ESL Blogs

MAN GOES FOR MANGOES

Khaliqur Rahman

Summer's delight, God's exquisite gift to Man, succulent with varied sweetnesses, Ghalib's favourite among fruits, you must have guessed what I am talking about. Yes, of course, if you are a connoisseur of good taste, you have.

Mangoes -- here's God's plenty -- are here again, of which one is never enough, neither are two. The truth is: enough is not enough -- at least for me. The mind -- and the body -- is always willing to go for one more, but I have to stop at a point for other reasons. There are people and what is worse, they are watching.

In fact, mango is one fruit, I would like to eat all by myself and all, all alone. It is a very, very private fruit. How often have I wished, there should be me and a room and mangoes and mangoes and mangoes, fresh from the fridge and sweating as impatiently to be eaten as I am, to eat. Perhaps, a full-length mirror nearby would make the setting ideally unearthly. How much  I would then love to lap the flesh and bite the stone and slurp the juicy eluding tricklings in many different gestures, of my hands, my lips, my eyes and even my nose. And how much I would give to have a time-to-time-look in the mirror to see how many various postures of extreme intentness my body acquires to match each gesture of its parts.

But modern civilization -- and my wife -- demands that I eat my mango -- poor, singular one or even less -- at the dining table with children and sometimes a guest or two. And that is very frustrating. I always thought mango-eating is not a child's play or for that matter a public affair. It requires a good deal of wild sophistication and extreme privacy.

But in modern times you are most often more constrained than liberated or emancipated. It was only the other day that I was thinking of Daseris and Langras, as I was relishing, with a lot of conscious composure, the taste of an undesirably delicately small piece of t. Himayat Soon I was beginning to be myself, even though the second helping was loathsomely tiny again.

But the last grab was a promising stone, thick with flesh and juice. Thinking that others would mind their own business and therefore imagining myself to be alone in the crowd, I decided to 'slog' and send the just-not-do-ables on a holiday.

I must have been in the middle, when I noticed, to my utter disgust and perhaps shame, that the children, having finished theirs, had already fixed their gaze of earnestness, surprise and greed to watch their father doing the devouring operation that presumably was to them sensuously brutal and passionately animal. Perhaps they couldn't believe their eyes as they saw their father eating for once sans dignity.

At the other end, as I encountered, from their mother, just another gaze but of a very different kind. I couldn't help muttering: Man goes for mangoes, not woman -- at least in summer!