Bhagmati’s great passion other than me (as I like to think) is mangoes. It’s been a good year for mangoes but a bad one for the monsoons. That often happens in Delhi. The first crop of mangoes start coming in from Tamil Nadu some time in April. Fat, pulpy stuff without any character. In May the much-fancied Alfonsos from Maharashtra make their appearance in Delhi’s markets. Delicious but murderously expensive. More so since Delhi’s foreign community cultivated a taste for mangoes. I only get to taste Alfonsos when some industrialist or minister of government sends me a crate. I send a few to my neighbours in the hope they will return the gift when mangoes from Uttar Pradesh start coming in. These days I have to scout around for more and more mangoes for the way Bhagmati tucks in I wouldn’t get to eat any. Without as much as a by your leave she will eat three or four at a time, suck their kernels with great relish till there’s nothing left on them. She ends her feasting with a loud belch, washes her hands and face—then proceeds to tie up whatever fruit remains on the table in the folds of her sari to take home. ‘I know you haven’t paid for them,’ she tells me. ‘My poor family hasn’t tasted a mango this season,’ she says as she leaves.

Nothing in the world of fruit compares with Dussehris, Langdas and Ratauls from the orchards of Uttar Pradesh. Of the nearly thousand varieties of mangoes, these are the three I relish the most. Unfortunately they also happen to be Bhagmati’s favourites. During the mango season her visits are more frequent. When she comes she makes a meal of my mangoes and takes away what she can’t eat. She says they are good for her digestion, the best thing to take for constipation. She is not bothered about putting on weight.

As I said we’ve had a poor monsoon. In the first week of June I heard the monsoon bird calling. Rain should have followed within a few days. There is news of heavy downpours in other parts of India. The Bombay and Calcutta streets are under water, and floods are devastating Assam. But not a drop in Delhi through June and July. A few miserable showers in August. The bloody songbird of the clouds, the meghapapeeha, hasn’t been heard of for the last three months. ‘There will be famine,’ prophesies Bhagmati tucking into her fifth Langda, ‘people will die of hunger in the streets of Delhi.’ Then she adds philosophically, ‘No matter. People are always dying in this wretched city. If it is not hunger, then it is by cholera, plague, small-pox, murder, suicide. Or old age.’

The Dispossessed