three to mango

On summer, childhood, grandparents and, well, the obvious 🥭

Every time summer rolls around it brings an urge to create. To make something. Maybe that’s just what it means to be home: the pomegranate tree in my mother’s lawn is flowering, the bougainvillea my grandmother remembered to plant but forgot to point out to the gardener about is noticeably larger (it was never tied to the wall, so it just sprawls down and drags across the grass) and I am forced to create just to keep up. It is something that just happens. My body does things to become more visible amid the noise and the heat, to feel important and present. But there are no sounds left in me, no warmth and nothing grows, either. So I make do with words.

In the evening over tea the adults talk about mango varieties when my grandfather interjects, swearing these days they have hybrid varieties which feels a little unnatural (how can the same mango be both sweet and sour?) And when I sit down to edit I know I’ll think this is too on the nose, look at you, two years after moving out, visiting back home and writing about grandparents and tea and mangoes. But he tells me about those small ones, (anwar ratols, I think) and how the appropriate way to consume one was only softening it between your palms, peeling away the bottom and squeezing it into your mouth. I never truly listen whenever mangoes are discussed by name because as a child I learned to differentiate between them based on touch; the firm green ones were sour and my favourite, the soft ones belonged only in milkshakes, and the ones in the middle — both soft and firm; here and there — were never the best because they just couldn’t make up their minds. This is a habit that has only strengthened and expanded beyond mangoes or fruits of any kind with age (because everything can betray you but never your own hands): I pick what I like based on how it feels moving from the palm of my hand to my fingertips — clothes, pens, lovers.

Anwar Ratol

There is no sophisticated way to consume an anwar ratol, my grandfather reminds me. And they’re meant to be thrown into ice buckets and not refrigerators, that’s just the way to do it. His favourite mango story involves the unavoidable inconvenience that reveals itself at the centre of it, after you carefully carve four slices around the middle: the seed. As a child I refused to even entertain the idea of biting the length of it — it was too sticky and too sweet — and I never did like getting my hands dirty. Among photo albums full of me as a laughing, sweet, obedient child there are images of one transformed, a grimacing menace gingerly clutching what my cook calls the soul of a mango for fear it would slip and stain the rug. He — however — lived for the ghutli, always saving it for the end. The slices are just to warm up, he explains, the real prize is the middle. As a child mango consumption was competitive, victory secured only by how one treats the seed: the paler it became and the longer the fibrous hair stood sealed one’s fate. We would bite at them all day, he admits: in those days, you knew you would only get the one.

In those days. When I was a child, I could have three mangoes in a sitting if I liked, but I never did. Maybe that is why the seed irks me; for me it is messy, sticky, unnecessary, an annoyance, even. I could never be a competitive mango eater. I’ve never faced the restriction that necessitates love. As a child I think my parents tried, really tried to instil in me the love of softening a mango and peeling away at it, allowing and encouraging me to be messy. Maybe it was to make up for the pain of separating me from my grandparents and Lahore at the age of four: I remember thinking how foreign this was, what do you mean you’re changing me in the middle of the day just so I can eat fruit and make a mess? To think they expected me, who cried when she fell on grass not for the skinned palms but the stained knees, to sit on our marbled terrace in Karachi’s sea-smelling breeze with mango pulp around my mouth and enjoy it annoyed me. This was part of discovering, very early, that my parents may love me but they will never truly understand me.

Langra

My first memory of the langra is when, at the age of five, I pointed at the wares of a fruit-seller from the backseat of my grandfather’s car and yelled, “parrots!” This was our first week back in Lahore after moving, after which my father insisted on visiting every eid-summer-winter-spring-wedding-vacation. Taking my parents’ loud arguments as their cue, my grandparents would make up some excuse to trail me down the stairs and into the backseat of their black Corolla, asking me how much I had missed them. On one of those first drives I saw a whole flock of langras, so round and so green, it seems to have stuck with me. I developed an aversion to them early: they stuck in my imagination as sentient, they weren’t sour enough and I had confused them with keris too many times for me to trust them. I learned their name, it seemed, only to avoid them and by accident when my grandmother laughed, saying, “woh totay nahi hain, langray hain,” a double entendre translatable only singularly: those aren’t parrots, they’re mangoes.

I remember feeling embarrassed, then betrayed, and betrayal quickly dissolving into love: if anyone had to tell me the round green things on that man’s wooden cart weren’t parrots, better my grandmother than anyone else. She became the first puzzle my mind worked at (after those heavy, wooden block sets my parents insisted I spend time alone with, “for growth,” they said) — my stoic, loud, nit-picky grandmother: maker of late-night breakfasts and secret teas, bringer of beautiful princess dresses; enemy of my mother and my first best friend. How can someone love you so much but hate the thing you come out of? As a child it didn’t matter. I loved her and she loved me, and after three sons I was her first chance at creating something better than herself. To do this it was necessary to become my confidante and appoint my mother as a harsh discipliner — which, I imagine, she relished. Soon I was not my mother’s first child — no, I was my grandmother’s first grandchild, her first daughter.

Not that I ever resented that. I was happy with the attention, and still am. I decided very early (and perhaps it was because of this very dilemma) that there are times where it is completely justified to allow yourself to be loved without intervention. I was loved by both and sought by both; and as a girl I felt it my god-given right.

Chaunsa

There are few things I remember about adolescence. I remember getting my first pair of glasses, and punching a boy for a mild offence. I remember moving schools and the possibility of leaving Karachi forever. And I remember this ad, with a lovely, shiny black-haired woman leaning back with mango juice slowly dripping around her mouth. It was bizarre and it left me awestruck. This looked nothing like the modest Shezan cartons my mother’s father kept ready under his staircase before we visited: instead of a red and white box there was a long capped bottle; its contents weren’t shiny and pale yellow, it was like liquid gold and so thick it clung to her. The Shezan cartons, packed to the brim with 24 little juice boxes, always smelled like ripe mangoes left in the sun: like summer, like home, like childhood. But this, this seemed different. More mature. I could drink from a bottle, like an adult. Where did it come from? Was that how she was so beautiful? Because of the mango juice? The thicker-sweeter-golden-er-not-just-for-kids mango juice?

Could I ever look like that?

2011 marked the end of my separation from my grandparents: my parents had finally split up, and I would no longer have to pretend to be happy in Karachi. Shuffling between almost-full cardboard boxes I dialled my grandfather’s office and asked, hurriedly, “what kind of mangoes do they use for mango juice? Could you get some for me when I come home next week?”

That was the first (and last, that I recall) time I had asked for a mango by name. Come summer I would exclusively consume chaunsas, a variety that — to my delight — could be cubed and eaten with a fork so I would feel less like a child because there would be no sticky hands or sticky chins or washing up to do after. Every summer my grandparents would make sure a paiti would arrive — and still does arrive — a large wooden crate packed with chaunsas and set up in the kitchen for free access. It is arguably the best kind of mango — the sweetest, the softest, a national favourite — which is why I grew tired of it quickly.

The ad began to annoy me. That much only took a few months. So what if it was the best, it just wasn’t the best to me. It was repetitive. So the lady got some mango juice on her mouth and didn’t even bother to wipe it off. I thought, if I did that my mother would laugh before she got angry. And what was so special about it anyway? Sometimes the mangoes were too soft, too yellow, and they began to bore me. I preferred the keris my grandmother pickled instead: they were smaller, harder, and green, and so sour which felt more exciting and less childish. She noticed this quickly, and began to set a plate aside for me. My break from “childhood”, then, rested on my love and then quick disdain for chaunsas, bringing me right where I had begun. Beneath that was, I think, a desire to stay that young forever; my parents’ separation and subsequent divorce had exhausted me and I felt much too fragile to think I could never sport a sticky chin post-mango, that I would always need to be armed with a fork to eat.

A few years later it seemed the ad had all but disappeared, and I wondered, foolishly, if I had managed to finally will it away. I remember asking someone why they didn’t show it anymore, and being told it had been banned on account of its “impropriety”. I don’t know if that’s true, and I never bothered to check: to me it meant simply that I could be a child for longer. I had returned to my childhood home, I had fallen in love with and abandoned cubed-and-forked mangoes, and my Shezan — packed in boxes that smelled faintly of mango sap — never needed a now-banned ad to convince me of its worth. I had everything again. Things were less confusing, and in my head only because of my return to my place between my grandparents. Now between them, givers and re-givers of childhood, older and arthritis-ridden, I consider this, until my grandmother interjects, saying, of the taste if mangoes this season, well, what do we know, the doctor said I can only have one.

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