This year, monsoon arrived two weeks early in Goa.
As most of the Konkan coastal regions experienced very heavy rainfall, the Indian Meteorological Department anticipated riverine flooding, damage to horticulture and standing crops and possible damage to “vulnerable structures”. In other words: raging rivers; flooded roads and fields; ruined crops, broken homes, and communities in crisis. Lives and livelihoods swept away in seconds. Nature is often a whimsical, ruthless beast; more so as the global climate crisis worsens.
To most people, Goa is a “tourist state”, advertised as a natural paradise of beaches, forests and waterfalls. Families, couples, college students on graduation trips and office workers on corporate retreats flock to this purported idyll every summer and winter. But this tourism-centric imagination often forgets local concerns: village life, agrarian experiences, the people most proximal to nature and humanity’s cruel unpredictability.
Life in rural Goa
The Bitter Fruit Tree and Other Stories is a collection of 13 short stories by Sahitya Akademi-winner Prakash Parienkar, translated from the Konkani by Vidya Pai. The stories draw from three decades of Parienkar’s writing and foreground the everyday precarities of poor Konkani villagers’ lives in North Goa’s Sattari district. Lucid and unflinching, this collection cracks the fantasy of beaches and blue skies wide open to deliver an incisive look at exploitation, oppression and the struggles of survival in rural Goan society.
Repeatedly and perhaps uniquely, Parienkar filters life and landscape in Konkan villages through the mediations of a deadly force: sudden and savage disappearance. Marginalised lives are rarely afforded the certainty of food, water, shelter, or any other necessity. Parienkar’s collection is shot through with this awareness; every story acknowledges how vulnerable existences are constantly subject to impermanence, contingencies and sudden reversals in fortune.
In “Fruits of Labour”, a landless farming family cultivates another man’s paddy field, sustained by the landowner’s promise of receiving their share of the harvest. The night before they are set to reap the field, unseasonal rains flood the nearby river and neighbouring fields, ruining the harvest. One night sweeps away a month’s labour and the certainty of food for the foreseeable future. The scene of this destruction is akin to death: “Like an eagle spreads its wings wide and hovers motionlessly in the sky, the bamboo fence floated on the surface of the water that had submerged the field before sinking down to cover it like a shroud.” At the end of the story, where there should have been relief and celebration, only the family’s tears are left. It is a moment of profound helplessness, and the reader’s complicity intensifies the impact: nature’s mercilessness is only outweighed by the apathy of the rich, the urban, the landed, who, all too willing to consume the fruits of labour, refuse meaningful support to labourers themselves.
Turning the page, in this collection, does not allow us to turn away; over and over, we witness the painstaking work that goes into existence being erased in pitiless seconds. The central emotional and political premise confronts us throughout: what disappears may never have promised permanence, but its loss is still cataclysmic.
Vidya Pai’s curation and organisation of these stories demonstrates her abiding appreciation for and familiarity with the currents of Parienkar’s work, and her translation is an act of deep love for Konkani. In a recent interview, translator Deepa Bhasthi discussed her conscious ethos of “translating with an accent” that charges English “with the hum of another language”. Pai’s translation is similarly oriented, acknowledging that these stories draw on lives lived in Konkani. Language becomes a site of sensations that build new homes in English: the dawn sun’s rays spread like wisps of floating cotton, harsh words fall against hearts like clusters of coconuts, and politicians’ promises rain down with the sound and fury of a summer storm. Pai bears Parienkar’s viscerally local imagery as gifts to the anglophone reader. Though the collection could benefit from a more attentive eye to overall consistency and clarity in translation, Pai’s extensive association with Konkani work shines through.
Violent vanishings
A common thread in many stories is the outsider, or community of outsiders, forced to depart the village’s insular social world. In “The Bitter Fruit Tree”, Tilgo, the only man of the Dalit Mahar community in the village, is asked to leave once his wife dies, leaving him no sons. “Don’t come back to this village,” the chief tells him. “We have asked someone else to play the drum today at the Dussehra rituals.” With the only available caste-based profession taken away from him, with no family and no progeny, Tilgo’s roots in the village are uprooted with a single command he has no power to disobey. In “The Trap”, a farmer’s bull breaks its leg in a trap laid by a nomadic group of otter-catchers on the riverbank. A mob of villagers brutally beat the man they assume culpable, and forcibly leave with his family’s inherited iron traps. As mother, father, and child watch the men disappear with their only tools of sustenance, a hungry emptiness takes hold: “It was as though their bellies had been wrenched out and were being carried away.”
Parienkar does not begin these stories at the point of departure. Rather, he tenderly details existing life-worlds for most of the narrative. For all their fragility, these worlds, though formed on the fringes, brim with love, care and determination in the face of adversity. Before they shatter, we see them for what they are: vivid lives, affectionate relationships, challenging but precious existences.
But in structurally oppressive social and natural ecosystems, tenderness is also often necessarily brief. In “The Crescent Moon”, a vanarmaro, or monkey hunter, is hunted, tied and beaten limp by villagers who believe he pounced on Chandre, a village woman gathering firewood in the forest. Knowing he is innocent and wracked with guilt, Chandre goes to release him and in what lasts a few moments in life, and a couple of sentences on the page, they engage in an embrace of mutual desire. For a breath, there is space for want, reconciliation, even love for and between the “outsider” and “insider”, but they must step back. He vanishes into the darkness; she returns home. The world still left, of “angry villagers and her husband’s ire”, arrives again.
This arrival of brutal rage, and its obliterating force, reaches a fever-pitch in “Desolation” and “The Sacrifice”, where the frenzy of ritual festivities turns entire villages into murderous lynch-mobs. In both stories, anyone who dares oppose the unanimous herd mentality is beaten to death by a heaving horde. This enforcement of total singularity and acquiescence enacts disappearance in extreme, subsuming all opposition, contradiction and even meaningful collectivity.
However, Parienkar does not always propose disappearance as acquiescence; in “A Forest Sanctuary”, it is radical resistance. The collection’s final story is about Avdu, an old woman who is asked to leave the home she’s known since her marriage because it’s in the middle of the newly declared ‘Abhayaranya’ or Protected Forest area. Rather than agree to the government officials’ and policymakers’ demands for deeds, documentation and eventual demolition – none of which account for the corrugated topography of precarious rural life – Avdu disappears into the forest, never to be found and never to return. With assimilation her only option either way, Avdu merges with the forest rather than a new system built to exclude her and her history. Her vanishing is still violent, abrupt and driven by forces of total power, but it is still defiant, spirited, leaving a regime of documentation uneasy.
Reckoning with return
On a bleak terrain stained with dispossession and death, instances of respite, return and resilience are waypoints of hope. In “Water”, a village’s tap water supply is stalled for days. Eventually, a lone woman refuses to continue relying on fickle government policy and politicians, and picks up a spade and pickaxe to dig up the closed-up local well again. Among others, this story is a testament to how women, despite accruing burdens of gender, caste and poverty, refuse to succumb silently to circumstance. In “The Old Man of the Hills”, an old farmer’s son leaves the village against his father’s advice, drawn to the promising allure of city life. Wrapped up in grief and resentment, the old man tries to come to terms with this abandonment, but his son returns, quiet and sudden, to a hearth that, despite its fallibilities, remains intimately familiar.
Indeed, even within stories of murderous caste and gender discrimination, poverty that burrows marrow-deep and policy that does not account for the people, Parienkar lets hope linger like the aftertaste of a sweet plum, never quite eradicated. However, it is so imbricated in social violence that its brevity almost becomes synonymous with inadequacy. It remains only a fleeting sweetness without an axe struck into the bitter bark of oppressive structures.
The stark directness of Parienkar’s writing, which Pai transfers with deceptive ease to English, refuses to look away from eyes brimming with tears, from bodies beaten to death, from painful helplessness and defiantly sought independence. This collection makes a difficult, but necessary, demand: bear witness to erasure, its ruin, its fragmented possibilities of repair.
The Bitter Fruit Tree and Other Stories, Prakash Parienkar, translated from the Konkani by Vidya Pai, Thornbird/Niyogi Books.
