* Author : Chaitanya Murali * Narrator : Prashanth Srivatsa * Host : Matt Dovey * Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh * Discuss on Forums PodCastle 723: Just One Last Mango is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 Just One Last Mango by Chaitanya Murali “Do you want one?” Meghna asked between bites. She was sitting in the upper branches of Balu maama’s mango tree, with half a dozen golden fruits bundled in her podavai and another one in her mouth. I shook my head, keeping an eye out for maama, and an ear out for his dogs. If he caught us, then that was another day of helping him. Another day of hearing him lecture us about how those mangoes were for selling, not eating. Another day of unpaid labour. Another loss for us. The mangoes I could eat once we were home. For now, I just wanted Meghna to get down so we could go. But my sister, older by a year and therefore infinitely more wise, swayed on the branch, kicking her legs and laughing — giddy from the flavour. Stolen mangoes always did taste sweeter. “He’s going to come out soon!” My words were a hissed whisper. “You better start running, then,” Meghna said, without the slightest urgency to accompany it. If anything, she seemed about ready to fall asleep on the branch, splaying herself across it like a basking cat. “Meghna! What if someone sees you?” “Their problem, no? It’s fine, Karthik. No one comes here at this time, anyway. And besides, he never eats them.” I could hear the dogs stirring now and my bones screamed in the panicked remembrance of a thousand crushing dog hugs. Balu maama’s dogs weren’t the biting kind. They were the aggressively friendly kind, which was somehow worse. They threw themselves at us with abandon, looking only to knock us down and pin us long enough to lick our faces raw. “They’re coming, toss the mangoes to me!” I said, opening thatha’s veshti that I’d snuck into his room to take while he snored on his wicker cot, a Dhina Thandhi magazine spilled open over his chest. Four fruits dropped, golden splashes in billowing cotton. Gilded and shining in the morning sun. These weren’t normal mangoes. I looked up, searching for where Meghna could have plucked these, but I couldn’t tell. The culprit herself was scurrying down the tree, each scraping step belying her grand indifference from before. She had the other mangoes tied in a bundle in her podavai, though I couldn’t tell if those were normal or not. “What are these?” I asked, holding one up for her to inspect. “Saw them just before I came down. They were in the upper boughs, coming from another tree,” she replied. “Don’t they look fancy? Just imagine how they’ll taste!” “Did they come from over the compound wall?” I asked. She ignored the question. Her silence was enough to tell me the answer. We jumped the compound wall as the dogs turned the corner, Balu maama close behind them. He was pale as a ghost, his skin and hair bleached white by some strange disease that had afflicted him for many years. But despite that, and despite his age, he was still sturdy — he told us he’d been a warrior in his youth, though he never told us any stories about it. But for now, we were over, and so we were safe. Meghna and I stood in the road, secure with the barrier protecting us. We had an unspoken rule in this game, Balu maama and us — if we made it over the compound wall,