Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven

I sat on the floor with my arms wrapped around my knees, feeling the coolness of the crimson tiles under my bare feet. Lychee seeds sucked dry lay clustered in a plastic bowl atop last week’s newspaper. The low, indecipherable murmurs of the television set — one that had been a fixture of this living room since my mother had taken her first steps here — offered some respite from the lazy silence that blanketed a summer afternoon.

“Can you come to lunch tomorrow, ma?”

It was the first thing she had said aloud in some time. My grandmother’s Bangla was faint, fragmented, and faltering. She hesitated between words, her whispery voice briefly trailing off before making its way back, her eyes dancing aimlessly across the floor as if grappling for the direction her question had been heading in.

“Yes, nanu.” I hoisted myself off the floor, making my way to the adjoining kitchen. “Yes, I can.” Letting the lychee seeds slide off into the trash, I rinsed out the bowl under the tap. My hands lingered in the smooth stream, the coolness of the water dulling the village’s throbbing heat. The dark curls of hair my grandmother had passed on to me clung to my face. The merciless Khulna summer had reduced my outfit to a tank top and a skirt.

As a child, I used to stoop by the door and peek in, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the bustling, steamy, seemingly cavernous kitchen — back when it had been the beating heart of my grandparents’ home. The whistling of tea kettles and sizzling of eggs in the morning; the wispy tendrils of smoke reaching for the ceiling and scraping of knives against cutting boards that soundtracked the readying of a family meal; the hushed, giggling exchanges of local gossip as pots were scrubbed clean after dinner. One of the cooks, a stout, smiling man who always smelled of elaichi and, according to my father, somewhat resembled a kinder George W. Bush, used to slip me orange slices whenever I had tried to subtly peer in.

A lone roach scampered across the bare countertop as I dried off the bowl. A singular pot sat on the stove, warming up my grandmother’s late lunch of cabbage and damp rice. George Bush’s twinkle-eyed doppelganger had died of cirrhosis four years ago.

“Hot day, huh, nanu?” I re-entered the living room, two glasses of water in hand. She responded with a blink and a blank stare. Her hands gripped the arms of her wheelchair, the veins running down her wrists and forearms prominently blue against her colorless flesh. Her upper lip quivered ever so slightly, as if she was constantly teetering on the precipice of breaking into tears.

“Just let me know when you want to eat.” I placed one glass on the floor and the other on the table beside her. Her gaze lingered on me before shifting to the water, studying it intently.

Her orna had slipped down her bony shoulders. Two decades ago, she would have playfully wrapped the same orna around me and Alvi as we giggled underneath its soft, checkered canopy of cloth. It had seemed gigantic back then, like we could get lost within its green and golden folds, enmeshed within its faint scent of citrus. Today, it could barely stay on her shrinking frame.

“Ma,” she spoke finally, her voice small and low. “Can we have lunch together tomorrow?”

“Yes, nanu. Of course we can.”

Her trembling lips widened into a smile. I responded with my own.

“Do you want to go to the veranda?” I adjusted the orna back around her shoulders. “The wind might feel nice.”

Nanu shifted her gaze towards the balcony, crinkling her nose in annoyance at the sunlight streaming in from the open doorway. My smile widened. She had always hated being in the sun. Every morning of our summer trips to this house, Alvi and I would race each other across the garden, laughing and stumbling and earnings scrapes on our knees as badges of honor of a childhood spent well. Nanu would wait on the porch, occasionally glancing up from her romance novels or taking a break from gossiping with the cook to tell us not to accidentally trip and die. Or we would see her little head poke out of an upstairs window, tantalizingly describing the warm milk, peanut butter sandwiches, or rice cakes she had laid out to lure us back inside. When she had to come out on a bright day, she would do so with a grumble and a newspaper held over her face. A shame and a grave crime to deprive the sun of seeing her beauty, my grandfather used to say. The flattery wouldn’t do much.

She hadn’t read any romance novels, gossiped with the cook, or prepared milk, sandwiches, or rice cakes in many years. Neither did we expect her to again. Her mind had withered, her voice had grown hoarse and hollow, and her body had been eroded by time, but somewhere deeper inside, her soul was still grumbling and groaning about the heat. We really are the kids we used to be.

Nanu returned her gaze from the veranda entrance to me. Her expression of annoyance softened, lightening into a quiet smile. Who knows what had inspired the change of mind — maybe it was the reminder that I would be there with her. I would like to believe so.

“Of course, ma,” she answered, her voice hovering above a whisper. I carefully wheeled her to the veranda, placing a hand over her eyes to shield her from the glare of the sun. In a balcony awash in sunlight, one spot sat in the comfortable shade, in the protective wake of the mango tree that had grown old beside this house for half a century. As my grandfather used to muse, their redbrick, two-storied bungalow from the 60s and their garden’s towering mango trees were siblings — born and raised together, sustaining and giving each other life, destined to remain firmly rooted in their ancient childhood home. Siblings, like me and Alvi.

Except I hadn’t seen Alvi in over two years since he had moved nine thousand miles away for college. Except that my grandmother had not picked, peeled, or prepared mangoes in years. Except that the largest mango tree in the garden had died last November. My grandparent’s bungalow now sat quietly next to its sibling’s barren, decaying corpse, destined to watch its companion of six decades slowly shrink and disappear until all that’s left is hazy memories that will only fade further out of view no matter how hard or how desperately you try to claw them back to you.

“Nanu, what’s my name?”

A gust of wind rocked the dead mango tree’s branches to and fro. She had heard the question. Her gaze remained locked on the floor.

We sat in silence.

I placed my hand on top of hers.

It’s okay. I wasn’t sure if I said it out loud, but I knew I didn’t need to.

She raised her eyes to meet mine. The dark brown of her pupils glimmered a deep hazel in the afternoon sun, framed by locks of her curly hair. Withstanding every decade that passed, her hair showed no signs of letting go of its smooth blackness. Her stubbornness had transcended human biology, it seemed.

She really always had been beautiful. Local legend had it that the day she got married to my grandfather, half the men in town skipped work the next morning on account of a broken heart. As if I had needed any further proof, I had come across an unmarked cardboard box earlier that morning while pawing through a closet for a dustpan. Entombed within an inch of dust was a stack of books seemingly untouched for a lifetime. One of them was a photo album.

The first few pages of the album presented a world in shades of black and gray. Her frizzy bun of hair and soft eyes remained unmistakeable, though, even as she smiled at the camera in an eleven-year-old girl’s frock and with her short legs dangling off the chair she posed from. Beside her stood her brother, a few years older. It was the first time I had seen him as a young man. I had only ever seen pictures of him in uniform — the same image on every poster commemorating his martyrdom.

The decades rolled by with every page, and color began to emerge. The red, green, and yellow of the flag she held outside her window, likely at the end of the war that had birthed Bangladesh and taken her brother from her. The crimson and gold of her wedding dress. The baby blue of the blanket she cradled her infant daughter in.

What happens to a memory when no one’s around to remember it anymore?

The orange of the sunset she posed in front of, draped in an olive saree, my grandfather’s arm wrapped around her waist, her hand holding my mother’s. Mom was pregnant with me. Their faces were lit up with laughter, as if the camera had gone off two seconds after one of my grandfather’s jokes.

What happens to us?

“Nanu, I have something to show you.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small photograph I had slipped out of the album. The edges had become frayed with age, and the already fuzzy black and white had taken on shades of gray. But the smile in the frame had yet to fade.

Nanu’s quivering fingers clasped one corner of the photo, angling it away from the sun to see it better. She stayed still, her face coiled in a thoughtful frown, running her eyes across the image. It finally clicked, and her furrowed brows then dissipated into a look of wonder.

She turned to face me. Then she threw her head back and laughed — a full-throated, full-hearted laugh that shook her shoulders. I had no choice but to laugh too. Nothing that funny had really happened, but it was the most genuine and soulful laughter I had laughed in a long time.

“Is that me?” There was sunshine, flowers, and life in her voice.

“That’s you.”

There indeed she was — in a white kameez, sitting in her garden, with a smile that would put a hundred stars to shame. Her hair was lifted by the wind. Sunflowers seemed to lean towards her. The mango tree in the back grazed the sky.

“It must’ve been . . .” Her voice trailed off. Three, maybe four decades, I guessed. But it could’ve been yesterday. Who’s to say it wasn’t this morning, or right now.

We sat there laughing, one hand of hers on my shoulder and the other clasping the picture. Laughing felt like the right thing to do. Maybe the only thing to do. The branches of the dead mango tree, rocking to and fro in the wind, seemed to have joined in on our laughter.

“Oh,” Nanu said in between chuckles, “oh, I had to ask you something.” She paused, catching her breath. “I wanted to have lunch with you tomorrow. Can you come?”

I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze.