something to do with mangoes

My relationship with mangoes is complicated by memory in the way that everything good is eventually complicated by memory. Summer in Delhi means mangoes from the cart outside Khan Market, which are always the Dussehri, sweet and slightly stringy, the kind you eat leaning over the kitchen sink because there's no dignified way to eat them. My mother cuts hers differently — with a knife, in precise pieces — and I've never managed to learn this. I eat them wrong and she lets me. The first mango of the season always produces in me a small, involuntary joy before anything else. Before the memory or the associated emotion or the complicated feelings about home. Just: the mango. Then the rest. My grandfather used to say that the only honest thing you can say about a mango is that it's good. Everything else is editorial. He was, in most things, the opposite of a simple man — he was complicated, opinionated, frequently wrong about things with great confidence. But about mangoes he was clear.