As the novel’s title suggests, guavas are symbolically significant to Sampath’s journey, representing the freedom and simplicity he craves. The first appearance of a guava marks a major turning point in Sampath’s life. After Sampath loses his job and sinks into despair over his depressing circumstances, his mother Kulfi joins him on the roof of their house and kindly offers him a guava. As he shakes and squeezes the fruit, demanding answers from it, Sampath accidentally causes the guava to explode. This seems to give him a strange moment of clarity. He realizes how badly he wishes to be free, and the next morning he runs away from home to live in a guava tree. These events associate the guava fruit with the idea of freedom, a stark contrast to Sampath’s restrictive former way of life. The exploding guava shows him that nothing is stopping him from doing something sudden, unexpected, and most of all, liberating.
Sampath’s new life in the tree brings him closer to the same fruit, symbolizing how he’s seemingly achieved the freedom he sought. But after Sampath’s father Mr. Chawla brings modern complications to Sampath’s orchard, this desire for a free and simple life returns. At the end of the novel, Sampath can only reach perfect freedom by literally becoming a guava fruit himself, by mysterious means. A guava has a simple existence with no responsibilities, concerns, or complications, and this is exactly what Sampath has been seeking all along. For Sampath, becoming a guava is a kind of spiritual transcendence. As he truly becomes one with nature, the monkeys that live in his tree carry him far away from the people chasing after him, freeing him from the pressures and restrictions of the modern world forever.
Guava Fruit Quotes in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
He thought of Public Transport, of the Bureau of Statistics, of head massages, of socks and shoes, of interview strategies. Of never being left alone, of being unable to sleep and of his father talking and lecturing in the room below.
“No,” Sampath answered. His heart was big inside his chest. “No, I do not want an egg,” he said. “I want my freedom.”
He could not claim it. If only it would reach out and claim him instead. If he stayed here long enough within reach of its sights and sounds, might it not enter him in the manner landscape enters everything that lives within it? Wouldn’t the forest descend just this bit lower and swallow him into its wilderness, leaving his family, his devotees, to search fruitlessly for a path by which they might follow?
Here and there in the branches near him, the season’s last guavas loomed from amidst the moonlit leaves. One, two, three of them…so ripe, so heavy, the slightest touch could make them fall from the tree.
He picked one. Perfect Buddha shape. Mulling on its insides, unconcerned with the world… Beautiful, distant fruit, growing softer as the days went by, as the nights passed on; beautiful fruit filled with an undiscovered constellation of young stars.
He held it in his hand. It was cool, uneven to his touch. The hours passed. More stars than sky. He sat unmoving in this hushed night.
Guava Fruit Symbol Timeline in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
