The Mangoes that tasted of summer

Mangoes and Kokum

Harish Dixit

Senior Infrastructure Manager – APAC

Linkedin

---

There is something quietly extraordinary about the way a childhood memory can find you when you least expect it.

Not through photographs or stories told at dinner tables, but through a smell, a sound, or the sight of someone you love doing something wonderfully unselfconscious.

Last week, I was on a family vacation in Dapoli, Ratnagiri, when it happened to me.

We had woken early that morning to the fluting calls of the Indian Blackbird and set off on a morning walk through the resort’s magnificent Aamrai, a grove of over 3,000 mango trees sprawling across 55 lush acres.

The previous night’s storm had been generous.

Mangoes lay scattered across the ground.

That is when my wife abandoned all adult composure, and started gathering them with the unbridled joy of a seven-year-old.

Watching my wife gather fallen mangoes from a rain-soaked path in Dapoli, brought back a childhood memory, bright and whole, like a childhood song you never quite forgot.

Every summer, when the schools closed and the city of Mumbai grew hot and restless, our family would make the long journey to our native village in Uttar Pradesh.

For a child, that train ride alone felt like the beginning of a grand adventure, full of passing fields, and the slow, magnificent widening of the sky.

The village was everything Mumbai was not. Quiet. Green. Unhurried. And best of all, it had the mango orchards.

On one particular golden afternoon, a band of us children had slipped away for our favourite forbidden sport of harvesting mangoes by lobbing stones at the branches.

One boy stood guard, watching for grown-ups. The mangoes were ripe and heavy, and the air smelled impossibly sweet. We felt like the cleverest children in the world.

Then the alarm was raised. The orchard caretaker was coming.

What followed was the most dramatic sprint of my young life.

Small legs pumping, heart hammering, I ran until the village temple appeared before me and my lungs simply refused to carry me further. I bent over, breathless, and waited for my fate.

The caretaker arrived. And then he did the most unexpected thing in the world. He laughed.

He offered me water from the hand pump nearby, asked me gently why I was running, and walked me all the way home. My father was waiting at the door.

The two men exchanged a few words and then both burst into laughter that I could not understand at all.

My father knelt down and explained, still smiling, that the orchard was ours. Every last tree.

There had never been anything to fear. He even asked the caretaker to bring me the finest mangoes he could find the very next day.

I stood there feeling wonderfully, gloriously silly.

It was a comforting memory to recall. The human mind is an amazing thing and so is our childhood!

-chalatmusafir (HD)