The New Yorker:

My ancestor was gifted a huge orchard just outside Delhi. The fruits it produced were the taste of my childhood.

By Madhur Jaffrey

Gifts from ancestors take the darndest forms. Mine included a tamarind tree, the tallest and most magnificent in our yard. My grandfather’s grandfather—a tall, corpulent Indian, prone to indulging in fine wines, fine poetry, and fine art—lived in Delhi and worked for the British. This was 1857, a time when Indians were gearing up to fight the British. The conflict that ensued would later be called India’s First War of Independence. The British would call it the Indian Mutiny.

The British put down the rebellion and my ancestor, whom Indians today might call a toady, helped. “We have eaten their salt,” he said, by which he meant that since he had been paid a salary by the British, he was honor-bound to support them. For this, the British gifted him and his family a huge orchard just north of Old Delhi’s city walls, on the banks of the Yamuna River.

On a bluff that eventually became his, my grandfather built a large house for his children and grandchildren. The back porch faced the sunrise and the river. A west-facing veranda in the front looked out onto the orchard. Sunset was often a flaming red, with seemingly a million green parrots with red beaks silhouetted against it, squawking their last for the day before disappearing into the dark of the fruit trees, which included mangoes, mulberries, apricots, falsas (Indian sherbet berries), jujubes, and one lone, mighty tamarind.

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