Father and son relationship

The exam question from the STX A exam on August 18th 2017 asks you to focus on the father and son relationship in the short story “The Tree of War” by Tanya Datta.

The father-son relationship is characterised by absence, as the father lived in India for the past six years while his wife and son moved to North London and left him behind. Because of this, the father-son relationship has become estranged. For instance, when he finds out that his father is going to join them in England, Krishna is confused:

When Mum first told me that my father was coming to England six years after we’d left him behind in India, I climbed into her wardrobe (…) I tried out the word ‘Dad’ over and over again to see if I could get my mouth around it. (ll. 83-87)

Krishna does not like the resemblance between him and his father, which functions as a reminder of the man’s absence:

… we were practically identical. My father has skin the colour of Jaffa cakes, exactly like me. He’s tall, too, the way I’m shaping up to be. Heavy drooping eyelids give his face the same sleepy look as me, although he’s anything but sleepy. (ll. 90-92)

Furthermore, the distance between his parents reminds Krishna of the tense family situation they had in India:

In fact, just seeing my father in the garden stirred up another garden deep inside me: a long-forgotten, baking-hot garden, in which my mum and dad are rolling around on the grass, trying to kill each other – no joke – while I throw pieces of Lego at them to try to make them stop. (ll. 106-109).

The father-son relationship is also affected by the man’s lack of interest in ...