The Jacaranda House

Family Story set in Bangalore India

The jacaranda tree in the front yard of the Venkataraman house on 18th Cross, Basavanagudi, had been dying for three years.

Nobody in the family talked about this directly. They talked around it the way they talked around most things that mattered with oblique references, loaded silences, and the particular kind of studied cheerfulness that the Venkatraman's had refined into an art form across three generations. Meenakshi, the matriarch, would say: "The rains have not been good this year." Her elder son Vikram would agree that the rains had not been good. Her daughter-in-law Priya would suggest calling a gardener. The gardener would come, look grave, prescribe something expensive, and leave. The tree would persist in its dying, dropping its purple flowers in smaller and smaller quantities each February, its branches thinning from the crown down, its roots so the gardener said being strangled by the construction next door.

The construction next door was a seven-storey apartment complex. It had begun two years ago, without warning or consultation, when the Aiyar family sold their lot to a builder from Pune who had never visited Basavanagudi in his life and who had no particular interest in what a jacaranda tree meant to a family that had lived beside it for sixty years.

This was Bangalore.

This was the deal the city made with itself, growth at the cost of memory, progress at the cost of shade; the future arriving before anyone had quite finished grieving the past.

Meenakshi Venkataraman, seventy-one years old and the last person standing who remembered the tree as a sapling her late husband Rangan had planted it in the year their first child was born, which was 1969 stood at her kitchen window on the morning of the fourteenth of February and looked at the tree and thought, this year it will not flower at all.

She was wrong, as it happened. By the end of the day, the tree would produce one final extravagant purple bloom, as though gathering everything it had left for a last performance.

But Meenakshi didn't know that yet. What she knew was that today, on what would have been her fifty-third wedding anniversary, her three children were coming home.

All of them.

At the same time.