Mango stories

I have never had a langda aam in my life or so I thought. Chrys has been raving about this type of mango since years but every mango season we would just binge on alphonso and the box of mangoes Chrys' dad sends sometimes. This year we finally got around to buying a few of the Langda variety. The moment I tasted it I was taken back to my childhood when I spent summer vacations in Kerala. My maternal grandad had these huge mango trees in the backyard of his house and those mangoes tasted just like these langda mangoes. Of course they call it something else and they look smaller, but the taste is the same. There were so many of them that we had it all day. My grandpa would squeeze an overripe mango into his rice and have it for lunch. Grandma made a curry of it with grated fresh coconut and curd. In the night when it rained, mangoes would fall off the trees and just after sunrise we would accompany grandpa in the grounds looking for them. It was like a treasure hunt. My grandpa almost always predicted the exact number of mangoes we would find. He counted the "thuds" in the night LOL!
One of those trees was cut down for grandpa's funeral... it was the one closest to his bedroom window... the one that kept him awake in the night with the sound of falling mangoes.