She used to spy on her mother, who seemed stranger each day the little girl went to school and discovered what normal was.

What it wasn’t: The chicken tikka sandwiches her mother packed for lunchtime that smelled enough to wrinkle little snub noses and avert golden heads, the baggy pants and long shirts she wore while waiting at the curb after school, the hesitant English and modest grace that marked everything she did, so different from the mothers of the other girls at school.

Early one Sunday morning, the little girl walked downstairs and peeked in when she heard sounds from the kitchen. The strains of Bach in the air and her mother – sleeves rolled up to the elbows, hands flecked with the gore of fruit, arms and knife dripping with juice – standing at the sink, cutting mangoes.

Her eyes intent, hands slow, slicing off paper-thin wavy strips of skin. She piled peels high in one plate, slid luscious slices of mango onto another. After cutting the three mangoes, instead of washing her hands, she licked them.

Licked each sweet rivulet slowly up her arms.

She ignored the fat slices of fruit and picked the peels up instead. Eyes closed now in concentration, soaring music her guide, she raked her teeth across each peel, mango threads catching in between her teeth, devouring every scant morsel of flesh that still clung to the finely pared skins.

Perhaps anyone so sensuous and enrapt can only evoke misunderstanding. Especially a mother, spied upon by a small girl.

How could the girl know that each jewel-toned mango had been smuggled into a country where only expensive, dry ones were available, brought by friends who understood that the pain of exile is briefly alleviated by such precious small gifts.

How could she know that her mother, eyes closed, senses alight, was swaying to the memories of music her father had played on his gramophone for her in a village far away while hand-feeding her fragrant, chilled mangoes?

How could she know that for her mother each paper-thin peel was a fragment of home so that the more she lingered, the more deeply she savored and swallowed, the longer she could hold all of them – dead parents, nine siblings and girlhood playmates lost to the dust of Punjab – inside?

The girl never asked her mother why she swayed to Bach and mangoes that morning.

But, from that day on whenever her mother spoke to her in Urdu, she replied fiercely in English instead.