The Bitter Fruit Tree and Other Stories

Written by Prakash Parienkar, translated by Vidya Pai (from the original Konkani)

Published by NIYOGI BOOKS, 2025, 190 Pages. Price: Rs 350/-

Picture by Harihara S S

It is such a delight when an erudite translator, familiar with the original writer’s work, outlines for the reader what the book is about. Translator Vidya Pai tells us that the anthology The Bitter-Fruit Tree and Other Stories authored by Dr Prakash Parienkar, an academic at the Discipline of Konkani at the prestigious Shenoi Goembab School of Languages and Literature, Goa University, takes us through the lives of rural Goa from the Sattari taluka, along the fragile banks of the meandering and endangered Mhadei river that gradually flows into the Arabian Sea renamed the Mandovi. It is this wide expanse of the river Mandovi that is familiar to everyone who lives in the tiny state’s capital city of Panaji. 

The stories in the anthology, however, are geographically located far away from the city; socially further away from the sunny sands and party destinations that Goa has become notoriously famous for recently. Yet, some of the stories from the lesser known villages are not untouched by the rapid urbanisation that has become the hallmark of this fragile state that many see as gambling away its future. These are stories from the scent of the soil of Goa, stories of caste prejudice and bigotry that has slipped its way through the illusion of development into the 21st century. These are also stories that have layers within layers and underlying all these layers is the rock-solid fact of lives intertwined with nature, an inter-dependence, a symbiosis. In fact, references to this inter-dependence are so subtle that it is like the whisper of the wind between the trees in the forests, a glimmer of komorebi, sunbeams that bathe every story, a vibration.  

The title story, the first in the anthology, speaks of love, an unbroken, compassionate bond shared by an elderly, impoverished low-caste Tilgo and Goklya. Goklya discovers a single gold coin, a treasured family heirloom, the last thing of material value in her possession. “A dimple would form on her left cheek whenever she broke into a smile, but her cheeks were sunken now and her eyes had receded into dark hollows,” describes a Goklya who lies bedridden for over three years. 

Tilgo is a Mahar, a caste that has been entrusted by tradition to play the drum at all the religious celebrations of the village. “He would have been paid three thousand rupees to beat the drum...” sums up the status of a Mahar in a Goan village. Tragically, however, Goklya succumbs to her illness a day before the festival. Tilgo loses his commission for the year and because he has no sons to continue with this duty, dictated by his caste, he is asked to leave the village permanently. (Not that having a daughter would have changed anything. Girls are forbidden to touch percussion instruments.) 

Tilgo is compelled to go from house to house asking for land from the upper-caste farmers to bury his wife. He is finally pointed to a patch under the bitter-fruit tree, a land that the village has no rights over anyways and for which the gold coin would come in handy. The plight of the Mahars in Goa has been unacknowledged and unspoken for too long. It is only stories like these that encapsulate some of the isolation, abuse, exploitation and collective cruelty in the name of custom and the landlessness of a large population of the community. Puran sheti, a farming method unique to Goa is when the bank of a river is cleared of stones, pebbles and vegetation. This created field is then fenced in with bamboo collected from the forest, the field filled in with dung-infused soil. Seedlings are borrowed from a wealthier farmer and precious paddy harvested but it is a precarious project that is prone to being washed away either in the flood or in torrential rain. In Fruits of labour, Phati and her family have pinned their hopes on such a field only to see it washed away in a storm in one night.

For those who still see Goa as a holiday destination, this book and the stories between its covers will come as a shocker. For those who refuse to see that Goa is caste-ridden, deeply prejudicial and parochial in its treatment of the “lower castes”, this will blow the lid off their complacency. They would learn, through these stories, of how a fruiting mango tree was cut down simply because the owner had no voice. They will learn how the Mahar was granted a varsal (the right to play the drum for all annual festivals) and paid in paddy, coconuts and some agri-waste. 

“If a youngster from the Mahar community doesn’t have the skills to perform his duties, how will he survive?” asks the protagonist in The Beat of the Drum. When the young, defiant Madhu refuses to play the drum, his mother begs him, saying, “Don’t do this, Babu. It’s our family’s chance to play the drum at social and religious functions in the village for a whole year. If we do not perform the varsal now, they will wrest this right.” 

In The Crescent Moon, when two women Yamune and Chandre go into the forest to collect firewood and come across a “big strong dark man with a mass of hair on his head” they assume that “He’s certainly not mad. Must be some low-caste Chandal”. When the posse of armed men finally find him, armed with a bow and arrow, they deduce that he is indeed from the tribe of forest-dwelling vanarmaros or monkey hunters. “Soon they had shoved him to the front of the temple where they tied him to the trunk of a mango tree.” Finally, when they leave him, uncared for and beaten within an inch of his life in a mass of blood and sweat, they unfeelingly say, “These vanarmare don’t feel cold. They sleep out in the open. As for feeling hungry, what do they eat anyway? If they kill a monkey they eat its flesh, otherwise it is upaas, fasting…”   

The anthology reads like a treatise on the life, occupations, occupational hazards, subsistence levels, survival threats, abuse on the basis of gender, caste, tribe,social status and location and space you were allowed access to in a village. The stories bring in agricultural practices of the past, the belief in the rakhandaar or guardian spirit. The stories also span changing times and the outmigration of rural youth who could see their “friends wore fine clothes.” In The Crucifix on a Chain we read that “In the old days cows would follow this track as they moved up the hill in search of pasture, so the cowherds of the village were quite familiar with this route. Caetano had used this route since he was a child and he had wandered all over the hill with his herd of cows. There are no cows in Caetano’s cattle shed these days.” Later in Water, “The road swallowed the well… it vanished when the road was constructed over the spot where it once stood. The cars rush over it now.” When water is delivered by tankers, replacing the khadpibayn (the well-in-the-rocks) a resolute Goklun “summons all her strength and begins to chip at the tarmac with her pickaxe.”

What one finds particularly interesting is the names of all the characters in the stories. Phati (branch but can also mean a rear), Phatlem (rear), Dulo, Dulya, Mhalu, Pandlya, Devgya, Tilgya, Golem, Uspo, Kango, Barkelya, Ganpat, Pandlo, Shevthu, Sadu, Jhipro, Hargo, Sudoku, Pandu, Vahilya, Dhana. On the other hand, the headman has a son who carries a name like Uttam (Excellence). Are the lower castes in Goa even deprived of the basic dignity of a proper, formal name, one wonders.

Names give a person an identity. The village settlement of Kadval gives Avdu her identity. “She was always referred to, with respect, as ‘the Kadvalkarni’, the venerable lady from Kadval village.” This is the closest the author gets to a surname in the anthology populated by first names, nicknames, diminutives of longer, formal names. These nicknames, endearing as they are, are also indicative of the all-too familiar, reduced status of the protagonists in these stories. It would do the subject justice if, Untouchable Goa (Dadu Mandrekar, Panther’s Paw Publication, 2025) that took 28 years to get translated from the original Marathi (by Nikhil Baisane) and is now available to readers in English is also read along with The Bitter Fruit Tree. 

The motifs on the cover design come as a surprise. Could Goa’s unique kaavi art not have been explored for the motifs on the cover of the book instead of a borrowing from neighbouring Maharashtra’s signature “tribal art” of the Warlis of Palghar and Dahanu?