Free The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi

You were measured in heaven by the blood of your heirs and Thatha didn’t want to fall short. At his age, where life was not ahead of him but behind him, it was more important than ever that the Somayajula family name be carried on.
    I loved my grandfather dearly despite his anachronistic ways. Thatha was a man from an era long gone. A white burly moustache on his creased face made him look distinguished and his eyes were bright as if he couldn’t wait for the next day. Unlike Ammamma , Thatha was always ready with a quick joke, some smart repartee, and mischief. He was also one manipulating son of a bitch and I was now old enough to see it, but it didn’t change how I felt about him. I had seen Thatha twist and turn people around to suit his needs; I still adored him.
    My father disliked my grandfather and disliked him immensely. Nanna always had a tough time fitting into my mother’s family, but he tried and I commended him for that. My father didn’t have a large family and his parents were always traveling— my paternal grandfather worked in the Indian Foreign Services— and Nanna’s only sister, a doctor, was single and lived in Australia; we hardly ever saw her.
    Thatha didn’t like my father either. He would always say, but never to Nanna’s face, “Radha liked him and we said yes, but children make mistakes sometimes.”
    And maybe it was a mistake. My mother and father were unsuited in so many ways, yet they had managed to stay married for over twenty-eight years. In some sense of the word, they were probably even “happy.” But happiness is such a relative term that it sometimes loses definition.
    When my father turned twenty-five his family pressured him to get married and four years later he relented. His first arranged proposal was with my mother and he agreed to the match immediately. I think it was because he didn’t want to go through any more bride-seeing ceremonies. My father had probably not anticipated the problems that came of living close to his wife’s family. Many a fight ended with Ma bringing Nate and me to my grandparents’ house. Then Nanna would come to get us and there would be a drama of theatrical proportions. All through that drama, Thatha would play the villain, at least in Nanna’s eyes.
    During the elaborate fights, Nate and I would pretend that we were on just another trip to Ammamma’s house. We wouldn’t talk about how we felt, but it was there, a lurking fear that Ma would not take us back home and we would never see Nanna again.
    My parents fought; they always had. But there would be special fights when the argument would escalate to the point where Ma would yell and scream and drag us out of the house. She would be either carrying Nate or dragging him along on one side and on the other she would have my hand in hers in a firm grasp. There would be no running back to Evil Nanna .
    The gate crackled open and I lifted my eyes. Thatha was home from the construction site where he was building a new house that he could rent out. When he had told me that they were building yet another house, I had joked he was becoming a regular slum-lord. But for Thatha , building houses on the land he had purchased years ago was an investment, a future for his heirs, the ones yet to be born.
    He stepped inside his plot of land and opened his arms wide. I raced into them and felt like a little girl again, little Priya with her big old grandfather.
    “I was not here to welcome you,” he apologized. His eyes wandered to Neelima who had stood up and his sharp gaze I’m sure didn’t miss the tears on her cheeks. “What is with her?” he asked me, and nodded at Neelima who scurried inside the house.
    “Everyone is being perfectly mean to her,” I told him, and inhaled the smell of tobacco and cement that hung on him. Thatha chewed tobacco, a nasty habit in any man but him. He made it look dignified; or maybe I was just biased.
    “She is imagining it,” Thatha said, putting his arm