M is Mangoes and Monsoon

Day 16 of the A to Z challenge! Wow.. only 10 more to go. And the real tough ones are yet to come ( Im looking at you, U and Q).

Anyways, today it's M and M for me represents my mom, magic, music, movies, m n m's, mocha lattes, macaroni, macaroons ('meh on these ) , Macross (sci fi mecha anime, old school.. I loved it and still do!) madhouse (that is my work sometimes), Megatron (who for some reason I think is kickass),Maleficent (scared the bejeebus out of me for years till Ursala came along) and so on so forth.

For today though, I'm gonna talk about Mangoes, the first fruit we desis fall in love with and Monsoon, the season we all look forward to.

 

 Ah, how we subcontinentals wait for these two things!

Mangoes, sweet and juicy. Or unripe and tarty. It is the fruit your mom will feed you as an infant. It is the fruit you will eat everyday atleast once a day for 3 months. It will be pickled and purreed, cooked and broiled, used in lentils when it's tart and in desserts when it's sweet.

It's eaten with white rice and it's eaten with parathas. Some eat it as a part of the meal, some gorge on it at the end.

It will be the fruit which will define girldom in some ways( what?! you dont like kairi??(unripe mango in Urdu for the uninformed...) but..but... girls love kairi!

It will be the gift of choice, specially as a sign of big respect to other families.

We take our mango  worship seriously.

However, too soon for our liking monsoon winds arrive and they signal both joy (yay rains!) and sadness (bye mangoes).

Karachi gets little rain. And even that brings electricity outages (like we don't already have those), mini lakes forming where once there were roads.
But we wouldnt exchange it for anything. The rest of the country is occasionally flooded and loads of misery is heaped upon a nation of poor people, but still every year, everyone waits for the rains to come.

So I'm ending my love sonnet/ode to the letter M.

PS: It's nearly time for Kairis! Yay!