Home on a Holiday (Part 1) - Midnight Mango

Right. It's been precisely 2 months, 2 weeks and 6 days since I came home. Gosh! Can't believe it's been so long! And I precisely have 2 weeks left. After all the procrastination of 'blogging regularly', here goes my first entry (of hopefully at least a few) in the series.

I have an insomniac aunt staying with us for some time now. Every night, she keeps a banana on her bedside. When it's past midnight and she still hasn't fallen asleep, which is all the time, she gets up, walks around a bit, eats the banana and tries to sleep again. Today, there were no bananas at home.

I was lying down in bed, like just a while ago (it's 1 AM now, if you must know), chatting, facebooking, solitairing and all those useless things, when I finally felt sleepy and closed the laptop.

"Sweetheart, if it's not too much trouble, can you please get me some cut mango from the fridge? There were no bananas today."

Oh sure.

I felt like a darling Indian daughter-in-law. I quickly walked into the kitchen, imagining I'd put the mango pieces on a nice plate and get a nice fork and make it look so delicious that my aunt would fall asleep instantly. Except I couldn't find any cut mango in the refrigerator.

Of course. Mom doesn't like keeping cut mango in the fridge. No worries.

I saw my mom effortlessly peel and cut mangoes everyday every summer since time immemorial. At this point, I am compelled to say, at the risk of diluting the suspense in the story, how the hell does she do it??

So I took the mango, the peeler, the knife and the plate, told myself, piece of cake. Or mango, whatever suits you, and started to peel. The first two tries, the peeler just slipped off without much incident. To the mango. But since I'm human and humans apparently by default have this built-in capability thing of learning or some such, I managed to peel once. And twice. And a few more times after that.

When I was half done (PHEW!), I thought that would do. Half a mango is a lot. And I cut it. The mango looked so yum I had to eat a couple of pieces myself. The plate looked very empty so I was spreading the pieces around a bit when my aunt came looking for me.

Really? Been that long?

"Oh honey I'm so sorry, weren't there mango pieces in the fridge? You could've just told me!"

"No problem, it was nothing atha! Here", and a big darling Indian daughter-in-law smile. Oh I've been watching too much Kyon Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi type stuff on TV these days. Damn.

So gist of the story is, cutting mangoes is not as easy as it looks! Especially at midnight. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. Seriously.