Mango mania and memories

Rahul Verma

A spectacular picture of oranges-and-greens caught my eye some days ago, I stopped to feast on the colours and aroma, for in front of me was a cart of mangoes. Summer is still to come knocking at our doors, but the symbol of the season — the much-loved mango — has already announced its presence.

Mangoes tend to throw up kaleidoscopic memories. Some people are reminded of Partition, many of the hometowns they left years ago, and quite a few, I am sure, of regional fights that the fruit tends to trigger. I, on the other hand, can’t see a luscious mango hanging from a tree without being reminded of a little dent on top of my head.

When I was a wee lad with dusty and scratched knees, we shared a house with other families in a part of central Delhi. The house had a large compound with a mango tree that was laden with fruit in the summer and the rainy seasons. We, the young boys who lived there, had a favourite pastime. We would chuck a stone towards a fruit up on the tree, trying to ensure that it hit the spot that would send the fruit plummeting down, right into our eager palms.

One day, I was busy doing just that when I saw the cranky gardener coming my way. I ran nimbly in the other direction when suddenly something hit me hard on the head. No, not the mango, but the stone that I had chucked up in the air. Every now and then, I feel the dent, and recall that day when the mango tree took revenge on me.

And that was rather nasty of the tree, for I always had happy ties with mango trees. I spent most of my childhood years in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, where my grandfather had mango orchards. He grew a variety called chausa — which is possibly why I still rate it as the best mango ever — and a few local mangoes such as kaalia. The kaalia was never cut, peeled or eaten but sucked whole, through the skin. There was some dussehri, too.

A local contractor came when the trees started flowering, booked the fruits, and then through the season had them plucked and marketed. A large mountain of unripe mangoes was left for us, which was kept in piles of hay to help them ripen. Tiny green mangoes were immersed in a jar of sugarcane vinegar with some radish slices and eaten all through the year. Some green mangoes were pounded in a mortar and pestle with jaggery, green chillies and salt into a tart chutney which was eaten with the meals.

I would spend my holidays — and some schooldays, too, no doubt — pulling out the riper mangoes from the haystack, immersing them in tubs of water and then eating them one after the other.

I must say I had a love-hate relationship with the fruit. I loved it, of course — who wouldn’t? But it also left a strange rash on the skin. Even years later, when I eat a juicy mango (a chausa, if I can, but sadly it only comes for a very short spell at the end of the mango season), I remember that irritating rash.

Now, of course, mangoes have almost gone out of my life. I eat them sparingly, sticking to the less sweet (and purportedly more stomach-friendly) papaya instead. But I enjoy mango stories. Every year, friends of mine go on a mango mission to a UP village called Rataul, close to the Delhi border. Legend has it that during Partition, saplings of the Rataul mango were taken to Pakistan. The fruit was renamed Anwar Rataul — apparently after one of the sapling carriers — and is much revered there.

My late friend, Zahoor Siddiqui, had a mango orchard in Rataul and invited aficionados over. They went in buses, ate all the mangoes they wanted to and brought back sacks full of Rataul mangoes.

There was actually quite a tradition of picnics with mangoes in Delhi once. When it started raining, people living in Old Delhi — most of south or central Delhi was still to come up then — would draw up elaborate plans for their picnics. Families from Jama Masjid would hire tongas to take them to Mehrauli. Keema would be prepared in large quantities, along with small hillocks of paranthas. And kilos and kilos of mangoes would be kept ready to be carried for the picnic.

But I wonder if people then bickered about what kind of mango to carry with them. For, if there is one fruit that unites the people, it is their love for mangoes. And if there is one fruit that ignites passions and divides brothers, it’s the mango.

Those who love their chausa cannot fathom what makes anybody eat any other kind. The langda lovers think the dussehri fan clubs need to consult a shrink. The southerner thinks the north has got it all wrong (as with everything else), for nothing beats the mulgoba, banganapalli, imampasand and badami. Easterners sneer at everybody else, holding up the Himsagar as the best mango ever, though a loud section whispers that nothing is as sweet as Malda. Gujarat’s kesar club has its card-holding members, for the fruit is deliciously sweet, quite like the cuisine. And almost everybody gangs up against the poor alfonso, which, in a contest where Maharashtrians were the sole judges, was once hailed as the king of mangoes.

I fear mangoes can bring out the ogre in us. My otherwise genial grandfather used to turn quite nasty when the mango trees started blossoming. He would then urge the kids in the extended family to go play kaikarwa — not in our compound, but in the neighbouring orchards. It was a simple game played atop trees. The ‘den’ had to catch the other players who were up on the branches of some tree or the other. There was a lot of jostling, and it often meant the end of the tree’s fragile blossoms. Luckily, for my grandfather, the neighbours didn’t have kids.

It amuses me that I — who once ate, drank and breathed mangoes — have to be careful of the number of slices that I can now eat. But, as the music group said eloquently in French, this is life. And I, for one, am more than happy to just spot a mango-laden cart.