The Mango Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

instead.
    I leaned back and closed my eyes. Another week and a half, just another eleven days, and I’ll be out of here. I repeated it to myself like a mantra.
    My grandmother’s house had always been a home away from home, a place where my mother couldn’t always dominate and coerce. A home where I was spoiled often and where not all of Ma’s rules applied. I had played in this house since I was born, and as we got close to it, I immediately recognized the smells emanating from the streets and the surroundings. It was a blow to my olfactory senses that even after seven years I still knew how this place smelled and how the air tasted.
    The house stood on a large premium plot of land in the center of the city. Coconut trees grew around it and there was a well that had been used for years in the old-fashioned way to draw water. The well now had a motor pump that extracted water from the ground and filled the overhead tanks, but evidence of the old ways hung on the well in the form of a piece of old frayed coconut rope dragged over a rusty metal pulley.
    When I was twelve years old it had been a rite of passage for me to be allowed by my grandfather to bring up a bucket of water from the well. Ma had been scared that I wouldn’t be able to pull the heavy bucket and that it would pull me inside the well instead. She wanted me to have help, but Thatha had been adamant that I do it all by myself. I had rope burns on my soft palms but I strutted around like a proud peacock for days after that.
    There was a small two-room house for the servants in one far corner of the plot and on another corner there was a large house that my grandparents rented. They had even constructed a second floor to their house. It was a modern three-bedroom apartment, which my grandparents rented out, too. They lived downstairs with my aunt Sowmya. Sowmya was three years older than I, and like me was not married, but unlike me had always wanted very much to be.
    Ma paid off the auto rickshaw driver who winked at me as he told my mother with a straight face that the fare was only pandrah rupiya . We carried the basketful of mangoes to the house gate. Ma opened the gate and yelled for my grandparents’ servant.
    Badri was my grandparents’ new servant. He and his wife Parvati had taken residence in the servant quarters just a year ago. Badri did all the gardenwork and cleaned the yard, while Parvati did the dishes and swept and mopped the floors in the house.
    The old maidservant I grew up with, Rajni, was as much a part of my childhood as my grandparents’ house. She had left a year after I went to the United States, to go back to her village to live with her son.
    Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen, but my grandparents had given her access to pretty much everything else. Sowmya cooked and left the dishes outside where Rajni cleaned them. Sowmya would take the clean dishes back inside the kitchen to put them in their rightful places. I used to think Rajni was a slacker because she didn’t do that part.
    It had been a rainy day when my grandmother explained to me that Rajni was from a lower caste and we were from the highest caste. She couldn’t enter our kitchens; in fact, in the good old days, lower caste people wouldn’t even be allowed inside the house and Rajni would be untouchable, in every sense of the word. Things were apparently better now, Ammamma had said. “We Brahmins have become more tolerant, what with the days being so mordern and everything.” She hadn’t sounded too happy about the modern days.
    I picked up our bags and helped Badri put the basket of mangoes on his head. My mother walked into the house like a queen as Badri and I followed like servile courtiers.
    I smiled when I entered the grilled veranda on which a huge wooden swing swayed, covering it almost entirely—an obvious hazard for children. The swing had always been on the veranda. I probably wouldn’t recognize the veranda without