Ekaambaram

My mother named it Ek-aam-baram.

A name born of Urdu and Tamil,

Like us Dekkanis trilingual in our native tongues -

The vernacular, the Mother, and the coloniser’s discourse –

Because it stubbornly bore

Just one and only one Banganapalli

At the end of each sweltering mango season,

Weighing green from its stem,

Ponderous, solemn, decided.

Manjula and I planted the slimy seed one muggy summer afternoon,

After we had scraped its flesh off with our teeth,

Flinging the skin over our shoulders into the shrubs

Surrounding the sun-bleached trough where we eight year old’s crouched,

In a worn blue pavadai sattai and a white cotton slip,

Shoulder’s wrapped around her bony and my chubby knees.

Ten years later, Manjula visited to ask for help with her newborn daughter’s surgery

Because her drunkard painter husband was

Dipping into an arrack glass as thick as his head.

My mother gave her Rs. 500 back then

And a basket of mangoes from the shower

Ekaambaram defiantly pummeled us with that summer

To be carried by our new domestic help from the slum

As Manjula walked home barefoot on the blistering tar road

And I watched from my cane chair, in jeans and a literary classic.

When I visited my parent’s home the last time,

A mother myself, with my first born in my arms,

Manjula’s striking 13 year old slung the mangoes home in a gunny sack

While her mother and I cried at the casual divergence of our lives

After our girlhood summers,

Our eyes squinting from the glint of the kaleidoscopes we called our separate paths,

As many hued as Ekaambaram’s fruit scattered in my mother’s backyard.

Manjula carrying my first-born in December 2006, in my mother's garden, Madras, India.
As is evident, her beauty remains as youthful as ever thanks to back-breaking labor on construction sites, while I was already sagging even 11 months after my very first delivery (!).