The six mango trees.

How to apologise to fathers for growing up without their permission?

My father was a farmer. He had an acreage of land in which he cultivated bananas and peppers. It was a method of intermittent cropping. He would explain to me how the banana plant would provide shade for the small pepper stems that he had planted.

Father was a man of average height and built with dark skin and thick straight black hair. I never found him to be an attractive man until I found an old photo of him in the album. He looked very handsome in it, which also made me realize why my mother had liked him. But on the other hand, I was fair like my mother but instead of her curly hair, I inherited his straight hair. My sister, on the other hand, was a copy of my father. She was dark like him and had straight long hair. And I always thought maybe that’s why she was his favorite child among the three of us. Even though I used to get jealous of that, I knew that my father had his reasons. The social setting we grew up in was never easy on a dark-skinned girl like her.

Coming back to my father, I never told any of my friends that he was a farmer. I told them that he has a pepper business. Which was not entirely a lie since he would stock and sell them in large quantities, but there was an element of shame hidden in that partial lie (or partial truth). Because saying my mother is a teacher, brother is an engineer and my sister is a doctor, always hesitated to finish it with “My father is a farmer”. Hence “he does business” was the phrase I used to finish off that sentence amidst my peers.

I remember myself as this sweet child who tailed my father in all his chores. As a result of this, from a very small age, I knew everything about cropping, farming, different plants, their seeds, how they are grown, what they need, and what they don’t need. I still show off the botanical knowledge I possess in the related discourses I have with my peers. But I always kept the source of my vast knowledge hidden. Most people of my age were more familiar with the supermarket culture and they would listen to me in awe when I say that a plantain only crops once in its lifetime. But how I came to have such a piece of knowledge, was a story I never told.

One day, as every other day in my life, I went to the field with my father. He told me he had spotted a ripened cluster of bananas and that we were going to harvest it. I followed him, dragging the heavy sickle in my small hand. I tried to keep up the pace with him, showing every impatience to spot it before he did. Finally, I found it before we reached it and made a run toward the plant. I wanted to count all the bananas on it, my excitement had peeked by then. Even though I have peeled and eaten hundreds of bananas, I never got the honor to participate in its harvesting. On his command I handed him the sickle, like an obedient soldier of a king, only to witness him doing something utterly unexpected.

He raised the sickle and chopped the plant into two with a heavy grunt!

“Ippa! What did you do? We could have made more bananas from that plantain. You killed it!” – I was shocked by the madness of this man! I wept for all the bananas that could have been! everything is gone now. The plant was no longer in one piece.

But my father looked down at this heartbroken me and burst out into a loud laugh. He consoled me by saying, “Oh Kunjus, a plantain only makes one cluster of bananas in its lifetime”

That was a hard truth in my little ears. As much of a sweet fruit it was, that was a sad affair.

We had a lot of similar chronicles of our own through those fields. He taught me how to never pluck the first pumpkin on the plant. Because the first one should be kept for the seed. It should stay on the plant and be allowed to rip to its prime.The second one and all that came after that was of course for us to eat. Sometimes some pumpkin would only have three or four on it. Still, you don’t touch the first one. It bears the seed for tomorrow-For tomorrow’s hunger. It is frowned upon and viewed as short sightedness if you were to act otherwise.

We also used to pick up the fallen areca nuts together, amidst the dry ones sucked and dropped by the bats, he would find the perfect orange ones that fell without waiting for the bats. He would pick it up and slowly brush it against my cheeks and I would gently close my eyes. Unlike his rough hands, which always felt like sandpaper against my rosy cheeks, the areca nuts felt soft and nice. He only ever caressed my cheeks with ripe and bright orange areca nuts.

There was this rain that came in the hot summer. It brings the whooshing wind and thunder along with it. The land so dusty and angry from the heat of the sun will go damp and soft. It will shake all the mangoes down from the sky-clad old mango tree in our courtyard. This violent harvesting mostly occurs at night. When I wake up and look out through my window, I would see the scattered mangoes. Hundreds of them! The brown of my courtyard would be completely hidden by the greenish-yellow mangoes. I would run to the tree with a bucket in my hand. Me and my father would pick them up, competing with each other. He could fit five or more mangoes each in his hands! I could only do so little. But to count them while picking was always an unspoken rule. The highest we ever picked was 269 mangoes. It is a large number considering the tree will give mangoes every day for the two months of summer.

We had six such trees. Each of them is at least 70 years old. As I grew up my father cut down each of them. Five of them were killed at different stages of my growth. I cried for the first two. He never listened. He pushed me away from the tree as the workers approached with an ax. The third tree was my everything. I got one week to say goodbye to it. Every morning, I would go and hug the tree. It was huge, I could never make my hands meet while hugging it. For seven days, I cried and apologized to it. On the seventh day, as I came back from school, I saw her leaving on a lorry. By the time the fourth tree was cut down, I had moved out from my parent’s house and we had stopped talking to each other.

His most trustworthy commander, His tail in all walks, His pride, grew up without ever asking him. Somewhere along that uncontrollable growth of mine, he stopped getting a say in the affairs of my life. I disobeyed him and lied to him. He hit me and pushed me out.

The fifth-grade child who answered: “I want to be a farmer when I grow up”- to the social science teacher, soon became a troublesome teenager and an arrogant woman. On the other hand, men only grow bitter as they age.

A few days ago, my grandfather called me and said my father had cut down the fifth one too. But I did not shed a tear like the last four times. All I could think about was, how there is only one more left now - The last of the six mango trees.

Disputed children are always advised to break bread with their fathers. Even strangers will remind you saying: “Put aside your ego, father is old. You have got not long to make things right”

What do I dread more? The death of the sixth tree or my father’s death?

I think the sixth tree is my hourglass. I know it hasn’t got much time left. It is the green signal waiting for me to come back. For a heartfelt sorry for growing up and leaving the nest. As much as all our movies and feminist literature talk about how fathers ruin their daughters’ lives, I wonder why no one talks about how a daughter can tear apart her father, and make a full-grown man sob like a baby.

If it’s going to be the tree or him that will go first- I don’t know. Strangely, I don’t care that I haven’t got much time left to make peace with him. Unlike the small girl, this betrayed and dragged-through-mud-woman doesn’t know how to make things right anymore. There are places and people in your life where you want to go back once more, but you never do, simply because you don’t know how to. And the clock always runs out while you figure out the “how” part.

However, in my dreams of the next life, I know I want to birth my father. I want to raise him with all the love in the world. I will race him to the fields, peel mangoes for him, teach him how to swim, and tell him how a plantain only fruits once. I will spend an entire lifetime loving him – Love, like a river, only flows downwards.