Mango Mania

Prasanna flung his school bag on the sofa, loosened his tie and switched on the air conditioner.

“Prasanna, don’t switch on the A.C. as soon as you come in from the hot sun”. Amma brought a glass of chhach for him. “Get ready for lunch."

Prasanna made a face. “It's too hot, Amma, I am not hungry.”

"You must have lunch," insisted Amma. "If you don’t feel like eating rice and rasam, at least munch some fruit. It is not healthy to miss meals." Amma marched into the kitchen.

"Wow! Juicy chilled mangoes! Mom I love you,” Prasanna hugged his mother as she offered him a tray filled with freshly-cut slices of golden mangoes.

“You little actor! Weren’t you saying you were not hungry? Now, has the  hungry ogre, suddenly, started dancing inside your tummy?” laughed Amma.

"Do you have any idea how hot it is? I can’t have hot rasam !” whined Prasanna.

"But mangoes cannot be your meals, Prasi,” scolded Amma.

“Last summer when we visited Patti in Salem, she told me, as a child, you climbed mango trees in summer and ate mangoes to your heart' s content.”

“Oh! The days of childhood!” remembered Amma, fondly. “It will never be the same again. Playing on swings and eating mangoes plucked from trees.”

“Mmm, chilled mangoes...,” Prasanna was gorging on the sweet wedges.”

“But Prasi, the mangoes we ate were not chilled,” Amma remarked.

“Did you eat hot mangoes?”

"Well, there were no refrigerators then,” Amma explained.

“How could you enjoy eating mangoes, then?” Prasanna was not amused.

“We enjoyed plucking ripe mangoes off the trees by ourselves. We ate some of them still sitting on the trees. The rest we took home.”

Prasaana wanted to hear more, “And then?”

“Then, my Amma, would soak the mangoes in a bucket of water. That would cool the warm mangoes.”

"So soaking the mangoes cooled them?" Prasanna chuckled.

“Indeed. The same way was used for other summer fruits too, like litchies and apricots.”

All of a sudden, Amma remembered something. Her eyes brightened.

"Prasi, I remember a funny incident about your Maaman. He was very young. He had noticed how my Amma cooled the mangoes. One day at lunch, he found the sambar too hot. He quickly went to the bucket of soaked mangoes and  quietly floated his bowl of sambar in the bucket. He thought that the sambar would cool like the mangoes "

Prasanna started laughing, “And...what happened?”

“Of course, the bowl tilted and tipped the sambar on to the mangoes below,” Amma smiled at the memory.

 “And did Mamaan get a scolding?”

“Oh no! He didn’t tip the sambar into the mangoes on purpose.”

“Then you ate mangoes tasting of sambar? That must have been an unusual flavour!” Prasanna cheekily remarked.

“They were sweeter than your slices because they tasted of my childhood fun.” Amma put a mango wedge into her mouth.