Every house in this country has a mango tree, or has had one, or is in mourning for one. Ours was in the back, near the broken wall, and it bore exactly forty-seven fruit a season for as long as we kept counting. Then we stopped counting, as families do, and the tree — indifferent to our attention — continued on its own terms.
The year we did not climb it was 1961. My brother had broken his arm in the spring and I had made a promise to my mother, which I kept, and have felt righteous about ever since. The mangoes that year were uncollected. They fell, slowly, over three weeks, and the air smelled of something I have never entirely found again.
Grief, I think, smells like rotting mangoes in summer — sweet and fermented and entirely unavoidable.
My brother is gone now. The house is gone. The wall was rebuilt and then demolished when the neighbourhood changed its ambitions. But I am still here, and I still smell it sometimes, on the right kind of August afternoon, when the air decides to be honest.