King of Fruits 

Nithya Indlamuri and Jaineshaa Naheta

Sitting cross-legged on the floor with his brother and sisters, their steel plates arranged in a neat line before them, their mother would place exactly four mangoes before them, precious as gold. The ritual was precise: each child would pair with another, one receiving the sweet, dripping juice, the other claiming the seed. To my grandfather and his six siblings, a single mango was more than fruit—it was a luxury.

A generation later, the mango remained a treasure. My mom and her sister would sit at a table, each with their own whole mango. One entire mango per person—such abundance would have seemed unimaginable in their parents' childhood.

Today, when my cousins and I go to India, we are welcomed to a different world. My grandfather spends weeks collecting the perfect mangos, bargaining with street side vendors and finding out about the newest market from phone calls to friends and family. At home, my grandmother carefully arranges the mangos in the refrigerator, building towers of mangoes sandwiched by steel containers of freshly squeezed mango juice. Together, they defy laws of time and season to preserve the taste of mango season until our arrival.

Once kids who counted mango slices like precious coins, they are now content to sip our leftover juice. In their eyes, I see the pleasure of witnessing their grandchildren enjoy without limitation and pass down to them a tradition and love.

But something has shifted in this abundance. When did the magic become mundane? For our grandparents, the enchantment was in the sweetness itself, in the rarity that made each drop precious. For me, the magic lives elsewhere—in my grandparents' eagerness to reveal the collection of mangoes hiding in their fridge, the familiar yellow-orange that reminds me of home, and in the preciousness of what the mango has meant to my family for so many generations.

Sitting across from my grandparents at their dining table as they coach me through how to correctly eat my first mango of the season–yes, apparently there is a proper method–my grandfather will lecture, "Like the lion is the king of animals, the mango, it is the king of all fruits". And just to put a smile on his face, I grab one more mango.