This summer, my mother came to Pune.
The original plan was for me to travel to Trivandrum in March and bring her back with me. But things didn't work out that way. My husband, P, wasn't keeping well, and my daughter had her exams. So, my mother made the long train journey from Trivandrum to Pune all by herself.
Whenever she visits us, she stays in the guest room. The window there looks out onto a pair of mango trees. This year, they were laden with fruit.
From morning till evening, the trees seemed to have a steady stream of visitors. Parrots arrived in noisy groups, mynas hopped from branch to branch, crows made their presence known, and several tiny birds whose names I don't know darted in and out of the leaves. After sunset, the day shift gave way to the night shift. Owls and bats quietly took over.
I should mention that these trees don't belong to our society. They stand in the compound of the neighboring society.
The gardener there, N, is a pleasant man whom I've known for more than a decade. Whenever my mother visits, she quietly slips some money into his hand to thank him for the fresh moringa leaves he brings her. There have been times when he has brought banana leaves for shradh ceremonies and pujas as well.
This visit was special because he hadn't seen her in nearly two years.
One afternoon, I noticed him talking to her from across the compound wall. After asking about her health, he said something in Marathi.
My mother doesn't understand Marathi or Hindi. Her strategy is simple. She smiles, nods, and hopes she hasn't agreed to anything alarming.
So I wasn't quite sure what had passed between them.
A few minutes later, I heard my husband speaking to Naik. Soon enough, Naik was at our door carrying five large raw mangoes for my mother.
The moment he handed them over, their fragrance filled the room.
They smelled raw, tangy, and slightly sweet all at once. It was one of those smells that instantly takes you somewhere else. I could probably write paragraphs trying to describe it, but some things are better experienced than explained.
I washed the mangoes under running water and wiped them with a cotton kitchen towel.
My mother wasn't impressed.
"Leave them out for a while," she said. "Let them dry naturally."
I knew better than to question her methods.
She had already decided what those mangoes were going to become.
Raw mango jam.
Soon she was rummaging through my grocery cupboard looking for ingredients. The things she couldn't find, misri and dry ginger, were promptly added to a shopping list. Before long, my husband was sent off to the nearby kirana store with a shopping bag and clear instructions.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my Preethi 750-watt mixer protesting loudly.
Or rather screaming I would say.
My mother was already in the kitchen.
A plate of crushed dry ginger was waiting to be powdered. A tablespoon of peppercorns sat in a white ceramic bowl. Another bowl held some pink salt. The biggest mixer jar was fixed onto the machine and was filled with powdered misri.
She turned around, smiled, and said, "I'm getting the ingredients ready for the jam."
Now all that remained was peeling and grating the mangoes.
"For that," she said, "we'll wait for K."
I grinned.
K had no idea what was in store for her. I could already picture her face when she discovered that, apart from the usual vegetables waiting to be chopped, she had also inherited five giant mangoes to peel and grate.
Sure enough, by the time K finished and left, my mother was almost bubbling with excitement.
Then she looked at me and issued her next instruction.
"Stay away from the kitchen for a while," she said. "I want the place all to myself."
That was when I knew something special was about to happen.
If you're curious about what became of those five mangoes, stay with me. In Part 2, I'll take you into my mother's cooking style, where recipes aren't written down, they're remembered, measured by instinct, and stirred with patience.
