By José Lourenço
‘Run, Yashu, run!’ came the excited squeals of children from the living room.
Jaisinghrao sat in the low verandah overlooking his courtyard, oblivious to the merry ruckus behind him. The courtyard of the Amonkar house was quite large compared to the razangonns of most of the landlords’ houses in Bicholim. The average courtyard would have had some flower patches and a few handy spice plants like karipatta and turmeric, and, of course, the mandatory tulsi pedestal. But Jaisinghrao’s yard held a good number of fruit trees as well. A lime tree for those chilled sherbets in the balmy summers, and a fulsome papaya tree for its delicious cooling fruit. A couple of banana trees stood at the eastern corners of the yard, like ceremonial guards decked with lush green plumage.
But the tallest and most glorious tree within that garden yard was the breadfruit tree. It soared as high as the rooftop of the sprawling ancestral mansion of this Amonkar clan. The house, almost the size of a small vaddo in itself, had once housed six families. But now only Jaisinghrao lived there with his wife and three children. The companies mining the rich iron and manganese deposits of Bicholim had prospered in a big way. Most of his brothers had taken up jobs at these offices and moved into flats provided by their employers. But, the house was still the same, with its cow dung floors, mud plastered laterite walls and hoary timber roofs. The other families would often congregate here for festive seasons like Ganesh Chaturthi and Diwali. Today, three of his siblings and their families had come over, to celebrate the sixth birthday of Jyoti, his youngest child.
There was just one problem with the breadfruit tree. Though it had grown tall with luxuriant foliage, it had not yet borne a single ripe fruit. The nirponnos would appear on the branches with great promise, but would fall before they were even half ripe. Jaisinghrao had brought a doctor from the Amona Farmers’ Centre and made him give the tree a number of injections and medicated bandages for its trunk, but nothing had worked. Every evening, Rukmini would water the tree, and clear away the dead leaves and fallen fruit. Jaisinghrao himself gazed upon the tree every day on his return from the plantations, seated in a cane armchair in the verandah. He stared at it as though willing its breadfruits to ripen, full and complete at last.
‘Run, Yashu, don’t let him catch you!’
There were half a dozen cousins running around the table at the centre of the long hall. The smaller children ran under it, and even clambered over it. Yasodhara, his older sister’s daughter was the eldest of them at fourteen, just a month older than Aditya, Jaisinghrao’s son. Jaisinghrao’s two daughters had been born a year apart, seven years after the boy. Rukmini had fallen into a depression after her first delivery, a malaise that persisted as the boy grew, but had cheered up after the girls were born.
Jaisinghrao wondered how children from four to fourteen could play together, with each child falling into a role that best suited them. But then, he and his siblings and cousins had frolicked like this in this same house, many years ago. The women were all in the kitchen, and an excited babble of voices hummed from there too. They had all feasted on a rich birthday lunch, and were now relaxed and easy. The evening light cast long shadows in the courtyard.
‘Mother, look at Aditya!’ Yasodhara wailed from the hall. ‘He’s not letting me go!’
The mothers were four rooms away in the main kitchen, and paid no heed. There was a lot of neighbourhood news to catch up on.
‘Mother! Just shout at Aditya, no? He’s holding me so tight,’ came Yasodhara’s plea again.
Jaisinghrao sighed and took a deep breath.
‘Aditya!’ he boomed across the passage to the hall.
The boy must have heeded his father’s admonition, as the cheers and scampering feet were soon heard again.
That resounding rebuke also brought Rukmini and Yasodhara’s mother to the hall.
‘Children, play properly! Yashu, don’t simply make noise. Aditya, don’t suffocate the smaller children.’ With this all-round scolding delivered they returned to their kitchen chatter.
What more could be done for this tree, Jaisinghrao pondered. He had pruned it a few months back, but the exuberant branches had sprung forth again, reaching out to the sky. But where was the fruit? Just stunted little green things that dropped hard and raw to the ground. He had dug up the base of the tree last year and fed it composted kitchen waste, fish meal, and all kinds of good food. The tree is like me, Jaisinghrao thought – tall and well built. Its trunk is smooth and sinewy, like my muscles, not rough like the bark of the mango tree. Its limbs are as robust as the wooden rafters of the old house, and yet are as young as the house is old.
‘Rukmini!’ he called out.
His wife, a fair, petite woman in her thirties came out to the yard through the kitchen door, tucking a loose sari end to her waist. Seeing her husband gazing at the tree and its surrounds she picked up a coconut broom and began sweeping away the yellowed leaves scattered around. Jaisinghrao nodded in mild approval and looked up to see the rays of the dying sun filter through the leaves of his beloved tree.
Rukmini was absolutely devoted to him and all the things that mattered to him: the care of his children, the cleaning of his hunting rifle and perhaps most of all, this tree. She had performed pujas and sung artis in the yard numerous times. This had pleased Jaisinghrao. He suspected that she had even danced the nagddo nach for the tree. In this ancient ritual, a woman stripped down bare naked and danced around the tree in the light of the full moon, all the while hurling abuses at it, to shame a barren tree into yielding good fruit.
‘Mother! See what Aditya is doing!’ Yasodhara howled from the living room again, accompanied by wild hoots from the other children.
Rukmini left the yard and hurried to the living room. Her son had gripped Yasodhara in a tight embrace from behind, and seemed unwilling to let go of the struggling girl.
But on seeing his mother’s angry face the boy released his cousin and stepped back. The other children looked at him with puzzled faces and then burst into raucous laughter, pointing at him. Aditya’s loose cotton pyjamas were stretched out in a stiff tent at his crotch. He made no effort to conceal his intense arousal. A stream of saliva dribbled from the left corner of his mouth. Grinning at his cousins, he uttered a loud grunt and made another dash for Yasodhara, who had now taken shelter behind Rukmini’s slender frame. Aditya was barely fourteen, but had already grown to a burly five feet seven. He lunged at the girl and collided with his mother. Rukmini reeled back and held on to her son to stop from falling. But fall she did, with Aditya on top of her. He lay there for a moment with a glazed look in his eyes, and then began making slow grinding thrusts.
‘Aditya!’ roared a thunderous voice in the hall. Jaisinghrao stood in the doorway. He strode to where his wife and son lay and hauled Aditya up in a single movement. Rukmini scrambled to her feet from the cow dung floor and dusted herself. Jaisinghrao turned his son away from the stunned but curious gaze of his younger cousins.
He gently pushed the boy towards his mother and gave her a faint, almost imperceptible nod. Rukmini wiped the corner of Aditya’s mouth with her sari end, and then held his hand and led him away from the hall. She walked him down the corridor that led to the inner rooms of the house. They entered Jaisinghrao’s bedroom and the door swung shut.
‘Carry on with your game, children,’ Jaisinghrao waved to the young ones. ‘Aditya will rest for some time. Go on, play!’
They had all retreated to the corners of the hall, and after some hesitation resumed their game, whispering and tittering among themselves.
Jaisinghrao went back to his verandah armchair and sagged into the wickerwork seat. After brooding for a few minutes, he looked up again. Perhaps the fruits would grow full and ripe next year. One must not lose hope. Some trees, like his neighbour Sadashiv’s mango tree, had gone for years with this kind of aberration before eventually making good. One just had to keep caring for them.
He paused in his reverie and cocked his ears, as though listening for something. A sound beyond the children’s squealing and the murmur of the kitchen gossip. He soon heard it, a low drawn-out moan, guttural and familiar, that rose and fell, like the muted bellow of a buffalo coming from the paddy fields across the river.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a while.
Jaisinghrao had planted this tree as a child. He had inserted its delicate roots into the moist earth and patted the soil back, straightening the tender sapling. Now, as he opened his eyes and looked up at its highest branch, his spirits surged again.
He heard the bedroom door creak open and Rukmini’s soft feet come towards him. She walked past him into the courtyard and turned on the pump near the well. She uncoiled the water pipe and hauled it to the centre of the courtyard. Then she stood there motionless, gripping the pipe firmly as the milky-white water gushed forth and darkened the soil at the base of the tree.
Jaisinghrao looked at his wife and gave that vague, faint nod again. This was the right time of the day to water the breadfruit tree, as dusk fell. Its roots would be satiated, and the tree would rest and grow through the night.
José Lourenço’s short stories, essays, and translations in Konkani and English have appeared in various anthologies and periodicals. He is the author of The Parish Churches of Goa: A Study of Façade Architecture, and has produced a desk calendar of Konkani proverbs. He has worked on the editorial teams of the Goa Streets weekly and Peacock, the IFFI festival magazine. He has also worked with the Konkani Bhasha Mandal-Goa and the Goa Konkani Akademi as vice-president, as well as the Museum of Christian Art at Old Goa as secretary. He is a founder member of the Goa Writers group, and co-edited the GW anthology Inside Out.
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