It was overpowering, the smell of mangoes-some fresh, some old, some rotten. With a large empty coconut straw basket, I followed my mother as she stopped at every stall in the massive mango bazaar. They had to taste a certain way; they had to be sour and they had to be mangoes that would not turn sweet when ripened. The mangoes that went into making mango pickle were special mangoes. It was important to use your senses to pick the right batch. You tasted one mango and you relied upon that one mango to tell you what the other mangoes from the same tree tasted like.

“No, no.” My mother shook her head at the man sitting in a dirty white dhoti and kurta. His skin was leathery around his mouth and there were deep crevices around his eyes. His face spoke volumes about his life, the hardships, the endless days under the relentless sun selling his wares, sometimes mangoes, sometimes something else, whatever was in season. He was chewing betel leaves, which he spat out at regular intervals in the area between his stall and the one next to him.

“Amma,” the man said with finality, as he licked his cracked lips with a tongue reddened by betel leaves. “Ten rupees a k-g, enh, take it or leave it.”

My mother shrugged. “I can get them for seven a kilo in Abids.”

The man smiled crookedly. “This is Monda Market, Amma. The price here is the lowest. And all these, enh”-he spread his hand over the coconut straw baskets that held hundreds of mangoes-“taste the same.”

That had to be a stretch, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t want to get embroiled in this particular discussion. I stood mute next to my mother, patiently waiting for the ordeal to be over. My light pink salwar kameez was dirty and I was sweating as if I had never been through an Indian summer before. But I had been through twenty Indian summers, and now seven years later, I was having trouble acclimating to my homeland.