Delight — An education in mangoes
This year, Pooja and I finally leaned into my great love for mangoes and undertook a summer exercise of eating and appreciating as many cultivars of mangoes as we could get our hands on. The results were deeply satisfying and as the season draws to a close, we have tried and relished 21 different cultivars of mangoes. They included local favourites such as Langra, Dussehri and Chausa, which rule the roost in Delhi and Western UP; Western India’s specials, Kesar, Pairi and Hafus; Southern India’s most popular yet contrasting mangoes — the delicate and fragrant Himayat, the most distinctive in appearance, Totapuri and the most inferior of Indian mangoes, Banganapalli (which inexplicably masquerades as Safeda in North India) and in my book the greatest mango in the world, the Dudhiya Malda from Bihar. Aside from these regulars, constant lookout led us to mangoes that I had eaten in some years — Neelam, Amrapali, Sindhuri, Mallika, Zardalu and Dhinga. But, even more rewarding were our forays into mangoes neither Pooja nor I had ever tasted — Fazli, Haya, Aaliya, Gulab, Mehtab and the much-storied Rataul.
This excursion into mangoes was, for me, a continuation of exploring one of my life’s existential questions — what kind of mango eater am I?
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In the story of my life, summers spent during my childhood and teen years in the sleepy Northeast Bihar town of Purnea are a worthy parallel to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty spending his idyllic summers at his grandmother’s house in Dehra. My aunt and uncle had built a large bungalow in the early eighties in Purnea. It was a grand house, its design perhaps informed by their time abroad with a long driveway punctuated by a portico leading into a garage, generous living and dining areas designed for entertaining, separate mezzanine quarters over the garage, and a stately master bed with its own living area and dressing room. For many years, my parents would occupy the back bedroom, with its own sit-out which opened into the kitchen garden.
For me, the house, for all its grandeur, was dwarfed by an even more impressive open area with large lawns, a rose garden, flower beds and a huge kitchen garden. Unlike Rusty, I was not a climber of trees, spending my summer reading time in the corners and recesses of the house, rather than perched on top of a fruit tree. Yet, for me, the fruit trees that adorned this house were its most appealing features. Their garden grew chikoo, pomelos, oranges, litchis, papayas and most of all, mangoes. In the nineties, my parents built a much more modest home across the street, with its own collection of fruit trees and a terrace kitchen garden.
My parents are extremely partial to mangoes, perhaps continuing to indulge more so than their diabetic septuagenarian selves ideally should. While I may have inherited my love for mangoes from them, the deep fascination is a credit to my late uncle. Every morning during the summer vacations, I would wake up to my uncle’s booming voice from across the street, calling my name. I would wake up groggily, brush my teeth and walk across the street for the daily mango ritual. We ate mangoes with every meal during the summer, but it is the pre-breakfast mango-eating feast that stands out as one of the most lucid memories of my childhood. Along with my siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces, we would sit around a large elliptical dining table. My uncle at the head of the table would select mangoes, introduce them to us by cultivar, cut them with an appreciable skill and speed, and pass them along to us to eat. The mangoes would never be market bought but the naturally ripended, carbide-free harvest from trees in the house and the farm thirty minutes away. If one of us came down with an upset stomach from a surfeit of mangoes, we were prescribed diarrhoea medication, so we could continue to enjoy the finest specimens of the greatest seasonal fruit in the world. There were summers when the mango rituals irritated me also, but in the weeks when we were not eating mangoes, I would inevitably end up missing it dearly.
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Those mornings were the inception of what will likely be a lifelong love for mangoes. Unlike Maloideae fruits like apples, whose optimal ripened state could last for weeks, mangos are not so forgiving. Nor are they as unforgiving as avocados, which are patently inedible if you end up cutting them too early or too late. The optimal state of mangoes lasts only a day or two, but you can still get considerable enjoyment from them over a week or so. Most of the summer, I tried to get my hands on new cultivars of mangoes every week, comparing fragrance, colour, texture, sweetness and flavour. My main preoccupation was to find the satisfaction of the sweet spot, the perfect time to cut into and eat a mango when it had reached the perfect ripened state, without venturing into the oversweet territory when it begins to break down.