The last mango of the season

The slices of mango, plump and peeled, lay on the plate, patient. As N. and I ate lunch, chatting and laughing, I kept glancing at those slices. Time had stroked those slices with brown thumbs, unthinkingly. Time is clumsy like that, all thumbs. It wafts around, stumbles, and holds on to whatever is around, be it walls, wooden doorways, or the underside of my eyes, and presses with its thumbs for support. You can trace time’s unthinking wanderings in a map of smudged browns and darkenings. Yes, darkening, for as time walks around aimlessly, it gets drunk sucking moisture with tiny straws, it all darkens, be it mehendi or metal.

As we finished mopping up the Kundapura gravy with the neer dosa, I reached out for a slice of the mango, a condensed softness even my lips could bite into. N., who initially had said she would not eat the mangoes, now, relented, and popped a slice in. I wished then that time were discrete, as Newton infinitisimally imagined it to be, slicing it into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces we could all masticate mathematically. If that were the case, N. could pop mangoes into her mouth without listing questions about how that moment connects to the moment next and after. Will it spike sugar levels? What if? Maybe? Why not. Despite Newton trying to trim it infinitely, time curves and folds, an immeasurable cosmic waistline.

I finished the last slice and licked my fingers clean, tasting mehendi and mango, and I felt my fingers pinch at something, a crease in time. I saw the empty plate, and I somehow knew, I had eaten the last mango of the season. There would be no more mangoes now, there is a marker in this moment, that time had a crease right here. Of course, the after will go on, time will roam aimlessly with grubby fingers, drunk on mango cider, for we will still try to preserve that which is past, time will get distracted, and things shall ferment.