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Disclaimer: I do not own any references in this story.
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Many times I find myself choking over the sight of mangoes. I have often told myself how irrational it is for a grown woman to be shedding copious tears at the produce section of a big supermarket, but I am governed by irrationality and emotions. Although after repeated sessions of self-mortification, along with practice and determination, I succeed in stopping the tears from coming out.
The reason behind this irrationality is simple enough.
When I was small, I had a mango tree, huge and towering over the garage at the left side of my house. At night I sat there with my father when he was still alive, under the mango tree, my father on a lazy chair and me in my father's lap. The roof of our garage was of corrugated zinc, and the mango tree being above it and shading it, released its ripened fruits when it could not help it anymore, and it banged the zinc in the dead of the night, rolled along the roof, and thudded on the ground.
In the morning, we would find many mangoes lying on the ground. I am grateful that not one of them ever landed on my head or on my father's.
I told my father what happened during the day, at school with the nuns and the teachers and my classmates, or at the canteen, about the foods they were selling.
"Papa, " I said, determined to inform him of the bad news I had been carrying for weeks, "The nuns said Jesus will torture you when you die, and me too when I die, if we're not Christians."
"Oh yeah?" he said, "How will he torture me?"
"He will skin you alive," I answered him, and then seeing no sign of fear I had expected, furnished him with the details I had gathered from my friends and teachers. "He will make slashes here, like so, around here and here, and then pulled the skin out of you, so that in one yank, you will be skinless, and then salt on it, and then burn you like roasted duck, and the next day Jesus will give you a new body so he can torture you again!!"
He pulled me to him and let out a soft laugh. "Darling, when I die I will have my body burned, I guess I'll beat God to it, and then I won't have flesh anymore, and you can't sit on my lap. And when my bones and flesh are burning, you will hear crackling and popping sound and some people will cry, but you will not, because you know I will not feel pain." A few years later my father passed on.
I thought of that in the next months and years I stayed at my Catholic school, and along with the thoughts I smelled the juicy ripened smell of mangoes, saw the bright orange flesh of it beckoning me, and I remembered my father. The subject of hell was a favorite of our religion classes, and after the conversation I had with my father under the mango tree, it became my favorite too. I imagined bringing into hell, and joining my father, his lazy chair and the zinc roof and our mango tree. What hell was not a heaven when I had these things.
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