Summer reminds me of my mother and nani's love for mangoes from our UP village
Although it would already have been quite hot for a month, it was only in May that the anticipated cartons of mangoes would be distributed to all our homes. The mangoes came from relatively near, about an hour outside of Delhi on a good day, from a little village called Jogipura near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.
The route to the village is chaotic and mostly charmless. At the edge of east Delhi you drive past a neighbourhood of carpenters who specialise in furniture — a mahogany headboard sprawled here, a leg of a bed strewn there. They live above their shops in squat, square buildings, two or three stories high. Wires hang precariously tangled and frayed, causing my mother to shake her head and gasp as we drive slowly by, stuck in the inevitable traffic jam. Many of these houses are missing windowpanes and doorways. The finish, if it can be called that, is still of cement. Once in while, amidst all the grey, you'll see a house painted a deep mint green or a shocking pink.
Mostly, though, it still looks unfinished.
The rest of the route to Jogipura is much the same — hued with greys and brown, but with just enough intermittent charm to keep you looking out of the car window: green fields growing all sorts of vegetables and fruits, small mud huts with straw roofs, with the pile of cow-dung pats plastered on the walls or piled up in neat hills near the hut.
When we would reach Jogipura, we drove on a dirt road through fields, avoiding young men in black leather jackets (despite the heat) doubled-up on bikes and cows alike, and passing through huts and houses to fields and fields of fruits and vegetables like sugarcane, mustard, potatoes, cabbages, peas, pears, guava, and of course, orchards of mangoes.
I have never seen these mango trees ripe, but out of season they are short, wide and leafy. If you were so inclined, it would be quite easy to steal mangoes from them.
My uncle, a jocular man who somehow got ladled with the responsibility, would distribute the mangoes to the apartments of all his siblings, the five that then lived in Delhi. He delivered the rectangular cartons of mangoes made of rough hewn wood planks. The mangoes lay on straw, jostled closely together. The wood of the cartons is such that if you slid your finger on it, you would get a splinter embedding itself into your skin. There's a space in between the planks of the cartons so that you can poke your finger in and touch to see how ripe the mangoes are as you wait for them to become fit to eat. We piled the cartons one on top of the other in several stacks in the corner of the kitchen. The kitchen smelt cloying, humid somehow, a strong smell that permeated through our small house with its large garden.
Sometimes, fed up of the complaining and questioning from his siblings that he still hadn't brought the mangoes, and tired of explaining that they are not all ripe yet, my uncle brought over cartons with unripe mangoes so that we could all rest easy at least at the sight of them, as we waited for the mangoes to ripen.
Jokingly, my mother, who loves mangoes, would survey the plentiful stacks of cartons and ask my uncle, "So how long do we have to make these last?"
When I lived in Delhi, I never much cared for mangoes. I found them messy to eat and requiring too much work. Each year, my mother would renew her astonishment that I still didn't hanker for them the way she did. To persuade me to enjoy the fruit, which brings her so much joy, she would have it cut into bite-sized squares. She would remind me how I had always been finicky and entirely too neat and tidy as a child — at three years of age, whenever we were at a gathering where people left their shoes jumbled up in a pile outside a room, I would go to the heap and start finding the pairs and lining them up against the wall. At six, when we travelled, I would insist that my mother ironed all my clothes, even my underwear, before putting it in the suitcase. So, mangoes were entirely too messy for me, instead I would daintily eat the pieces she had had cut up for me at the end of lunch. That I could stop at one mango remains a source of incredulity for her.
For my mother, though, in those summer days, her lunch was a meal of mangoes and roti. She would pull her own sleeves up to the elbows, a pile of mangoes on the plate in front of her, and a quarter-plate with a couple of rotis on it beside her. She would start deftly peeling a mango, discarding the skin on a second plate and biting right in. The mangoes were ripe, a sort of orange-yellow, and the juice would drip down in sweet and sticky streams to her elbows. Intent on the fruit and the flavours, she didn't feel any discomfort, saying "But this is where the enjoyment is!"
When nani was still well enough to come to Delhi and stay with us in the summers, she would bargain with my mother about how many mangoes she could eat, despite her severe diabetes. She would start off with one, but keep adding to it, saying "How can you just enjoy one mango? You need at least two, and it's only at three that you start getting a full taste..."
Nani, who had shifted to dressing from the saris that she had worn for the better part of her life to salwar kameez which she found more comfortable in her older age, too would dive into the mangoes with gusto. My mother and nani weren't embarking on a meal, they were entering into a battle arena, and by god they were going to come out the winners!
It was a strange site to see these two beautiful women, sitting across the table from each other, entirely immersed in these rich, sweet meals of mangoes that they had anticipated for the whole year. Nani, with a neat black bun (she still dyed her hair), at the base of her neck, quickly peeling and eating mangoes, the sparkle of her diamond ring glittering through the adroit movement of her hands in the mango pile. My mother, usually still wearing a pastel cotton sari which she had worn to her work as a senior school teacher, composed and strict at school, eating mangoes here with abandon.
Last summer, when I went to visit my parents in their home of the last few years in the Hague, I saw a small carton with six mangoes neatly arranged in a golden base, chocolate-box-style. The mangoes were hard to the touch, they were parrot coloured with dabs of reds and greens. "You haven't eaten these?" I asked my mother, "Don't you want to?" She had shrugged her shoulders, casually saying, "What's the point? It's wouldn't even make a full meal."
In California, mangoes start appearing in grocery stores in early May, mostly in the form of one pale-yellow, lustreless mango that has been neatly sliced placed in a little plastic carton. It looks quite antiseptic. But I find myself puzzlingly drawn to them here. These ones in the stores have none of the soft, pulpy, sweet delight of the ones my mother and nani ate.
But buying this box, and having mangoes at home gives me a sense that yes, now it truly is summer.