Craving Raw Mango at 2 AM

Nobody warns you that pregnancy cravings are not polite daytime requests. They arrive at 2 AM, fully formed and absolutely non-negotiable. Mine was raw mango. Not ripe, sweet mango — that would be too easy. Specifically the hard, sour, green kambakht kind, sliced thin, with a little salt and red chilli powder. The thought of it would wake me from a dead sleep, mouth already watering.

The first time, I tried to be a good wife and suffer quietly. I lay there for an hour, staring at the ceiling fan, willing the craving to pass. It did not pass. It grew. By the end I was practically vibrating. I finally shook my husband awake and whispered, with the seriousness of someone confessing a crime, "I need raw mango."

To his eternal credit, he did not laugh or argue. He just blinked, said "okay," and shuffled to the kitchen half-asleep. We did not even have a raw mango. He found one shrivelled specimen at the back of the fridge that my mother had left, and he stood there barefoot on the cold floor at midnight, grating it, getting the salt-chilli ratio wrong, then right, then bringing me a small steel bowl like it was the crown jewels.

I cried. Obviously I cried, I cried at everything those months — at ads, at pigeons, at the national anthem. But this was different. I sat up in bed eating sour mango at 2 AM while my exhausted husband watched me with the softest, sleepiest smile, and I thought, this is it. This is the whole thing. This is what love actually looks like when you strip away all the romance.

After that it became our ritual. He started keeping raw mangoes in stock, like a man preparing for a small recurring emergency. The neighbourhood vendor knew us. "For madam?" he would ask, already choosing the greenest one. There is a particular intimacy in someone learning the exact shape of your strangest needs and simply meeting them, no fuss.

The baby is here now, and the 2 AM wakings are for entirely different reasons. But sometimes I still crave raw mango, and sometimes he still gets up to grate it, and we stand in the kitchen in the dark, tired and a little ridiculous and completely, quietly happy.