We had no difficulty agreeing that any piece of creative work is an implicit contract between a reader and an author. If all goes well, within the first few pages of the book, an equilibrium of understanding is achieved between the two parties about the journey they are both about to embark on. A dynamic of mutual expectation emerges: about the author’s commitment to forging an intimate communication through his written words and the reader’s willingness to travel along to meet the author on his or her terms.

In a translated work, however, this sort of an implied understanding between the reader and the writer takes on another layer of complexity as both parties are primed by their own cultural milieus, their moral norms, and their varying styles of communication, not to mention the myriad assumptions they hold about the zeitgeist of the times they are embedded in.

The Tamarind Tree posed some specific concerns in addition. In our shared task of shaping the text, we found a translator in Aniruddhan, whose commitment and spirit and dedication was to preserve the original text as much as possible but worked tirelessly with us to make some adjustments when absolutely called for.

The first four chapters revolve around the tales told by a local maverick Asan. In these chapters, we see the birth of a town and get to know the tamarind tree as an intimate character in the book. However, starting with the fifth chapter, a whole new cast of characters emerge, taking the reader through labyrinthine political power plays and the overarching theme of this book: a town’s growth and untimely decay caused by human avarice as witnessed in silence by a sprawling tamarind tree.

Other moments in the text called for clarifications in the form of adjudication with a foreign reader. For instance, a simple shaking of the head or a body gesture might mean one thing in the everyday semiotics of Tamil culture, but the same gesture might come to imply something entirely opposite in other cultures or have no significance at all. Based on the dialect or an idiomatic phraseology, a character who is not formally introduced in the beginning of a chapter might be instantly recognizable to a Tamil reader. But a foreign reader might miss this and would need to wait until the end of the chapter to be formally introduced to the same character. All of this character’s nuanced communication skills and delightful interactions would be missed along the way.

In short, it fell on our shoulders to renegotiate a contract with the new reader on the author’s behalf. How do we stay true to the original text, yet add guideposts to clarify intents and purposes in the author’s absence? We found ourselves in the unenviable situation of trying to imagine what the author might have done had he been presented with such a dilemma.