The first amla

Gayatri’s shoes bravely bore the spray of the puddle’s spittled laughter, a spray that had doused less fortunate unshod feet. Even before its rippled smile damped down, she was off. The traffic signals cleared a bewildered passage for her to the fruit stall.

Her fingers, ringed with a folded ten-rupee note, skidded over her uncertainty about the Tamil name. They hovered over the pea-green pile like an indecisive pebble cornered by an avalanche. “Five rupees of that.”

The fruitseller blinked sunbeams out of his eyelids as he groped for five rupee coins, elusive in their sunburnt glare. Cars and bikes whizzed past that intersection, their horns screeching as if in denouncement of this transaction. He rolled out a glossy page-3 funnel dripping with gossip but they would plug leaks of amla.


Generously sprinkled masala powder didn’t make it past her lips. Like shoes banished respectfully at a doorstep and recalled into the house in a trice by hospitable hands, her lips swept them into her mouth between mouthfuls. The spice warmed a tongue that had welcomed those tart yellow marbles frozenly.

Was it her teeth that cut into the fruit or the fruit into her teeth? Its sour scalpels scribbled words onto her tongue, incisions that she could never utter. What was that her mother used to say? Something about people with black-spotted tongues who possessed the power of turning anything that escapes their mouths true. “It isn’t the same as a prediction. If they wish to experience anything they just have to say it aloud. Curse or blessing, their pronouncements always come to pass”


Gayatri wished the amla would etch citric scars on her tongue that would perform that miracle in reverse- narrate whatever happened to her the way it did. She envied the amla’s quality of truth. Sharp and clear like a polished knife.

The walk back to her office was hot. Madras heat is unlike any other, an amicable despot who declared frequent tax rebates for sugarcane juice stalls and coconut water vendors. Sometimes his generosity led him as far as to unloose ticklish gusts of wind that consoled congealed cotton and teased dark sweat-blotched faces of out of armpit-hiding. How little of him had she seen all these years in that cave of an A/C cubicle.


“Gayatri, I hope you know that the presentation starts in ten minutes. Where have you been?” There she was, Madhu, standing hands-on-hips, head tilted at an intensely disbelieving angle, eyes narrowed as it were a polarizer in search of the right wavelength of excuses to filter.
Gayatri’s tongue ceased to lick, and her teeth shivered loosely in denuded relief. The wrapper unravelled to scatter fruit all over the conference table, a conical scroll spreading bad tidings in court.

Madhu continued, pout-in-place “This is irresponsible and unprofessional. Never expected this from you. The client will be here in 10 minutes, and you walk off god-knows-where to buy gooseberries.”

Gayatri’s mouth bulging with the runaway retorts exploded in a shower of slurped rinds still singing the amlas’ sharp notes.
White seeds bounced off the LCD screen in surprised spots and landed on laptop keys, saliva fingering the keys like stenographic hands poised to type at an order. Gayatri wondered if it was just the seeds that she spat out or whether bits of teeth had followed them out, teeth that had hitherto been bared in smiles of counterfeit obedience and had crushed despairing smirks behind quivering lower lips.

She walked back arm in arm with the Madras heat. A two-rupee packet would be enough this time.