Mango Season

Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: Preeti Talwai’s essay lands on the taste buds and ripens into an impactful narrative about time, family, displacement, and chronic illness. It further examines the thin line demarcating what is considered delicious/desirable from the things that are almost sickeningly sweet.

Listen to Talwai read “Mango Season”:

Mango Season

The little patience I have, I learn from a mango tree. 

In Bangalore’s monsoon thunderstorms I stand with my grandmother, face tilted to the leafy sky, waiting for a blush to spread across it. 

I learn that ripening takes weeks and months. 

In the final days of summer, just before we fly home to California, she scoops golden flesh onto my tongue. 

I want to tell you that Indian mangoes are sweeter than American ones. But the only thing I remember of the American mango I eat later is the taste of my mother’s knife, which had cut garlic before it. 

My mother jars the mango and garlic, leaves it on the counter. The next week she spoons the pickle onto my steel plate and says, not to me: She always eats so fast. 

But speed is a trick of perception. My grandmother teaches me that although we perceive thunder after lightning, they are simultaneous. Once lightning backlights the veins of the mango leaves, we cannot outrun the thunder. 

The ulcerative colitis strikes in a flash of symptoms when I’m nineteen: my gut chasing food out of me, neon and bloody, the storm inevitable. But it has been ripening unwatched, turning my intestines cratered and pulpy. 

I discover the patience of bearing a chronic illness. For a decade I carry the rotting mango, its pit humming with maggots. I cannot rid myself of it, I cannot glance away. I don’t know what I’m watching for—I never learned what becomes of mangoes forgotten on the tree. But I have my guesses. 

When I’m thirty, the expensive biologic infusions begin. Under the thick heat of summer I wait for the medicine to start working, and I wait for the mangoes. 

When the mangoes arrive, my first bites cause pain under my ribs that is worse than labor.  I writhe for five hours, slick with sweat, until sleep takes me. The doctors think the medicine has altered my gut, making some foods suddenly dangerous. 

At the end of mango season I’m pronounced to be in remission on the same day they find precancerous dysplasia in my colon. They can only remove it three months later, after the biopsy site heals, after the bad cells decide whether to recede or develop. 

I learn again that ripening takes weeks and months. 

When they finally scoop the lot of bad cells and spread them on a stained slide, the margins are fuzzy. Rot remains under the rind. 

We wait and scoop, again and again. 

These scoops don’t land on my tongue. My tongue no longer waters for mango, my gut unable to bear it. 

My fruit bowl no longer holds fruit. Instead, it is filled with heads of garlic. They are always in season. 

I’ve come to love the burn of a clove pressed to my gum, crunching its raw flesh over the kitchen sink. Watching papery flecks of skin fall like the first snow over a land that’s only known the monsoon.