Sree
New Voices Award Winner
A Mango Afternoon
“That was the day my grandmother first removed my tunic and kissed my tiny, deficient breasts, her mouth moving across my chest, her betel-stained lips leaving red marks on my skin.”
This was the first sentence I wrote when I finally decided to write about that afternoon. I’d saved it as “Grandmother_notes.docx” months ago and hadn’t been able to write anything after it. Now, it was 4 a.m., and I couldn’t stop staring at this line on my screen.
The truth of the line was so overwhelming that it blurred any other considerations of what happened that afternoon. For weeks, the document sat unopened. When I finally looked at it again, I couldn’t remember typing those words. I decided to let the words sit for some time in hopes that something else would emerge. But nothing did. Only doubts about whether it ever happened. So, I decided to keep the lines here at the beginning as a reminder that it did happen.
It was not a ghost story I had invented. I needed to let that image be real. I needed to accept the truth of that afternoon to write any further about it.
This was the image that had chased me all my life: a yellow afternoon and the scent of mango blossoms.
The table fan was blowing out hot, perspired air, and some spotted doves were mourning a death unknown. A cuckoo that always came to the spring mango tree, on this particular afternoon, chose to practice his song. All I remembered was a sad breeze carrying the tangy smell of the mango blossoms, and then I turned into an orange-colored, disembodied feeling of shame; I became something other than myself.
Did I need to relive this every other spring afternoon?
In all of twenty-eight years, many images disappeared, rooms of love, of death, blue rooms, white rooms, rooms by the sea where I made love timidly, and rooms of terror, of drunken mistakes. Some had blurred, and others seemed to have become illusions even though I had never dared to question what I experienced. But sometimes, when cuckoos called in spring, even here in this flat with no trees in sight, the scent of mango blossoms seemed to rise from my own skin.
What happened on that childhood afternoon resisted simple judgment. My grandmother, who loved me, kissed my bare body, her mouth on my chest, my stomach, my thighs. Her lips, stained red with betel leaves, left marks across my tiny, hairless frame.
As a child, I waited for months, perhaps even years, for it to happen again. I was certain it would.
My mother, who also loved me, would soon learn about this afternoon. But it never stopped her from loving her mother or me. It also never stopped me from loving my grandmother. She was the closest woman to me until her death, though I stopped visiting her in her final years. The smell of the betel leaves and her amnesiac self, annulled that afternoon from her memory, and I did not know how to talk to her anymore.
My grandmother died alone in her room at ninety-four. When my mother called with the news, I cried harder than I had for anyone. I’d been hoping, without admitting it, that her death would free me from that afternoon.
It had been five years since. I’d left home determined to build a different life. After a series of odd jobs, copywriting, fact-checking, and writing film reviews, I ended up here. A tiny flat on the top floor of a half-finished building.
The only bedroom window looked onto a vast, empty field. There were no trees. Yet now, at 4 a.m. I could see the mango tree from my childhood window blooming again, so vivid that I could smell the blossoms filling this hot, airless room. My boyfriend snored loudly beside me, but it could not distract me from that afternoon.
I should have been finishing a film review, due at noon, but instead I was watching the cursor blink, counting ants on the wall, waiting for the hospital to call about my mother’s discharge. She was moving in here, into this space that was supposed to be mine alone.
Outside, I could hear tonight’s protest; women had been marching every night since the R.G. Kar rape case. We want justice. We will not be silent. Reclaim the night.
I’d planned to join them, to shoot footage and write a piece about the protests. But I couldn’t make myself go. The excuses I gave myself were practical: the early wake-up, the long walk across the city, but the truth was simpler. I did not go because it would reveal a thing about my body, a thing I preferred to hide all the time, the fact that I was just a woman. So instead, I doom-scrolled. I screenshotted my old university friends’ Instagram stories from the protests and reposted them, my small, safe gesture of solidarity. Then I fell down the algorithm, makeup tutorials, weight-loss transformations, trigger-warning-blurred videos of violence, then back to makeup and fashion.
I was eleven when my mother started imposing rules about how I dressed. Throughout my teenage years, oblivious to what had happened with my grandmother, she made it very clear that I should dress modestly and never travel alone. She didn't like to see me grow up. Whenever she saw me undressed, my body repelled her. She saw my breasts as a threat to draw unwanted attention and danger. She hand-sewed cotton training bras, so tight that I could barely breathe, and they left marks on my chest and shoulders. She never allowed me to take them off, not even at night.
Years later, after she learned the truth about my grandmother, my mother would cry and say that if she’d known, if she’d understood why my breasts were developing so fast, she would have thrown my grandmother out, as if that was a visible sign she should have read.
But she never confronted my grandmother about it. Instead, she tried to erase what had happened from my mind and body. She blamed herself for trusting her own mother, for not protecting me. She never forgave herself for failing to stop my breasts from growing so fast. She was ashamed of being both the mother and the daughter in this story.
I never forgave my mother. I didn’t know why. Was it her violent temper, her compulsive chatter, her need to please everyone, her constant blaming of fate? I could not tell. I never forgave her because it was easier not to forgive her than my grandmother. Because no single image connected me to her as it did to my grandmother. Instead, it was a constant normalcy of slowly becoming like my mother. I wanted to become anything but like her. So, I ran away. I thought the only link to the little girl that afternoon was what happened that day. And if I could run far away, the afternoon would finally dissolve away. I did everything I could to turn my life over, or so I believed. I fought to be what my mother and grandmother could never be.
Living alone in this flat, with empty afternoons before me, I realized I was waiting for some revelation that never came. Yet, now in the early morning, the tangy scent of mango blossoms restored my body to the afternoon.
For the past few weeks, I had been living inside that afternoon. It had become grey and mute, something closer to madness than memory and death. Nothing in my life since then had felt so real. I had always compared the other events in my life to that afternoon, to assess their degree of emptiness, and never found anything else that could measure up to it.
******
I must have slept eventually. When I woke, it was 10:12 a.m.
I dragged myself up. My boyfriend had already left for work. The flat looked like it always did, too small, too cluttered. I sighed.
The bougainvillea by my bedside window had bloomed, two flowers, one pink, one white, though the shopkeeper swore the plant would only give white. I tried to focus on the flowers to ignore my mood, but the rage was already climbing up my throat. Nowadays, all I could see was dust, and all I felt was anger. My life had become a dance between earning my survival and keeping on with it. Earn money, cook food, eat it, and clean up. Afford the flat, maintain the flat, and have sex once a day.
I kept on telling the old story. He cared for me in the best way he could, in intervals, in gaps. He tried to do better, well, better than my father ever did. I diluted my living reality into curated fiction for people to peep in, for me to be able to live through it. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that this life was my mother’s and grandmother’s dream. A job, a rented flat, a man who cared sometimes, and the endless dishes. I told myself that the women in my life had wanted exactly this and had been denied somehow. Otherwise, it would refute my struggles, my pain, and the life I was living. It was easier than admitting the truth that I had joined them in their life cycle, even with all the self-awareness and elaborate plans of escape.
Probably nothing in my life had been as three-dimensional as that afternoon, when my grandmother's grey hair brushed my face. I remembered thinking I saw my life branching out like budding blossoms. I couldn't make up my mind which of the blossoms I would choose. So, I sat there, unable to decide, and the blossoms wrinkled away and became my grandmother’s veiny hands. I could not become anything other than who my mother and grandmother were.
But lately I was growing tired of that. I could not suppress all the other things I wanted, all the things that they dreamed of. They were coming out of my body in fits of anger toward my life. And now I looked at my boyfriend’s shoes on the floor, the bedsheet stained with wine from last night’s tired, unfinished sex. The anger crawled up to my chest. With a deadline to meet in an hour, I could only think of the unclean dishes in the sink, the grocery list, and the bills, the endless bills. I tried to think of all the men I had known. How the dust, the dishes, the stains, the bills didn't concern them. They could be invisible to it in a way I never learned.
In the beginning, I protested. I refused to take care of anyone else. I said whatever I could to not become my mother. But those were just innocent protests of a girl in love, a girl who had only known to love like a mother.
What would I tell my mother when she arrived? That I couldn’t fulfill the potential I promised despite her constant disapproval? That I became exactly what she predicted I would?
I wanted to forget how to clean and love men. So, I let the anger guide me instead. I turned on the news on my phone and increased the volume. I listened to people debate the rape case as I cleaned. I dusted the mattress, watered the plants, unclogged the toilet, and threw away the garbage. Then I was distracted by the crow that came for the stale roti every morning. Its plastic water bowl was empty. I refilled it. On the news, everyone dissected the case in terms of punishment, timeline, the victim’s and the accused’s profiles, and the government’s failures. Anchors went into the streets, thrusting microphones at pedestrians, asking for their opinions on violence against women.
The last time a man penetrated me without my consent, I remembered wearing a pair of faded old jeans and a plain pale green shirt the next morning. It was my father’s. I had that shirt since the afternoon my grandmother loved me. Since I was eleven. I didn’t know what it meant that I’d kept it all these years, or why I’d reached for it after.
My boyfriend always asked before touching me. Always. The thought made me scrub the dishes harder; the Vim bar melted against the greasy plates. The smell filled my lungs. I felt the warm anger rising in my chest.
My phone buzzed; the editor wanted the review. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, crouched by the sink, and started typing. Dish foam rose around my hands. My fingers were wrinkled and dry. They usually looked like this after long showers in early spring. Afterward, I’d pull on the overly washed, faded, bulky sweater my mother knitted for me. Just last winter, it had stopped smelling like her.
As a child, I hated her smell. It was dish soap, fish scales, and sweat all mixed together. Now I smelled the same. It was funny how that scent transcended time and space and generation, to finally catch me off guard.
A pre-teen with wet shoulder-length hair sat looking out the spring window. My mother sat next to her, still beautiful, still unwrinkled. She knitted and hummed to herself. This was the only time of day she had for herself. No one was home. After a whole day of cleaning and cooking, these few hours were hers before my father returned. The smell of henna in her hair made her hair shine dark and maroonish. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. My grandmother dozed beside us, sometimes chuckling with my mother about their past, my mother’s old lovers, recipes, and gossip about some girl who had run away. Nothing had happened yet. My grandmother had not taken my tunic off in this story.
Warm anger started leaking from my eyes as I finished the review. It wasn’t good, but it was done. I pressed submit and closed the laptop. My phone buzzed. My boyfriend had sent me a photo of his office lunch, some elaborate thali he’d ordered. My empty stomach growled in response.
I knew I needed to stop believing love would cure everything. But my health, my career, my writing, my hobbies, none of them had ever made me as necessary as loving someone did.
I didn’t think I could take care of myself if I didn’t have others to take care of.
I looked at the clock. It was time to bring my mother from the hospital. I pulled on my father’s pale green shirt, grabbed my mother’s worn-out black dupatta to cover myself, even though it was warm outside.
Sometimes the shame was in being asked to stand for judgment, to prove it happened, to prove I didn’t want it.
******
We arrived from the hospital at half past four.
My mother had weathered in the years since I left home. Her movements still had their usual frisk, but with more irritability. She wasn't the woman who once tried to unlove her own mother in order to love me better. She sat on the bathroom stool while I undressed her, pulling the blouse and saree into a bucket. I turned on the water and began washing her hair, then her body. This was her ritual; anyone who’d been to a hospital had to wash completely before touching anything in the house.
As I scrubbed her skin, careful around the vein swollen from the saline channels, I caught our reflection in the bathroom mirror. I saw myself at seventeen in that same position, locked behind a different bathroom door, hiding from my mother’s questions. The tiles were pink then, not this institutional white. There was always something devastating about bathrooms, their promise of privacy and the rituals of cleansing that never quite succeeded. I’d just been laughed at in school for my hairy legs. I was trying to trim the hair with scissors. Blood ran down my thin, veiny shins. Later that night, despite my mother’s objections, my grandmother taught me how to remove my body hair properly.
Now, I helped my mother into the bedroom and patted her dry. I helped her wear a saree. I saw my mother’s face, calm, without any expression. I wiped her hair, started brushing it. Suddenly, we heard echoes from the street. She startled.
“It’s from the protests,” I assured her. This was the first time I spoke to her in days. This was the first time she came to my flat.
She nodded and lay down. I knew she was hungry, but she wouldn’t ask for it. She would pretend that I didn’t need to bring her here, that I could have abandoned her. I hadn’t had anything except tea at the hospital canteen. I was too hungry to begin any argument, then. I avoided her and went to the kitchen.
The first time I heard the word rape, I was eight years old. August 14, 2004. Dhananjay was hanged. I remembered my mother talking to our house-help, Bharati-pishi. I’d known her as long as I could remember; my mother had hired her on a hot summer afternoon when I sat on my grandmother’s lap eating a mango, pulp dripping onto the floor. I would hear them discuss rape again after eight years. In 2012, they stood in the same kitchen discussing the Delhi gang rape case. The woman who was brutally gang-raped on the bus. I was fourteen by then, old enough to understand. I remembered my mother hiding the newspapers from me. She tried to shield me from the details. It didn’t work. I was terrified to take a bus after dark for years.
I chopped the frozen onions and potatoes, washed the pulses and the rice. Outside, I could hear the voices from the protests. My phone lit up. A text from my boyfriend. Eating out tonight. I ignored it.
I needed to cook this lentil soup, perfect for my mother. My grandmother’s recipe. She’d made it for me whenever I was ill. Later, my mother made it daily for my grandmother when she fell sick. All three of us loved it. I hadn’t made it in months because my boyfriend complained about the vegetables in the lentil soup. I thought of those initial years of grandmother’s amnesia, when I gave her baths. She’d sit on the stool while I soaped her back, her breasts, her body curled and withered, skin hanging loose. But she still laughed at jokes, smiled with her bare gums, ate her lentil soup until its last drop.
My mother had hinted I shouldn’t have to care for her, worried it would hurt me to touch her that way. It didn’t. But I’d used it against my mother in fights, accused her of not protecting me from her own mother. She never had an answer. And I won the argument every time.
The lentil soup became my obligatory retreat for now. My sudden passion to get the correct amount of garam masala into it, of course, was made up of spite and necessity. But I would let myself believe that it was out of dearest hope.
I rubbed the chopped vegetables in turmeric before dropping them into the frying pan. My fingers were stained yellow from turmeric. As I stared at them, I noticed my mother had moved silently to the sink. She was washing the utensils I’d used, her hands already in the soapy water. She’d taken over the kitchen without even asking. And I sat there with turmeric-stained fingers, watching her work. I felt everything would become alright, my relationship with my boyfriend, my failing career, now that she was here.
And suddenly in my mind, there was my grandmother from that lost afternoon two decades ago, smiling at me, her betel-stained lips ready to mark my skin. And in front of us, a pre-teen girl with wet hair stood looking out the window. Nothing had happened to her yet. Her grandmother had not kissed her bare breasts in this story. She turned and looked at me and my mother. I realized all of this was for her. For the girl who saw beauty in those mango blossoms that I could no longer see, for the girl who would never know about her grandmother’s kiss. Perhaps it had all been a bad dream for her.
I knew I would carry that girl through every afternoon to come. I would remember that I was still her. My life’s work was to hold her and remember how she loved before any of this happened. Every day of my life, I would kneel before the love I had for my mother, for my grandmother, and for that girl to whom nothing happened.
The scent of mango blossoms would return every spring. And I would never forgive or move on completely. I would simply carry what remained: love and loss, braided so tight I couldn’t separate them any longer.
Soon, my mother and I would sit together with that little girl of my imagination and eat our late lunch. A word would sit between us. It would be called love. And within it, at first, nothing happened to that little girl. In the end, it would happen to both of us again and again.
Sree is a writer and interdisciplinary artist reconstructing desire, subaltern memory, displacement, and the intimate resistances of marginalised women's lives.