Record High Sweet and Sours
It is May in Ayemenem... if only. It is May, but unfortunately, I am one of the lucky ones. I get to live in a sprawling metropolis—bigger than New York City—in crowded apartments where there is a yearly record high. The constant humming of air conditioning from every possible direction grows louder and louder in my head, driving me crazy. A record high insane.
Hyderabad sits a little to the North and a little to the East of Ayemenem. Not East enough for beautiful coastal beaches and ocean air, but not North enough that I can't relate.
It was the summer of begrudgingly going through the motions of ten-minute, fifteen-minute, five-minute workouts—because I'm so sweaty anyway that it's not a massive inconvenience. The summer of discovering how seasonal depression applies in the hot months, too. It drains me from the inside out, locking me indoors to protect myself from a heat that sucks you dry with a straw, like in the commercial from everybody’s childhood.
So drink a lot of coconut water and electrolytes. Ice creams and cold beverages. And don't even think about going out until after sunset, because you were born in the winter. So naturally, you're allergic to the sun.
The mangoes, however, are overflowing; we eat three a day, each. You are supposed to hold it in your hands until the seed is scraped white, your fingers sticky and yellow and sweet, while the conversation grows around what to do with all these pits. Should we plant them for future generations? Will there be enough for future generations? Will there be a future? for the future generations?
As a respite, I read as much as I can devour with my eyes and my hands, and Arundhati Roy says that personal despair in a nation like this is never desperate enough. But we are no longer just a nation on fire, but a whole world set ablaze. Yet, somehow, I still feel like my personal despair is the most desperate. Is it privilege? Is it narcissism? Or, in an attempt to salvage my conscience, is it just a natural human flaw to not be able to care about things you cannot see? And you don't see, because your own despair is desperate enough. To turn on a black screen every morning just to broadcast the worst of the world to your dried-out eyelids is too much—so you don’t. And so, your own despair is enough.
It has been quite the year. I see my homeland now—the local politics, the daily conveniences, and the governmental logistical inconveniences—with new eyes. Whether I am a prodigal son or a prodigal daughter is yet to be determined. When you are the eldest, only child of an entire family tree, you are both.
I had not seen India in this light before. Everything is new. The nostalgia has been removed, safely stored away in an intricately decorated wooden box inherited from the grandparent I lost. Only to be dug up when the future is honestly bright and there is time enough to be nostalgic in.
And so in the interim, I eat the mangoes for I am one of the lucky ones; they are from our very own farm, organic and natural. I exist between two realities. One is sweet and sour, colored the hue of an almost-ripe mango—something to look forward to. The other is a hazy blue sky: the life I left behind.
