The best moment of my life—one that felt exactly like a movie—was when I stole mangoes from a mango orchard for the very first time.

I was eleven, and Priya was twelve, which meant she got to decide everything. She decided we would go at noon, when the sun was so brutal that even the watchman, old Ramu kaka, would be asleep under his neem tree with his transistor radio murmuring cricket scores into the hot air.

“If we get caught,” I whispered as we crouched at the boundary wall, “I’m saying it was your idea.”

“It was my idea,” she said, and hauled herself over.

The orchard was another world. The moment I dropped from the wall, the temperature fell by ten degrees. The trees were old and enormous, their branches tangled overhead like the vaulted ceiling of some green cathedral. The mangoes hung in heavy clusters — Alphonso, dusty gold and blushing red — and the smell was almost unbearable. Sweet and thick, like sunlight had been slow-cooked into something you could hold.

We didn’t run straight for the fruit. We stood there, just breathing.

Then Priya climbed the nearest tree barefoot, quick as a squirrel, and I held my skirt out below her like a net. The mangoes fell into my arms one by one, still warm from the afternoon sun, and I was laughing so hard I almost dropped them all.

We ate them sitting against the wall on the far side, our backs to the bricks, our chins dripping. No plate. No knife. Just teeth and thumbs and the juice running down our wrists and elbows and neither of us caring.

Ramu kaka’s radio played on in the distance. A wicket fell. Someone cheered.

That was it. That was the whole story. Nothing was saved or discovered or learned. No one chased us. No grand consequence arrived to give the afternoon its meaning.

But for those forty minutes, the world was perfectly sized —
small enough to hold, sweet enough to eat,
and entirely, recklessly ours.