Mango Showers

In India, they have terribly hot summers in most places, but these are interrupted by rain. Of course, we also know that summer is mango season. In southern India, sometimes these rains are so harsh, that it rains mangoes. They call these “Mango Showers.”

I’d never eaten a mango till I got here.

Well, I’d eaten Mango flavoured things, like ice-cream and cheesecake and other things, but I’d never really eaten the fruit.

And I realised that the best mangoes weren’t the ones that were sweet all over and specially picked and cut up into dainty little cubes.

No, the best fruit was when you didn’t know if the mango was sweet all over, and it tasted better when it had a little bit of that lip curling sourness in it.

It was nicer when there was a mess all over the front of your shirt, and juice dribbling off of your chin.

And it was especially nicer, to have someone’s laughing face close by, stained and messy in much the same fashion, making your own lips curl into a smile.

And that was how I came to love mangoes.

Windward

How would you be, my dear,
Were you human as you are the wind?
Would you be as wild and untamed?
Would we shiver in your displeasure,
And tremble in the chill of your contempt?
Would we thirst in the heat of your fervent passion
And bask in the afterglow of sweet content?
Would we welcome you in nights of restless abandon,
And desperate hope that you'd stay near?
Tell me, How would you feel,
Were you not whispering by my ear?

-Sreedevi

Ask and you shall be questioned.

It occurred to me that perhaps one of the bigger causes for problems of the human race is that we expect everyone to tell us things.

Why is that?

We’re told why we should choose one shampoo over the other, one toothpaste over the other, why one store is superior to the other, even why one programming language is supposedly better than the others.

And what do we do?

We hmm and haw, get ourselves more confused by the minute, and eventually make a choice that we doubt for a long while after – till we embrace the choice because we made it and it would be too humiliating to admit that we were wrong the first time round or we give up on it, admit we were wrong and proceed to repeat the cycle.

Why is it so difficult?

In the world of INTJ, we have a statement “I’ve made up my mind; don’t confuse me with the details.” I didn’t quite understand it then, but then the appearance of a praying mantis outside my door gave me pause. If I believed in such things as omens – good or bad – I would think that it was a sign to contemplate my surroundings, clear my mind and think about the choices I’m making.

Odd co-incidence, that.

The mind’s a funny thing, really. It finds all the hidden meanings, all the junk that goes on in between lines; whether that’s a good thing, one can’t say, but if you’re thinking it, then you can’t blame anyone but yourself. That is the truth.

The good thing about the mind is that it won’t tell you a thing. It’ll only just sit back, cross its arms and ask you questions that most of the time you cannot answer. It’ll smirk at you when you parrot out what you’ve been told all this time and ask you, “Really?”

You’ll really want to smash that smugness right out of your skull, but you can’t do it apart from the obvious reason why. It’s when you decide that the heart is a stupid muscle that can’t do a single thing that is voluntary. Hell, it can’t even beat without that miserable git that is your brain.

It’s fairly stupid to follow the sayings of a muscle that’s pretty much ordered around by something else, innit?

The truth lies in that complex grid of neurons that not even the most intelligent people on the planet have thus far been able to understand fully. We should be turning to minds, I suppose, not Gods when confronted with troubles.

That’s what the mantis at my doorstep meant.

So the mind says, “You needed an external factor that is sketchy at best, to tell you what you should have been listening to internally, all this while? And you call yourselves the most intelligent species?”

We’re learning; we’ll get there. That’s why we are the most intelligent species – for the most part – because some of us will learn.

The details are less confusing now; worst case scenario, the cycle will start again till I get it right, or die trying.