what we saw vs. what she told me (at the beach)

raw mangoes sprinkled with chili powder, the sharp, spicy seasoning amalgamating with the sweet saliva in our mouths; for when she confessed to me that she sometimes felt relief in distress, comfort in unease, solace in trouble.

balloons going pop, tiny toy bullets colliding with multicolored plastic; for when she told me about her hopes and dreams that would float around, only to be burst by the ones she loved (and the ones she did not).

little green parrots hopping about, picking tarot cards with their tiny beaks and predicting the future; for when she wondered about her own, things that could be and should be but things that weren’t, yet.

sandcastles being built and torn down; for when she reminded me that what goes up must come down, what is created must be destroyed, and what we get attached to, we must dissociate with.

and finally, corn on the cob, charred nearly black over a coal-fueled stove, golden sparks flying around against the dimming horizon; for the darkness within her that came before blinding glimmers of hope.

Guava

The summer Naiynayya died, the guavas were the sweetest they had ever been. She was pregnant with her first child, a girl, although the world around her was hoping for a boy. "Goh-uh," she would say, while purchasing the fruit from the street vendor, and it would only be years later that she would learn the correct pronunciation from her daughter - "gwaa-vuh." She much preferred the Telugu word, jaamapandu, but it was a time when English words were thrown into most sentences, a consequence of colonialism.

She started each morning with three slices of the bright green fruit, the white, seeded inner flesh always so alluring. The sticky insides created a gum-like texture between her fingertips as she rubbed them with the tiniest pinch of salt, exactly how she loved eating them as a child. The stubborn seeds would get stuck in every little crevice of her mouth, and some even managed to find a home down her throat.

There was something so pleasurable about this unique culinary experience that no other fruit seemed to offer. A seed or two would remain in her teeth for hours after, and her tongue would brush past one, a sudden surprise, when she was in the middle of making a cup of masala tea or frying an appadam for lunch.

 

Three days before she gave birth to her baby girl, they got the news. A heart attack had taken him in his sleep. They burned his body in Thalluru, behind the guava tree that they had spent many summers chasing him around.

It seemed only fitting.