The Tree With Eyes and Other Stories
Author: Bela Negi
Publisher: Tranquebar
ISBN: 9789371976824
Emerging from the very marrow of the western Himalayas, these are stories about grief and loss. Pain and madness. Humour and absurdity.
Here a man and his mother witness the landscape around their home change gradually, while persistent pain slowly eats away at his body. A couple wait for eternity to be with each other, while the world makes demands on their time and youth. In the eponymous story, a newly married young woman looks out the window at a tree and tries to ignore the sounds of her own intensifying loneliness. A runaway returns to his childhood home and finds it forever changed. A man searches for his old grandmother one night and discovers an open secret.
Narrated with unusual empathy and gentle understanding, these are tales of lives shaped by migration, ecological change and the slow erosion of belonging. The mountains here are not a backdrop but a living presence—at times companion and at times an unsettling force.