then a JCB backhoe was driven up and a rope fixed over the trunk of the tamarind. It felt like a noose was placed around my own neck. At last, grandfather showed signs of alarm. He ran up to the workers and pleaded with them to spare the tree. ‘What will I tell the goddess?’ he whimpered. ‘What will I tell her?’ But of course, they did not heed him.  

‘You’ve received your compensation, old man, have you not? Now go away and let us do our job.’ 

The engineer took pity on grandfather. ‘The tree needs to be pulled out by its roots’, he explained. ‘Otherwise it’ll harm the road that will be built over it.’ 

Crushed, grandfather walked slowly back to the verandah. I noticed how old and shrivelled he looked. He was no longer that towering personality that dominated our lives but just a frail, defeated old man. Grandmother and my aunts, even Amma, had gathered in the doorway to watch the depredation. 

After two or three strong pulls by the JCB, the sturdy tree gave in and heaved over, its roots wrenching clear of the earth that had held them for decades, now pointing upwards, like so many scraggy arms extended in supplication. 

The show was over. I could watch no longer. But suddenly the hullabaloo intensified, and a great shout arose from the workers, for enmeshed in the upturned roots was a human skeleton. 

Only grandfather seemed unsurprised. 

He shut his eyes and began to mutter to himself. ‘What could I do? What could I do? He was going to sell the land for their dowry. I pleaded with him. I begged of him.’ 

Grandmother came up behind him, and with a tenderness I’d never seen before, she placed her hand upon his shoulder and squeezed it. ‘I understand’, she said softly, ‘I understand.’ 

‘I didn’t mean to’, said grandfather. ‘I was just reasoning with him. There was a scuffle. He hit his head on a rock. What could I do but bury him?’ And then: ‘The tamarind. We couldn’t possibly drink his blood, could we?’ 

Grandmother stood straight, tears streaming down her cheeks. I wonder if she’d known – or perhaps, suspected. 

Kunti-akka and Kanta-akka were trembling, their faces contorted with horror, with anger, with hatred, with regret for all they had suffered and lost, for their useless lives and what had been stolen from them. 

Only Amma seemed unmoved. She began to hum a film song. 

Kunti-akka, still trembling with rage, walked the short distance to the village grocery shop, bought a kilo of tamarind, returned and went into the kitchen. Kanta-akka followed her in. A few minutes later they came out with a bowlful of tamarind chutney. Kunti-akka thrust the bowl into grandfather’s hand, and Kanta-akka took a spoonful of the chutney and shoved it into grandfather’s mouth. ‘Eat’, she said. 

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist