This summer, when a new lockdown was imposed, I could not reconcile myself to the misery inside my four walls and decided to indulge in a pet project.
The mission was simple: eat as many varieties of mangoes till the end of the season. With the lockdown restricting my choices, I decided to order online and get the fruits home-delivered.
One may ask, why mangoes? Why not the evergreen bananas or the juicy watermelons?
For that, I retort, “Why is the ‘snitch’ popular in Harry Potter or why is the ‘Mockingjay pin’ popular from Hunger Games? Why have these items been begged, borrowed, bought and googled? While some may point to good marketing, others call it nostalgia.
The cherished memory of summers from my early childhood is about lying under the shade of a huge mango tree in my grandmother’s ancestral house. The nine-chambered house had enough room for me, but under the mango tree, I found my home.
In the warm breeze, the aroma of the Totapuri mangoes, turning a shade darker by the day, would fill my vision and heart. Though they are not the sweetest mangoes, they burst to life with taste when added to a salad or pickled.
During those summers, my brothers and I would volunteer to help the adults in plucking the mangoes from the trees. We would always hide a couple of parrot-nosed Totapuri under mounds of Neelum mangoes from the neighbouring fields. Suppressed smiles would emerge when the elders offered a jar of the home-made Neelum mango pickle to our neighbours. I am famous for once laying my hands on the mango baskets and leaving bite marks all over the reddish Payri mangoes that marked the beginning of summer, only to be bellowed at for ruining the whole lot.
Even after being banished to my room, I would feel a warm feeling in my heart as the smell of the fibreless Dasheri mangoes wafted through the cracks of my door. The Nawabs had grown this variety, and the aroma of this mango certainly makes one feel like royalty. The trick is to always balance the extreme sweetness of this particular mango with a bite of its greenish skin to cleanse the palate.
Every basket that arrived from my great uncle’s yard from Ahmedabad would have mangoes with a distinct red crown. Alphonso, the king of all mangoes, they called it. On late afternoons, when others slumbered, my diabetic grandmother would sneak behind the creaking steps of the attic and bite into the luscious Alphonsos with the golden juice trickling down her hands. To every woman, her Alphonso, I would claim and secure this secret in the depths of the attic. The attic itself was the ministry of mangoes. The last mango to arrive, the Chausa, named by Sher Shah Suri after his defeat of Humayun, would be preserved at the top of the lot to save the fruits as long as time would permit.
Today, in my brick-walled house on the 12th floor of an apartment building overlooking another brick wall, the only thing I got after seven days of wait was a lone Himsagar. Being the rebel it is, the mango has a thin skin that permits its aroma to enter every nook and crannies of my apartment. With nearly 1,500 varieties of mangoes to taste, I decide to take things into my hands and get ready to chase the vendor down the road for my next mango.
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