The scene is set in early twentieth-century Travancore in the mango season. Dancing under the tutelary mango tree of a Nāyar taṟavāṭ̣u̥, children are singing a rhyme addressed to the wind of Māvēlikkunnaṃ, praying for its blowing down showers of both unripe and ripe fruits, both essential ingredients for Kerala cuisine and Āyurvedic pharmacy.

I would like to bring out from Malayalam and Sanskrit literature the immemorial recognition of a conspicuous association on the same tree of the sweet, heavy and kapha constitution of the ripe mango fruit, which cures vāta disorders, with the bitter and saṃgrāhin proprieties of young fruits, milky sap and astringent bark of mango stems used against raktapitta, in other words a bitter-or-sweet pair of opposites. Why do painters represent toḍīrāgiṇīs, ladies awaiting their lover in vain, under the shade of a mango tree covered with innumerable ripe fruits? It might be a metaphor exploiting the bitter-and-sweet quality of mango trees to figure the idea that Kāma and Māyā are indissociable. Metaphors of the showers of mangoes type are born from saliencies observed in natural history, then invested with emotion, and eventually tied up with one's collective lifeworld beneath the conceptual expression of formal knowledge.