The Mango House

| Sanchalika Das | July 2025 | Short Story |

I think she lived. I’m almost sure she died. I am certain she was mad. Utterly, seriously, irreversibly mad. Wife to a dead husband, who was well tolerated in the community. He died with his office affairs mismanaged, his almirah and desk in the office in an absolute mess, his registers filled in all sorts of pen marks, making it almost illegible for anyone to understand. He died on Makar Sankranti. On a religious holiday. His death made it obligatory for the office to revoke the holiday and made it a moral compulsion for everyone to be present in the mourning. 

He died without settling his dues in the local general store, with a little bit of debt from mostly everyone in the office. 

500. 700. 650. 300. 550. 80. 62. 110. 

People left their poori, chana sabzi (what a waste), raita (did he have to die on a festival, that bastard),  barfi (tch) on the plates unwillingly, half eaten and went for his mourning in the office at 2 pm on a holiday. 

TchTch! 

He died on the office desk. 

Why did he have to go to the office today?

He died amidst the files. 

How will we work there now? 

He died with the pages stuck to his face.

They’ll have to sanitize the whole place now. Good for us. No office for at least 2 days.

It was a heart attack.

Will the wife be allowed to keep the quarter? Tiwari from the first floor wanted that quarter.

TchTch!

After he died, she got the job in the office on humanitarian grounds. She was just asked to come into the office, sit in her dead husband’s chair, the table had been given to a new joinee who suited it more. She was to sit on that chair from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm and wait for someone to call her and ask her to do something. She had only gone to school till class 2, so she couldn’t be useful in any admin work except to give and take files from one department to another. 

When she joined the office and sat in her husband’s chair for the first time, everyone took notice. They asked about her health, the child, her swollen ankles that used to flare up in winters, and the small piece of land her husband had bought in Lalkuan, is she thinking of selling it? Who will she sell it to? She answered graciously, in Hindi, which had a pahadi accent.

In the first 6 months of her being there, people asked her to do something, anything, with an apologetic tone, the tone you take with someone who’s lesser than you and you both know it, but you pat yourself on the back thinking of how it doesn’t make a difference to you. Oh, so progressive. The benevolent tone of allowance. They took pride in their generosity for this poor widow, their big-heartedness and their tender voices towards her.

As those six months came to an end, she somehow realized that she could not be thrown out of the office. Someone from the colony had shown her the papers, written in a language that she didn’t understand, but that only meant the papers were very important. Why else would it be written in this secret code of a language?

She was shown her name typed on that paper. She was told it was her name. Her daughter confirmed it indeed was. 

M A Y A D E V I 

She saw the seal of the office, she saw the signatures in blue ink, which looked nothing like her own. She saw her own signature done in Hindi and her name in English underneath it, typed. She remembers signing these papers a long time ago when her husband was still alive. She remembers how she had to practice first on a newspaper before she wrote her name in a childlike, unsure handwriting. She remembers her husband had asked her to just put the thumbprint and move on, to not take so much time, to not waste the form.

She didn’t know what alphabet was what, but she remembered her name like a pattern. Like a mehendi design. She just knew how to move the pen in a way that would result in her getting the familiar pattern. 

The ink was a bit faded now, but she remembered how fragile this document felt to her, how very delicate. Like the silver leaf on kaju katli, her husband bought home from office events, wrapped in A4-sized papers. One touch and it vanishes into silver dust on your fingertips, lodged into the intricacies of the swirls and waves of your finger. 

**************

Patpatpatpatpat 

They said, “Madam, can you give this to Pathak ji on the third floor?” 

She nodded and then again walked swiftly towards the staircase in her small but fast steps. Patpatpatpatpat

“What an uneducated walk.”

Till now, the people in the office were losing their sympathy and regards for this widowed lady.  Men in the admin department sat in their AC cabins and talked about how the office was wasting resources on this woman.  How very unprofessional. How illiterate people don’t want to leave their illiterate ways, and will have no sense of how things should be done. How expensive is a pu-leather sandal? Why would you wear hawai chappal in the office? How they are not even sure if she is saddened by her husband’s death. How this position could be offered to someone else. How she didn’t look needy enough. How she’s so certain she won’t be kicked out of the office. Why??? How she is so confident with her hawai chappals, and how she cries when someone reprimands her. How no one can say anything to her because she is a woman who’ll cry. Convenient. 

No one knows if she heard all this or not. No one knew if, just like the AC’s cold air, these discussions, thoughts and laughs remained trapped inside the glass chamber. Waiting to fizzle out. Waiting to lose their coldness. Slowly.

She continued with her affairs and came home at 5:30 pm. Sharp.

Mayadevi came home, woke her daughter up from the bedroom window. The daughter would be taking her after school nap.  Mayadevi came home drenched in sweat. Her baby hair sticking to her forehead, her bindi peeling off.

Her daughter opens the door and goes right back to sleep. Mayadevi closes the door behind her and strips off her clothes in the same and only bedroom where her daughter is sleeping. 

She then lies beside her daughter. Both their thin bodies sticky with sweat and a layer of dust and grime on the mother’s.

The daughter sleeps with her face tucked on the side of her mother’s stomach. Inhaling all the smells her mother has.  Smell of the road, dust from files, the faint flowery smell of cheap talcum powder mixed with the sweat of the body, the smell of fear and wait, what’s that? Smell of madness? Very faint but very present. 

She looks at the moving fan and sees the cobwebs. She makes a mental note to clean it on Sunday. She looks at the fan and remembers how her daughter had scored low in the GK exam. She looks at the fan and remembers how beautiful, smooth and pinkish her feet were. She remembers how her daughter had inherited her father’s feet. Unshapely, dark, big and a bluish green vein popping on them. She had poor people’s feet, she had feet which turn gray when you wear open-toed sandals or chappals. 

Her own feet never turned gray when she was her daughter’s age. 

Now Mayadevi also has feet like her late husband. Did he switch them before dying? Feet with wiry strands of hair on the big toe. The big toe’s nail is turning inwards. Blackish. She had cracks in her feet that no cream could fill. Her feet and legs look like they belong to someone who works with cement. Mayadevi looks at her feet and hates what she sees. She loved wearing altaa. Stopped long before her husband died. Preparatory? 

The altaa seeps into the cracks of her feet and looks like her feet are bleeding and glowing. Like a neon sign. It looks horrific and ghostlike. Her feet look ugly.  Monsoon came, and the peacock cried, looking at its ugly scaly feet. 

No one in the colony remembers how she started going mad. No one remembers when her mind started going off its axis. She married her daughter off at around twenty-five and started living alone. Was it the living alone part? Was it the part where you come home and everything is just as you had left it? Do you start seeing yourself shuffling about the house? Was it the neon sign feet that she tried to fix by digging more and more into the cracks, trying to rip the skin and even it all out? 

No one knows. 

She still went to the office and sat in that very same chair. Sitting makes her tired now. She complains to the peon who gives water to the men in the AC chambers about the pain in her joints, about how she needs a table now, about how it’s getting hotter and hotter with each passing year, about how her daughter’s husband has recently bought a Nokia 1100 for her -no one ever saw the phone though- how she was willed her husband’s poor, ugly feet. 

The peon wonders who hired this senile old woman. He wanted that job for his brother-in-law. He mumbles something without even stopping to listen. 

She rambles on and looks at her feet. Are they really hers? She wonders. 

One public display of Mayadevi’s weakened mental faculties was when she was arguing with a plumber who came to her house to repair her toilet. The plumber was asking way too much after finishing the job. They both had a shouting match. The argument then seeped from the cracks of the one bedroom house to the road. Kids who were playing in the park watched because profanity was fun to hear. 

Suddenly, Mayadevi turned around and exposed her ass to the plumber. Everyone, including the plumber, thought she had given up and was going into the house to get the money. Instead, she undid the knot of her salwar, lifted her suit, bent a bit and dropped the salwar from behind. Suddenly, it felt like the air froze. The kids were shocked and ran away. The plumber said something and was also a bit afraid of what this woman might do next. He got on his bike and drove off. 

Mayadevi stood there for a whole minute with her ass exposed to the colony and the whole world. She then straightened, tied the knot of her salwar and went inside, making a mental note of paying the previously agreed-upon amount to the plumber the next day.

This news spread like wildfire. It was so outlandish and absurd that no mother believed their kids when they told them. The news was so funny, bizarre, and so classic womenlike that no husband believed their wives when they were told this over dinner.

The next day, this news also reached the AC chambers of the office. Men talked. Discussed. Laughed. Analyzed. Gave solutions. Hypothesized. Mocked. And then reached the conclusion that they had always known something was off about the woman, she never looked sad when her husband died, and then never sold that piece of land in Lalkuan to people who were paying well, she cried easily, and she was always looking at the AC chambers. Suspicious.

No one knew why Maya Devi did what she did. The plumber never came back to anyone’s house in the colony after that. Was she able to settle her accounts at least? No one knows. 

Summers came wearing a cotton faded saree with mangoes all over it, and a step behind it came all the loose leaves that were to fall inside Mayadevi’s head. 

Mayadevi’s backyard had a mango tree. The tree was there long before any of us were there. The year Mayadevi’s head started going barren and her feet turned more scaly was the year that the tree had mangoes. Everyone thought the tree was now infertile. Sweepers and young men came and drew obscene things on it. Drawings of women with unnaturally large breasts and hips. The face was never detailed, but the drawing of everything else always was. We kids used to look at it and laugh. 

Mayadevi had never taken notice of the infertile tree in the past, but this time she sat with her ears and eyes open, saving the honor of the tree. The tree became laden with mangoes, and Mayadevi started sitting in her backyard permanently. She didn’t go to the office – that rickety government chair waited for her. Day in and day out, she sat there with a sickle in her hand, scaring off men who came to look at the drawings and to make more, and kids who came for the unripe mangoes to eat with salt.  She sat with her eyes on the tree, making sure not one leaf fell off without her noticing. She sat trying to even out her feet. Digging deep and deep into the cracks, trying to reach her own pinkish feet. 

Mayadevi called a man to pluck all the mangoes. The man climbed the woman’s tree and plucked the mangoes for her. She paid him in cash and asked him to go. He took the money, mumbled irritably and left. He was expecting at least a few kilos of mangoes with the payment. 

What a cheap, greedy woman. 

She slept with the mangoes, woke up with them, and her entire house was filled with mangoes. The unripe, leafy and slightly off earthy smell changed to a plump, ripe and slightly sickeningly sweet smell. It was an unspoken rule to distribute mangoes to each house in the colony, as not every quarter’s backyard had a mango tree. She didn’t do any of that. She was shut inside her house with the mangoes and the smells.

What will a lonely woman do with all those mangoes? 

She might send it to her son-in-law and daughter.

Didn’t you hear? Things are not good between the daughter and her husband.

What a shame. The daughter clearly takes after her mother.

There must be about 100 kg of mangoes in that tree, she couldn’t spare a few kilos to share? 

We could have bought you know, but the market ones are full of carbide. 

What a greedy woman.

Well, what is it to us? 

Inside the house, Mayadevi started eating those mangoes and digging deep into the feet. For breakfast. For lunch. For dinner. For dinner. For lunch. For breakfast. She ate and dug slowly and steadily, and the timings of breakfast, lunch, and dinner blended into one another. She ate and ate and ate. Dug and dug and dug. Till the juice ran down her forearm, till it made her mouth, chest and clothes all sticky, till her stomach was blown out, till the crevices between her teeth were filled with small thread like fibers of the fruit, till all her clothes smelled like mangoes, till the walls were painted in yellow, and till the juice ran down the street to the plumbers shop, till every house started getting that yellow hue, till the flies made it all theirs.

When they found her, she was naked with a football for a stomach and a mango for a house. Her broken, cracked feet had scabs, and finally were even in that bloody Altaa mess. Pinkness was just around the corner. Flies circled her ritualistically. The whole house was filled with mangoes and their peels, and smelled rotting sweet. 

Is she dead?

They’ll have to sanitize this place.

How come nobody knew she was going mad inside?

No one would want to live in this quarter now. It would have been better to give this quarter to Tiwari. 

Why didn’t anyone check? 

All these mangoes went to waste. 

TchTch!

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_{Sanchalika Das is a budding writer of twenty one from Uttarakhand. She is an alumna of Delhi University. She likes to dabble with the themes of family, loss, identity and struggles regarding it. Her work has previously been published in Kitaab Magazine, a Singapore based international journal and Monograph Magazine, a student led magazine based out of Kolkata, India.}

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Feature image by Harshit Suryawanshi via Unsplash 

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