A student’s winning podcast looks back to a way of life she never knew

Avani Yaltho’s podcast, The Things We Buried, begins with the trill of a wooden flute. The haunting sound propels the listener on a trip into the past, set in motion by her first line:

“My grandmother says mango trees used to belong to everyone.”

Her narrative takes listeners to the villages of Kerala, a state at the southern tip of India, where Avani’s grandparents grew up. Her story explores the things that have disappeared over decades of urbanization and globalization in India.

Our judges found it so moving that they chose The Things We Buried, from the nearly 2,000 entries we received, as this year’s grand prize winner for high school in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge.

“It was a beautiful exploration of what can be lost over time,” said B.A. Parker, a host of NPR’s Code Switch and one of this year’s judges. “And she smartly shepherds conversations with her family while holding the hand of the listener in a cool way.”

Avani describes communities full of colorful houses with doors wide open to the world. Groups of children would run to the mango tree in town and wait for the wind to shake the fruit loose.

“No fences, no ownership — just laughter, sticky fingers and the simple joy of being together,” she says in her podcast. “That was Kerala.”

Her descriptive prose at times feels like something out of a storybook, and she uses family interviews to weave a cohesive narrative.

“[Now,] if you go to most of the towns or villages, you’ll find an elderly couple living there alone,” Avani’s grandfather, Jacob George, says in the podcast. “The youngsters are nowhere to be found. The kids are leaving. They don’t want to stay in India.”

Saira George, Avani’s mom, jumps in to add: “It’s more like they were leaving for better opportunities — their education, jobs abroad.”

Decades ago, Avani’s grandparents were some of those “youngsters” who were leaving India for more opportunity. They settled in Texas and raised their daughter. Now, their granddaughter is a second-generation Texan and a senior at St. Agnes Academy in Houston.

She said getting older has made her think about her childhood more, and the difference between her youth and that of her grandparents.

“It’s just kind of crazy to me that I haven’t had fruit that I picked from a garden,” Avani told NPR when we visited her at home in Houston. “I’ve never had that … and a part of me wishes that I got to see what was before.”

Avani has been to India once, but all that’s left of her grandmother’s house and the mango tree is a couple of bricks and a stump. The fields near where her grandfather grew up are now subdivided into small plots full of houses.

When she started her podcast, she enlisted the help of a cousin in Kerala to find sounds of children playing outside. But, she told us, when she got the recorded clips back, all you could hear was the sound of traffic in the background. Similarly, the birds posed a big challenge.

“It was difficult to get those bird sounds, and specifically the koel bird,” she told us. “No one could find it.”

Many things are different, but sometimes an unexpected comfort from home will take root. For Avani’s family, that comfort comes in the shape of a curry leaf tree growing up the side of their house in Houston.

Years ago, her grandmother tossed some seeds outside without much thought. Now, that tree is thriving. So, who knows, Avani says. Maybe a garden is next.

You can listen to The Things We Buried, here.