Look, I’m not saying Ramu was a liar exactly. My mother would’ve called him “creative with the truth.” He sold fruit near the old temple, always going on about how his papayas could cure insomnia or his coconuts were harvested during some auspicious planetary alignment. Most of us just nodded and bought our bananas. You learned not to argue with Ramu—it only made the sales pitch longer. But that June—god, it was hot that year, the kind of heat that makes your thoughts sticky—he outdid himself. I was getting chai from Shankar’s stall when Ramu came striding up with this mango. And okay, it *was* beautiful. The kind of mango that makes you understand why people write poems about fruit. Greenish-yellow, no blemishes, catching the light like it was posing for a magazine. Even Shankar stopped mid-pour to look at it. “This,” Ramu announced to anyone listening (which was basically…