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 ra...