The Tamarind Tree
We watched it spring up one year, so slender, growing in the box of dirt dad had made with clay bricks at the front of the house, the type of clay bricks that were sharp and strong on the outside but hollow on the inside and would flake and crumble into powdery red shards when shattered, we watched it, growing behind the mossy grey wall that kept the hillside from coming down on us, the wall’s paint peeling as though it was skin, my skin growing blisters and sores and boils as we played beneath it—the miracle of dirt, the consequence of building cities, marching armies through the veins of a mud metropolis amid worm and snail, until it surpassed all the children, growing as tall as the house, even then its leaves still delicate: a thin head of hair that let in pock-marks of sun, small patterns all over the walls inside our rooms, a barren mass of effulgence that grew as we became adults and our parents children. I, the end of myself, mysterious and finite, like a wall pushed slowly by the powerful hulk roots of a tree, a wall at first made gently swollen, and then beset by cracks, fractures that grimace under the strain, until the concrete has lost the battle and is made inconsequential. We let the tree continue to get even thicker, respiring at nights above the house, as the roof, now in its shadow, looked on with longing, the house slowly cut open like an eternal wound, buried daily by mounds of fine tamarind leaves, each a written notice, warning of the coming rains and our eviction.
We watched it spring up one year, so slender, growing in the box of dirt dad had made with clay bricks at the front of the house, the type of clay bricks that were sharp and strong on the outside but hollow on the inside and would flake and crumble into powdery red shards when shattered, we watched it, growing behind the mossy grey wall that kept the hillside from coming down on us, the wall’s paint peeling as though it was skin, my skin growing blisters and sores and boils as we played beneath it—the miracle of dirt, the consequence of building cities, marching armies through the veins of a mud metropolis amid worm and snail, until it surpassed all the children, growing as tall as the house, even then its leaves still delicate: a thin head of hair that let in pock-marks of sun, small patterns all over the walls inside our rooms, a barren mass of effulgence that grew as we became adults and our parents children. I, the end of myself, mysterious and finite, like a wall pushed slowly by the powerful hulk roots of a tree, a wall at first made gently swollen, and then beset by cracks, fractures that grimace under the strain, until the concrete has lost the battle and is made inconsequential. We let the tree continue to get even thicker, respiring at nights above the house, as the roof, now in its shadow, looked on with longing, the house slowly cut open like an eternal wound, buried daily by mounds of fine tamarind leaves, each a written notice, warning of the coming rains and our eviction.