For Kannada Version Click Here
Mango season. Ah, what a time.
The joy of dipping tender raw mango slices into a mixture of chilli powder and salt and eating them with your friends… the extra taste that came from doing it without the elders noticing… the thrill of knocking down mangoes with stones while making sure the owner never found out. Some things have to be lived. There is no real pleasure in merely describing them.
Ours was a teachers’ colony. Durga Teacher, Gopal Master, and my father, Ganapati Master—between the children of these three households were as thick as thieves. Ha… ha… ha…
It was annual exam season. Exams were held in the mornings, and the afternoons were left free for preparing for the next day’s paper. Not all our parents had holidays, so we teachers’ children would be left at home, rulers of our own little kingdom.
There must have been ten or twelve of us, from Class Two right up to Class Ten. Some of our classmates who lived farther away would also spend their afternoons with us in the name of combined study. What fun that was.
We would return from school, eat lunch, and stay enthusiastic about studying for the next day’s exam until about half past three. After that, one by one, people would begin to wander off. Even if someone still felt like studying, the sight of everyone else disappearing was enough to make them forget the exam altogether.
The Nekkare mango tree behind Gopal Master’s house would be there, waving us over.
We would get the “donti” (Long bamboo stick with a hook) ready. All four of Gopal Master’s children would join us. Some mangoes we plucked; some we brought down with stones. Within fifteen minutes we would have gathered eight or ten of them.
By then, the three children from Durga Teacher’s house would arrive carrying coconut oil and chilli powder. From our house came the salt, a vessel, a knife, green chillies, curry leaves and whatever else was needed. Everything would find its place on the stone platform in the courtyard.
We prepared it all with great care, no less expertly than Pachadi Maam (the legendary Pachadi Maam of Bantwal).
By then it would be four o’clock.
School ended at four, which meant it was time for our parents—and Sunita Teacher—to start returning home.
Before they arrived, we would divide up the pachadi and finish every bit of it. We would leave the place so clean that there was no sign of what had been made or eaten. Then, with books in hand, we would sit there looking like model students.
Today, my granddaughter sat down to eat a tender mango that her friend had given her. She brought out a knife, salt and chilli powder, just as we used to.
And another coach rolled past on the tracks of memory.
Only this time, unlike then, my teeth refused to cooperate.
They had already turned sour.
By Veena Shanbhogue
Translation and Preservation by Sumanth Shanbhogue for Shanbhogue Publications
Shanbhogue Publications 
Leave a comment