Mangoes and a Good Day

I feel like a lot of what I’ve been posting lately has been on the negative side, and I’ve been waiting for a fabulous mood to strike or a great day to happen so I can try to balance out the negativity. The opportunity has struck!

First I’m going to talk about my good day today, and then I’ll talk about mangoes, which have been a huge part of my life here.

Haha I was just about to start talking about my lovely day, when I saw a huge cockroach walking across the kitchen floor toward where Helen was about to start eating a mango. I tried to calmly get her to leave so I could kill it without freaking her out, but in the end I wound up saying something like, “Comeinherethere’sacockroachunderyou!!” We killed that one (which was huge, did I mention?) and then almost immediately found another smaller one by the fridge, which resulted in a frenzy of spraying and being paranoid. I wound up standing on a chair because it offered a better vantage point and superior protection to standing on the floor, while Helen bravely continued spraying everything in sight.

Now… back to that good day.

I woke up feeling good (and not sick), got ready for work, and biked with Helen. When we got there, I had some work to do on the annual report, and then I received the rest of the reports that I needed to finish it. I ended up being very busy with work all day and also chatting with my friend Amee over Gmail. At lunch, Girija told us he was planning to go to Ranchi the day after tomorrow and invited us to go along, so it looks like we’ll do that. After lunch, I sat with Satish and worked out a lot of details about donors and projects and stuff, and we worked until about 6.

Helen and I came home, ate mangoes and dates, and then Shradha told us we were invited to go with the family to a 10-year-old boy’s birthday party later. In the meantime, Shradha and Uncle took me to an ATM and to buy more mangoes (which I’ll talk more about later). We went to the party, which had tons of adorable small children. The birthday boy asked us the few questions he knew how to ask in English (“How are you? Where are you from?”), and his family took pictures with us. They fed us dinner, which Auntie had gone over and cooked earlier in the evening. Dinner was absolutely delicious, and also very spicy. I’m amazed, but my stomach has actually been fine with it. (I did take some pre-emptive Tums when I got home, though.)

Overall, today was productive, active, and involved exciting plans for the future, which are all things I’d been lacking.

Now for mangoes.

This, right here right now, is the peak of mango season. I’ve been hearing about it since I got here. Mangoes are cheap right now, and the ripest ones are firm, juicy, sweet, and packed with the tangy mango flavor that everyone loves. The best mangoes are called the King of Mangoes, which brings really silly imagery to mind for me. Helen and I have been eating 1-3 mangoes per day (each, not combined [though I took a brief hiatus when my stomach was struggling]).

We ran out of mangoes today, and mango season will be over soon (a few weeks left, at the most), so I was eager to go out and buy more while the buying is good. Uncle is notoriously good at picking out  mangoes, so I was glad that he happened to be going out and was willing to take me mango shopping.

Uncle is really fun to watch shop. He chose his favorite mango stand (which to the untrained eye [mine] looks exactly like the surrounding mango stands), and he talked to the shopkeeper in Hindi, gesturing to the mangoes. The shopkeeper handed him mango after mango, and he held them up in the light, looked at them critically through his bifocals, felt their firmness and skin texture, and eventually rejected them all. He got the shopkeeper’s assistant to go around to the back of the stand and pull out a crate of mangoes, and he was able to quickly pick out the best ones. I bought 2 kg of mangoes, which was 7 mangoes, plus a kg of my favorite apples.

My time here has been marked with mangoes: the ones when I first got here, that I ate messily while Skyping with Jeff; later, the ones I ate at breakfast at Satish’s house; in Kolkata, the mangoes that we had to stuff ourselves with because Uncles bought too many; and now, the best mangoes of all, which will soon be running out. Uncle said that the mango season still has two or three weeks left. I told him I’m hoping it’s three weeks, because I leave in four, and I can’t imagine being here without a steady stream of mangoes.