Two months in our village

I must have been seven. We spent two months in our village when school would be closed. Vacation time was a time for fun. We spent the time in our hometown in Kerala.

Kerala back in the seventies was green with a capital G. Coconut trees were everywhere. Gently flowing rivers crisscrossed the land. Grandfather had a big family. He built a big house to accommodate his entire brood. Uncles, aunties, cousins, babies, and old balding relations lived in the house, and there was still room to spare. Once, I counted the rooms, and there were eleven on each floor. There was enough room to run around and play without getting in the way of the elders.

Three of my cousins were my age, and our idea of fun was to run all around the house, making a racket.

During one of our races around the house, we saw a line of workers carrying baskets over their heads and making their way to a storeroom. Naturally, we followed them. We were too short to see the contents of the baskets, but that was not necessary. The smell from the baskets gave away their contents. The baskets were full of mangoes, both ripe and green, in the hundreds. The workers began dumping the mangoes in a corner of the storeroom. Within minutes, the storeroom was stacked to the ceiling with mangoes.

The mangoes were from one of our farms. Needless to say, for the next couple of weeks, we survived on a mango diet. It was during this time that I learned that you should not have ripe mangoes on an empty stomach. I also figured out that too many mangoes can cause stomach ache.

Decades later now, when I go to the market and see mangoes selling at hundreds of rupees per dozen, I remember a time when we got tired of eating mangoes. A time when we had enough and did not value it.