‘The Bitter Fruit Tree and Other Stories’: Disappearances mark the terrain of Konkani village life

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...

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