The Wet Season:

The year I was born was the year my grandmother died.

Rains were heavy that year, my grandfather told me later. My grandmother passed away in the heart of a whipping thunderstorm, and I was born a week before amidst a drizzle. That was a sign, he always said – he was a big believer in signs. He never clarified whether it was a good one or a bad one.

I know it’s not possible that I remember my grandmother – I was only six days old when she died. But sometimes, when I’m feeling wistful, my eyes will drift shut and I’ll catch a whiff of jasmine woven between oily black curls, or feel soft, wrinkly arms rocking an infant to sleep. My mother scolded me once for having an overactive imagination and no respect for my elders (which, as we all know, is a fatal combination for an Indian girl), and she was probably right. I still like to imagine though, because the alternative is that all that’s left of my grandmother is a few albums of peeling sepia photographs and echoes of rain.

That was also the year my grandfather planted a mango tree. He got into gardening soon after my grandmother died. Without having to care for her constantly, he said, he felt like he had nothing to do with his time anymore. So he filled her emptiness with roots. Coconut palms with fruits that had hairy shells, pomegranate trees bearing bright red fruits with seeds like sparkling pink gems. His hands became calloused from gripping a rake, and a permanent stripe of dirt decorated his nails. His favorite spot in the garden was the small patch of earth where he knew the grafted mango sapling grew, a bright sliver of green laboring for the sky, yearning to fruit. He would check on it twice a day, careful to water it according to the seasons and to make sure the dog never got to its precious leaves.

It flowered for the first time when I was four, and, although my memory of those days is hazy, I’m sure I saw tears behind his thick bifocals. That day, I asked him the story of the mango tree. It wasn’t an uncommon request – my grandfather, in my mind, was the Story Weaver. It didn’t matter to me that he’d dropped out of school before he was fourteen or that the only job he’d ever worked was at a run-down steel plant; the words he spoke were magic. He didn’t paint a picture in my mind so much as transform it into an IMAX theater – watching Avatar for the first time in 3D had nothing on the captivation I felt when I listened to my grandfather recount an age-old fable. By four, I had exhausted all the usual tales – the stories of the Panchatantra, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana – and so when I waddled up to him, claiming to be bored and begging for a story, he sat me down and told me about the mango tree. Of course, he feigned reluctance at first, like always, but his eyes sparked with enthusiasm as he finally conceded and said, “Okay, mol, but promise me you’ll listen closely.”
I nodded fervently, as I did every time. “Yes, Appacha. I promise.”

He smiled and leaned back in the splintering bamboo porch chair that I’ve come to associate with him. “When your grandmother and I were young, we lived in a small village in the southernmost tip of India. Life was easy there, simple. As children, we played barefoot in dirt and walked fifteen miles to school. My father grew trees in our garden – we had ten acres all to ourselves. Banana, papaya, you name it, we had it. My favorite food in the whole world was our homegrown mango. Every summer, when the fruit grew golden and we knew it was ripe, my brothers and I would climb the trees and pluck it. Sometimes we would eat the mangoes while still tangled in the branches, like monkeys. My mother would do the most amazing things with the fruit. She could fry it and serve it as fritters, or cook it into curry. She could pickle it, she could juice it, she could chop it up and serve it cold as a refreshing snack when we arrived home tired from school. To me, mango was magic. I was a small boy in a small village, but the only dream I had back then was to grow up and be exactly like my father, growing mango trees in the backyard. But when your grandmother and I got married, we knew we couldn’t raise our children in Chengannur. We wanted to give your father and his siblings the best possible life that we could. So we moved to Bhilai, a big city, and we had a great life there. Still, I suppose there was always a part of me that wished we had lived in our village, and had the life I always dreamed of as a child. So that’s why, mol,” he concluded, looking back at me and the past at the same time, “I love the mango tree so much. When I smell mangoes, I know that I’m home. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, of course, but I was so hypnotized by his voice that I tried to pretend I did. He kept smiling, but the corners of his mouth drooped down a little and he tilted his head back, closing his eyes as though the weight of the world was forcing his lids shut. I could tell something was upsetting him, so I slid from my chair to the ground besides his knees, my back pressing against the hard iron railing of the porch. Earlier, I had plucked a flower from the mango tree and, as I sat with my grandfather in the fading daylight while mosquitos buzzed in the humid air around us, I studied it, analyzing the facets of what my grandfather was so amazed by and struggling to find its worth. It was a creamy white blossom, ornamented with yellow dashes of color in the middle, with browning petals slightly crushed by my overeager grip. I brought the flower to my nose, attempting to commit its sweet perfume to memory.

The smell of home.

My grandfather and I sat out there until the white light of noon melted into a soft gold and the sky was the shade of pink lips stained by the juice of pomegranate seeds. We did this so many times, almost every day after almost every new story, that my childhood became defined by these evenings. The chirping of insects permeating the moist air heavy with rain while I curled by my grandfather’s knees watching the sun die.

My childhood became Crayola skies and humid nights.

***

The Dry Season:

We left for England when I was five years old. I begged my grandfather not to let me go; while my parents loaded luggage into a rickety taxi, I climbed up a pillar of our house and hugged it tightly, refusing to move. My grandfather gradually talked me down with a few choice words and a smoky embrace – although he gave up cigarettes years ago, he always smelled slightly of smoke and earth to me – which was persuasive enough for me, because my grandfather was never the hugging type. The trip is foggy in my mind, shrouded by a veil of hot tears and temper tantrums. 

My sister was born three months after we settled into a cramped apartment in bustling Manchester. Her first word was “Mummy”, not “Amma”, and, as she grew, she spoke with the crisp, clipped tones of a British child – the tones which I, despite incessant urging from my teachers and peers to lose my clumsy Indian accent, could never master. Words would tumble out of her mouth, clanging like cowbells and devoid of all musicality, and I would strain my ears to understand.

I feared the day when she would grow up and realize her superiority to me, for even at the tender age of eight, I knew that her polished accent and English manners trumped mine any day. There were times when her British-ness would shock even my easy-going mother. She scolded my father once for scooping rice into his mouth with his hands instead of a fork, and when I blushed because she made her Ken kiss my Barbie, she deemed me a prude.

Her childhood became plastic dolls and costume tiaras.

***
I remember the first time I felt real mortification. Not the mild embarrassment of forgetting to cut the tag off a shirt, or the slightly greater humiliation of a boy finding out you like him. Actual mortification, the kind that flushes even my dark skin scarlet and makes me cringe and squeeze my eyes shut tightly when I think about it to this day. 

I was eleven years old and the only Indian enrolled in my expensive private school. By this time, we had moved for the third and last time – from Manchester to Houston. Justin Bieber was a new singer, Tamagotchis were in style, and my brother was an unborn comma of a child, just unfurling his fuzzy outlines. I was enjoying the change so far; England was characterized by unforgivingly bitter breeze, a cold that seemed to seep into my pores and freeze my blood, while Texas was humid and warm, much like Kerala. The day before, my friend from church had brought over a fat, unopened tube of henna paste and we had gleefully etched designs on each other’s hands, painstakingly following stencil patterns of peacocks, flowers, or suns. The burnt orange markings filled me with delight; I hadn’t used henna in three years, the last time I visited India, and its pungent fragrance filled me with a pleasant nostalgia.

In homeroom, while my teacher was rattling off the roll – and stumbling over my name, despite it being halfway through the semester – a girl who sat next to me spotted the henna and leaned over, inspecting the design with a puzzled frown. “Dude, that’s so cool,” she finally said, her clumpy mascaraed eyes open wide. She was chewing noisily with her glossed mouth open, and I could see a wad of slimy pink gum wedged under her tongue. “Your parents let you get a tattoo?”

I smiled at her and began to explain. “Actually, this is …”

Another girl, one who sat across the room from me, suddenly whipped her head around, smacking someone with her ponytail in her haste. “It’s not a tattoo, Grace,” she scowled, narrowing her eyes at me. “Don’t you know that she’s Indian? They use those weird tubes to draw things on their bodies. My mom says it’s because they worship the devil and those patterns are devil symbols.” The class exploded into snickers, and even the teacher’s lethargic mouth twitched a little at the corners. 

In that instant, I was hot and cold all at the same time. The words that never failed me withered on my tongue. Stuttering, I said, “No … we … we don’t …”

She laughed, a mean titter laden with derision. “I’ve seen a picture of your gods. One of them’s a monkey. Your people are so stupid. No wonder you can’t even talk English properly!”

My chest felt fizzy, like bubbles frothing over the top of a Coke can. Tears, glistening and jewel-like, clung precariously to my eyelashes. 

That was the moment I knew I had to change. I began watching hours of American TV, practicing and perfecting the slurred words, the hard t’s and r’s, the short syllables and the bored drawl. I replaced my slick braids with the popular layered look of the day, complete with swooping bangs covering one of my eyes that my mother absolutely loathed. I flirted with boys and gossiped with girls. I was constantly hollow, carved out from the inside, suspended in the wafting air between reality and pretense.

My adolescence became acne cream and fake laughter.

***
This is the part where it gets a little fuzzy. My life, I mean. It’s not that I don’t remember; I do. It’s that I feel like it’s not me – like I’m someone else watching a girl who looks like me, talks like me, but somehow isn’t me parade around in my skin. I’m not proud of it – I’m not ashamed of it, either. It’s just the truth. Sometimes, that’s all there is.

I met my first boyfriend (boyfriend might be stretching it – let’s just say the first boy who prompted me to change my Facebook status from “single” to “in a relationship”) at a party that my friend dragged me to, because her other friend’s older friend’s boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend/current friend-with-benefits was throwing it. “Come on,” she fake-pleaded, trying her very best to look sincere while making a duck face into her phone (don’t judge her; Instagram was just beginning to become a thing). “It’ll be fun, and you never go out.”

I shrugged. It was summer, I was bored. What the hell? A party might not be so bad. Wrongwrongwrongwrong.
I knew I was making a mistake as soon as I walked in the door. The room was pitch black, besides fluttering spurts of bright light from phones and computer screens. A stench of alcohol mingled with the stale odor of sweat and skin and there were people everywhere….moving and grinding and doing virtually everything else imaginable with the contours of two forms.

Disgusted and slightly scared, I navigated to the backmost corner and shrank against the wall, my only goal in life being to keep my face out of other people’s asses. My ‘friend’ had long since ditched me, and it was reaching the point where I’d decided to just walk the ten miles home when a boy, slightly older than me and ten times cuter than any freshman I’d ever seen, approached me.

“Hey,” he said, typically suave.

Have you ever had the feeling of a fountain of witty remarks drying up from the sudden drought in your brain?  I was suddenly incapable of forming a coherent sentence. “Hey?” I managed to stammer - and no, that question mark was not a typo.

I don’t know how it happened, but at the time, it felt like the question mark and me being pushed against the wall with his tongue in my mouth were sequential, no pause in between. God, I hope I’m wrong.

In my experience – which, trust me, is not very broad – first kisses come in one of two varieties: the sweet, awkward fumble, or the aggressive sneak attack. I knew which one mine was the moment I felt his cold fingers against the bare skin of my stomach.

I should take this time to mention that this guy is not the aforementioned boyfriend. He’s not even close.
My chest clenched and I tried to push him away. I think I even managed a strangled “geroffme” before the bundle of twine in my throat inhibited the functionality of my larynx. In retrospect, I was probably overreacting – a rational “this is going too fast” would have most likely sufficed – but it was my first party, my first kiss, my first almost-rape, and the newness of the situation was threatening to overwhelm me.

That was when I heard a voice accompanied by what seemed to be a halo of white light (his phone, I later found out). “Hey man, leave her alone,” he said.

The other guy shrugged and backed away. The only thing I can remember about him now is the taste of beer on his mouth and his curiously flat eyes. “Whatever, dude,” he slurred, and probably moved on to his next victim. I wouldn’t know. I was too enraptured by my savior – my long-awaited knight in shining armor.

“Thanks,” I murmured, not caring that there were bits of crumbled nachos in his braces or that one pimple on his cheek was a dangerous level of green.
He flashed me a toothy silver grin. “No problem.”
And that was that.
We broke up two months later, when I found out that he cheated on me. I asked him why he did it. He responded by raising his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. “She was blonde?”
That explained it.
I wasn’t upset, but when I got home and sat down to do my homework, I found tears streaming down my cheeks. I actually touched my face to make sure they were real and I wasn’t just unobservant enough to not notice rain outside. They were real – wet and black with mascara.
I waited for the tears to change me.
They didn’t.
My youth became crossed fingers and phony “I-love-you’s”.

***
The Wet Season:

Last year’s monsoon season was one of epic proportions. Rivers flooded, sand eroded, people drowned.
The phone call woke us up at three o’clock in the morning, Houston time. That was how I knew that something was wrong – my grandfather was usually so mindful of the time difference. I jolted awake when I heard the phone ring, and my stomach began prickling, like static fizz from a woolen scarf, when I heard the urgency in my father’s voice as he answered. His desperation made me worried enough to wrench myself from the warmth of my bed and trundle downstairs with mussed hair and my retainer still in.

“What’s wrong?” I mumbled, standing drowsily in the doorframe of my parents’ room.

They had been conversing in rapid, hushed Malayalam, but their heads snapped towards me so fast, I almost heard a crack. Carefully, my mother approached me and said in a cautiously modulated tone, “Sweetie, your grandfather’s had an accident.”

I don’t think the magnitude of this registered in my brain at the time. “That sucks,” I remember myself saying. “What happened?”

“A tree fell on the house during the storm,” she said. “The roof was already leaking from the rain, and with the weight of this tree, it caved in. Your grandfather fell and hit his head. He’s in the hospital right now – the doctors think he’s broken his hip, and he’s having trouble remaining lucid.”

“Which tree?”
My mother raised her eyebrows at me: one in shock, one in disapproval. “What?” she questioned flatly. “Why would that matter?”

Tears were misting up my eyes, but I persisted. “Which tree?” I insisted in a cracking voice.

My father sighed and rubbed his temples with fatigue, figuring that it was better to just answer me than try to deal with my psychosis at the moment. “The mango tree.”

***

My last conversation with my grandfather is something that I’ll never forget. It’s burned into my mind forever. Not because it was inspirational, or moving, or any other cliché bullshit that you hear about people’s last words. But because it was so damn terrible, my heart almost broke.

I was sitting in my bed, with the covers yanked over my head, clasping the phone like it was a lifeline. Dried tracks of tears painted streams down my cheeks, and my mouth was dry from talking. My grandfather was drifting in and out of consciousness – sometimes he’d remember me, but think I was still five; sometimes, I was the hospital nurse and he needed more water.

“Appacha,” I begged, my voice hoarse and tired. “Tell me a story.”

“Forget that, mol,” he said to me. “I just told you the one about the tailor.”

“Again,” I would plead, but then he’d be gone and there would be nothing I could do but clutch the phone to my chest and sob some more.

All my life, there have only been two things I couldn’t control: my ever-changing home and my wildly frizzy hair. Everything else, I had mastered with flawless technique from years of practice. My carefully applied lip-gloss, my perfected American accent, my shoes that are the perfect middle-ground between trendy and trying-too-hard. I wasn’t used to losing the tight grip I had on my life, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

A few minutes later, he knew who I was and where I was and what year it was. At the time, it seemed like a miracle. “Mol, it’s been too long since I’ve seen you. Tell your dad to bring you to India. Your old Appacha is missing you.”

A contorted smile twisted my mouth. “I will, Appacha. Definitely.”

“Good,” he murmured sleepily. “We can pick mangoes together. They’re almost ripe.”

Something happened in my stomach then. It didn’t drop. It vanished and left a gaping hole where it used to be. “Appacha,” I whispered. “The mango tree fell.”

“Sherikkum?” he queried, with only the slightest tinge of curiosity in his tone. “No matter. We’ll plant another one.”

***

I knew my grandfather was dead before my father told me. I’m not claiming to be psychic or anything; I just heard his footsteps on the stairs and they were distinctly heavier and slower than usual.

I was prepared. And then I wasn’t.
We flew to India. Ironic – my father couldn’t get a week’s leave to see his dying parent, but he could get a solid two to attend his funeral.

I visited the old house with two of my cousins; my parents were too busy organizing the funeral to spare a minute. There was almost nothing left – a heap of wood and brick, home to a few stray cats and dogs undoubtedly infected with all sorts of unspeakable diseases. Feeling a tight pang in my chest, I picked up some soil and rubbed it between my fingers, allowing the memories of those quiet evenings filled with my grandfather’s steady voice and the fragrance of mango blossoms to wash over me. I was startled when my hands ran over something hard and bumpy; unconsciously, I had unearthed the roots of the mango tree. Because I vaguely remembered my grandfather telling me that planting the roots would grow a new tree, I packed the earthy mess in my suitcase.

It got confiscated at customs. No foreign invasive species. It’s a rule.

***

I think I’ve forgotten the smell of mangoes. The true smell, that is. When my mother brings them home now, I sniff the basket and try to remember what my grandfather called “home”.

All I smell is fruit, slightly rotting from the shipment across the Atlantic.