Free The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi Page A

around me. We walked inside the veranda and he groaned comically at the voices coming from the hall. “They are all here?”
    “Mango pachadi ,” I supplied laughing. It was good to see the old man and it was good to be this comfortable with him even after seven years.
    He looked around mischievously and then winked at me. “The pomegranate tree has some red, red fruit; let’s go,” he whispered, and we both sneaked out holding hands.
    The pomegranate tree and a few mango trees were scattered in the area between my grandparents’ house and the house they gave up for rent. As a child I was not allowed to wander around the fruit trees because more than once I had fallen sick eating too many not so ripe pomegranate seeds.
    It was a ritual. We would come for a visit and Thatha would sneak me away to eat the forbidden fruit. We would usually get caught because I would end up with some fruit stains on my clothes. My mother would never let it slide. She would kick up a fuss and Thatha would apologize and the next time we came for a visit, he would take me to the pomegranate tree again. We were partners in crime. We were pals.
    “Here.” Thatha peeled a pomegranate fruit with his pocket-knife, broke it open, and handed me a piece of the fruit. We sat down on the stairs that led to the apartment upstairs and watched the traffic go past the metal gate of his house.
    “So how is my American-returned granddaughter?” he asked amicably.
    “Doing well. But things here don’t seem that . . . well,” I said, slurping over juicy pomegranate seeds.
    He sighed. “Anand . . .” He paused thoughtfully, then continued, “made a mistake. . . . But what do they say in English? To err is human?”
    I shook my head. “He married the woman he loves; that’s a blessing, not a mistake.”
    Thatha ’s eyes twinkled. “Love isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, Priya. Marriage needs a lot more than love.”
    “But love is essential,” I argued.
    “You fall in love later,” he said with a patriarchal wave of his hand, “ after you get married and have children ”
    I wanted to argue the point with him, even though I knew it was futile. He was set in his ways and I in mine. We lived by a different set of philosophies. In his rulebook, duty was high on the list, and in mine, personal happiness was a priority.
    “What if you never fall in love with your wife . . . or husband?” I questioned.
    Thatha gave me another piece of fruit embedded with bright shiny pomegranate seeds. I took it from him and started peeling the seeds off from their rind before popping them into my mouth. It wasn’t the season for pomegranates but this one had ripened early and was sweet.
    “You always love your wife . . . or husband, as the case might be,” he said in that authoritarian tone that broached no further dispute.
    But he knew just as well as I did that unlike his children and other grandchildren, that tone would not deter me. It had been that way since the beginning. I had had the most arguments with Thatha , the most debates, and, ultimately, the most fights. We discussed various subjects and passionately argued our stance; even when I called him from the U.S., we’d get excited talking about something and our tempers would flare. I think he respected me because I was opinionated and not afraid to tell him how I felt and because I openly disagreed with him. Sometimes I felt that I argued a point just to earn his respect. He was important to me; his opinion mattered; he mattered.
    The man was a bigot, a racist, a chauvinist, and generally too arrogant for anyone’s liking, yet I loved him. Family never came in neat little packages with warranty signs on them. Thatha was all that I disliked in people, but he was also a lot more—he had a backbone of steel and an iron will to make the best of a bad situation. When Thatha joined the State Bank of AP right after Independence, he was just a lowly bank teller. When he retired he had been a bank