There is only one correct way to eat a banganapalle mango:Wash the fruit and scrub the skin. Do not skip this step, as the skin will be in your mouth just as much as the fruit.Wash your hands and clean fingernails thoroughly.Use a peeler to peel the mango all the way around. Suck the flesh off of each peel before discarding (see step 1 again).Once the fruit is fully peeled, bring it to your face and devour it. It may get up your nose and up till your cheeks but that’s okay. Your line of sight should be partially obscured by the mango flesh. You may hear nothing but your own slurping.Relish till you reach the seed. Then turn the mango around and repeat the step.I love mangoes and look forward to them every year – just as I look forward to summer and monsoon – but my experience with mangoes is actually quite uncomfortable, overwhelming, even suffocating. Like the seasons are painful and oppressive – even though I love them – mangoes too are heavy on the stomach. And the way I devour them makes it worse not only for me but for those around me. I make an absolute mess, while the mangoes make me all hot, sweaty and sticky.Sometimes I even find dried up mango juice on my nose or elbow hours after I have cleaned up. It is the same way sand shows up in your underwear or behind your ears and between your toes hours after you’ve come home from a beach trip. I also find mango hairs perpetually stuck in my teeth. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyI particularly feel it in the oppressive pre-rain heat: sometimes I take a step towards my balcony to watch the Brahminy kites circling, and I feel a squelch under my heel, traces of the sticky mango flesh showing up in places I didn’t even know I’d been relishing them. Sometimes they leave stains on my clothes.Even the rush to consume mangoes is loaded. From the moment they arrive in season, we’re in a race to get hold of them and eat as many as we can at their peak. We eat them feverishly, wiping sweat off our faces, the juice dripping down our hands, and trying not to get mango juice all over our hair. Of course, this is only if you eat them the correct way.Every day, they’re checked and fussed over, moved to different temperatures, swapped out in the fridge. They are lined up in order of their ripeness, and this order is prone to shifting. They may be moody and not be ready for days, and then suddenly five of them spread their aroma across the room on a single day, flooding in like the rain. So, it is five mangoes for dinner and make sure to have them with curd. Never mind the inevitable stomach ache afterwards.Mango season keeps me on my toes like nothing else. In my home, the crates arrive from Hyderabad, where my grandmother, recently widowed, tends to raspuri and banganapalle in her bedroom until the whole house smells of ripe (and then overripe) mangoes. The air becomes heavy with mango, yes, but it’s also heavy with her anxiety to feed us, to share with us one of the few things she is still able to offer. She is still our resident mango expert and supplier – my grandfather would say that she “becomes 80% mango in the summer”. When she was young, her father would refuse to travel during the summer holidays because he only wanted to eat the mangoes native to their district. The air is now heavy with my grandmother’s attachment to her house, which she both refuses to leave and is unable to comfortably live alone in. The air is heavy with the vague feeling that it must be filled with mangoes because it is so unbearably empty without my grandfather. It is heavy with my need to make my grandmother feel needed, to eat everything I am fed until it makes me sick and then to keep going, to give in to the too-much-ness of this season in our lives. Mango season – like summer, like monsoon – can be stressful and unkind. My way of enjoying it, as with my way of eating mangoes, is, I admit, disgusting and probably undignified. Yet, it is life-giving like nothing else: the mess of it, the high-maintenance-ness of it. Sweat, grime, stomach aches, rot. Passion. Leaning into this heat and discomfort is freeing, in a way. Stewing away in an overripe house. To eat a banganapalle this way involves an overload of senses. How lucky I am, I think, to be this alive.Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer, editor and fact-checker.We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.Read the series here.