They sat on a hill and took turns sucking on the mango. The yellow-orange fruit was fully ripe and so sweet that they couldn’t help grinning at each other, letting some of the juice dribble out the sides of their mouths, down their chins and onto the grass below.
By the time they finished, nothing was left except a big shiny white seed. The father held it up— ‘We’ll plant it right here on this hill,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll enjoy lots of delicious mangoes just like it.’
The boy was delighted— ‘How long will it take the mangoes to grow?’
‘I’m not sure,’ his father replied. ‘Some years…’
‘Years!’ cried the boy. ‘We can’t wait that long!’
‘Sure we can,’ laughed his father, knowing his son’s impetuous streak all too well. ‘What’s the rush?
We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.’
And he led the boy back down the hill to their countryside house.
At dinner the boy didn’t taste the food in front of him. All he could taste was that juicy mango. And all he could think about was eating another one as soon as possible.
In bed he couldn’t sleep. The full moon shone through the window. Funnily enough, it seemed to have a yellow-orange hue, just like the mango, and it beckoned him outside.
Once outdoors, the moon kept drawing the boy farther from the house.
‘Follow me,’ the moon seemed to be saying, ‘and I’ll lead you to all that you desire.’
The boy never looked back. Making his way by the light of the bright moon, he followed the trail, which became a path, which led into a road. Before he knew it he was off on the great mango hunt.
market. There were few shoppers at this hour, although most of the hawkers were already setting up their stalls.
The boy marched by all the stalls until he came to the one he was looking for. A bald man was carefully arranging rows of mangoes. Yellow ones, orange ones, and even a few red ones.
The boy reached for an orange one.
‘Thirty shillings,’ the man said.
Startled, the boy looked at the man quizzically.
‘That’ll be thirty shillings for the mango,’ the man said, more loudly and slowly, thinking the boy might be hard of hearing, or a bit daft.
‘But I haven’t got any money,’ pleaded the boy.
‘Then you haven’t got a mango either,’ said the man, snatching the mango away and returning it to its place on the shelf.
‘But you don’t understand,’ the boy burst out. ‘I simply must have a mango!’
As an afterthought he said— ‘I’ll pay you when I get some money.’
The man laughed— ‘How about you get the money first? Then you…’
‘How?’ the boy demanded.
‘How?’ asked the man.
‘Yes, how do I get money?’
The man was amused by this hot-headed upstart, so he decided to indulge him.
‘Go to the mango plantation. It’s only a few kilometres down the road,’ said the man, pointing in the opposite direction from which the boy had come. ‘It’s harvest time and they need workers. That way you can earn some money and eat mangoes, all at the same time.’
The boy needed no further prompting. He was on his way to the mango plantation.
Passing through the gate of the mango plantation, the boy saw trees. Trees to the left, trees to the right and trees straight ahead, as far as he could see. The trees were as wide as they were tall, and they overflowed with an abundance of luscious green leaves. By comparison, the tree trunks looked rather thin. It was like looking at hundreds of oversized heads covered with large green wigs perched atop skinny necks.
For all the trees, the boy could not spot a single mango. He walked up to one tree and gazed up through the branches and leaves. There they were, except they were all green. Well, he thought, there are yellow mangoes, orange mangoes and red mangoes. Why not green ones.
He went from tree to tree staring up at the mangoes, trying to guess which one would taste the best and counting how many he could spot in each tree—until his upraised chin bumped into something.
It couldn’t have been a tree trunk. It was too soft. No, it was the big belly of a gigantic man with a straw hat, a moustache and a pipe sticking out of his mouth.
The straw-hatted man, continuing to puff away at his pipe, stared down at the boy.
Straw Hat looked like a man in charge. In any case he was the only person in sight. So the boy burst out— ‘I’m here to pick mangoes!’
‘Oh, really?’ puffed Straw Hat, not bothering to remove the pipe from his mouth.
‘Yes, the mango-seller at the market told me—’
‘Well enough,’ Straw Hat interrupted. ‘Pick that one there.’ And he pointed with his pipe to the top of the nearest tree.
The boy scampered up the tree as if there was a pot of gold waiting there. Straw Hat only managed to puff a few times on his pipe before the boy was back in front of him with the mango.
‘Alright, boy,’ Straw Hat nodded. ‘You’ve got yourself a job. You start tomorrow. I’ll show you where you sleep and eat.’
At the mention of the word ‘eat,’ the boy suddenly felt very hungry. He hadn’t eaten since last night’s dinner with his parents.
‘May I eat this mango?’ he asked.
‘Go ahead,’ said Straw Hat, with a strange smile.
The boy found it difficult to peel the mango, and he noticed there was no juice running down his hands, as with the mango he’d shared with his father on the hill. When he bit into the fruit it was so sour that the boy had to spit it out.
Straw Hat laughed heartily, smoke billowing out of his mouth.
‘What’s so funny?’ frowned the boy. ‘It tastes awful!’
‘Of course it tastes awful. It’s green…just like you! The ripe mangoes you’ll be picking are on the other side of the plantation.’
Then Straw Hat placed a consoling hand, a hand as big as a frying pan, on the boy’s should — ‘Come along. You’ll have more mangoes than you could SHAKE YOUR FIST AT.’
That night the boy dreamed that he was standing beside his parents. They were all looking up at a massive tree with beautiful purple flowers. The boy started to climb the tree.
‘Come down!’ his mother shouted.
‘I’ll be down in a second,’ the boy called back. ‘I just want to smell one of the flowers.’
As he climbed, though, the flowers seemed to retreat from the boy, so he had to climb even faster.
He was scurrying faster and faster, just like a monkey. His hands turned into feet, and his feet into hands. He even felt his tail swishing behind him. He leaped from branch to branch, so joyous and free.
He was now high up in the tree. He looked back down for his parents, but they were no longer there. In their place stood Straw Hat, puffing away on his pipe.
Suddenly there were no flowers in the tree, only mangoes. The boy picked mango after mango, but it was hard to hold them all in his little monkey hands. Then he spotted a perfect-looking mango. It was orange-yellow and rounded and juicy. It was last night’s moon mango.
The boy plucked the moon mango and balanced it atop the other mangoes he was carrying. But he now had too many mangoes, and the moon mango began to topple off the pile. He desperately reached to save the moon mango and the other mangoes slipped from his grasp. He watched all the mangoes fall slowly towards the ground, where his parents were now watching him again.
In his hand he held a single mango. But it was not ripe and juicy. Instead it was bright green, and the boy knew how sour it would taste. A single tear fell from his eye, and he watched that too fall away.
In the next few weeks the boy earned more money than he had ever seen. Straw Hat paid him for each crate of mangoes he filled, and because the boy climbed trees like a monkey he filled them in no time at all.
But the boy was less concerned with the money than he was with the quality of the mangoes he was picking. Every day he ate a dozen mangoes; they were sweet, sure, but they were somehow empty.
They lacked a certain quality, an essence, and left the boy feeling unsatisfied. There was no magic in the mangoes, as there had been in the one he’d shared with his father on the hill.
Early one morning, the boy was climbing a mango tree and pondering this question of the empty
mangoes, when a dove’s song descended through the branches on a shaft of morning sunlight— ‘Woo-hoo-woo-oo-hoo-hoo, woo-hoo-woo-oo-hoo-hoo
Listen to the trees, boy, they’ll tell you all you need!’
The boy stopped climbing and listened, but all he could hear were leaves rustling and branches faintly creaking as they swayed in the light breeze.
Over the next few days, the boy listened more closely to the trees. After dinner he would walk
through the mango orchards and sit on a branch and listened. Finally, one evening he heard —
‘Hey!’
‘What?’
‘Stop fidgeting!’
‘Let me be. Can’t you see I was here first!’
The voices were coming from between the creaks and groans in the trees.
‘Is that you, tree?’ the boy asked.
From somewhere in the distance came the reply —
‘It sure is, boy. That tree you’re sitting on never stops talking. Keeps us up all night.’
‘It’s these crowded conditions, boy,’ said the tree he was on in its own defence. ‘Straw Hat planted us too close to each other. We don’t have the space to fully spread our branches.’
‘That’s right, boy,’ hooted the distant tree. ‘What we need here is a branch manager!’
There was a sudden burst of laughter from all the surrounding trees, with thousands of leaves tittering in the twilight.
‘Plant enough trees,’ the tree he was sitting on said wryly, ‘and one joker is sure to spring up.’
‘Seriously, though,’ explained one tree. ‘We have to compete with each other for space.’
‘It leaves us no room for individual creativity,’ complained another.
‘Not only do we fight for space,’ said a third tree, ‘but also for food in the soil. There’s just not
enough to go around.’
‘Is that why your mangoes taste—’ and the boy paused to choose his words carefully. He didn’t want to hurt the trees’ feelings. ‘Is that why they are lacking a certain something?’
‘Of course it is!’ shouted all the trees in unison. He felt the tree he was sitting on rumble in
discontent.
‘Then why did Straw Hat do that?’ asked the boy.
‘So that he can harvest more mangoes and make more money!’
‘But if the mangoes don’t taste as good, what’s the point?’
‘Do you think people really notice? After eating enough of our mangoes they forget how a true, natural mango is supposed to taste.’
And now a few more trees joined the discussion.
‘That’s right…’
‘People think that because they’ve got hands to make things and eyes to see that they’re so clever…’
‘But their eyes often blind them to what’s actually happening.’
‘It’s like they can’t see the forest for the trees!’ whooped the joker tree, and another round of
laughter went up.
The boy listened to the trees talk and joke late into the night. Eventually, the trees forgot about their sorrows, grew tired and dozed off.
Author’s Notes:
This is an ongoing story, unfinished story.
There are some notebooks in Nairobi with other parts. I was not happy with them and was rewriting them.
Anyway, in the end, after many experiences, many fruitless searches for the perfect mango in which the boy gets disillusioned by the ways that mangos are commercialized (but lose their taste), are worshipped (but never tasted), are scientifically produced (but lose their essence), are made into alcohol (which leads him to forget his search for a while)…
And at the same time his experiences lead him to grow in ways that he’s not planned, he’s not aware of… he makes music with the drummer girl and falls in love, becomes a mango adviser to a queen, travels right around the world.
Eventually, he staggers, broken, beaten, hungry…. To a familiar place. But what is it?
There’s a splendorous mango tree on a hill. With his last strength he climbs the tree and picks a mango. He sits in the mango tree’s shade and bites into the mango. It is delicious. It is perfect, just like that first mango he ate with his father so many years ago on a hill just like this one.
The boy closes his eyes. He sees his father walking up the hill and they share the rest of the mango together.
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