In the grip of mango fever

Summer startles me out of my copywriting with a clunk on the tin roof. It sounds like stone pelting and I come out on the verandah to ask the durwan what happened. “ Aam , d idi,” he grins from ear to ear. That’s when I realise that our mango tree is now studded with hard green balls. Soon the children are dancing round the boundary fence, pelting stones in earnest and sending the green balls rolling down the drive before making a scramble for them.

People are murmuring about aam daal or chopping the raw green mangoes into slices and dunking them in chilli powder. By the time the green can ripen into gold, the branches are empty and we have to look elsewhere for our taste of summer.

The first inkling of the season’s ripe mangoes comes from the alphonsos that materialise in south Kolkata’s Gariahat market. Named after Portugese explorer Alphonso de Albuquerque, the alphonso proudly declares itself the ‘king of mangoes’ and has won the respect of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. In fact, when mango imports were restricted in the UK, the Indian-origin British politician Keith Vaz tried to sweeten 10 Downing Street with alphonsos. Nonetheless, the king of mangoes has competition in the bazaar. There are the ‘lame man’s mango’ (langra), the parrot pleaser (totapuri), the tenth day (dussehri) to contend with. Cities and states jostle to lay claim to orchards with the best trickles of golden sweetness — Lucknow, Varanasi, Bihar, West Bengal and, more frequently these days, Maharashtra.

The word ‘mango’ comes from the Tamil mangkay , though in Hindi and Bengali it is aam — how a royal fruit turned India into a mango republic and became a pun for the common man is a matter of speculation. The wittily-inclined hold that India has two seasons, monsoon and mango. Both are seasons of refreshment, the mango season being vital in nurturing the country’s poetic soul. The paisley design that is so popular in embroidery and block printing came from the mango, and without it where would many designers be? Koels rave about mangoes in the trees from the time the buds begin and Kalidas’s literary references have found their way into timeless erotica.

The season itself lasts only a hundred days — some lover counted — and to make the most of it, mangoes become a part of every possible dish. From mango chutney (green and ripe) and mango salads (ditto) to mango lassi, kulfi, aam panna and ice cream. It is turned into the aamsatta , mango syrup set out to dry on terraces burning with hot summer afternoons until they are ready to be wrapped in muslin and doled out throughout the year. The aamsatta , though, is in danger of becoming a grandmother’s tale and the ubiquitous aam papad is no replacement, despite the odd appearance in wedding chutneys.

Mothers and grandmothers warn teens that gorging on mangoes can result in an outbreak of pimples. The issue is hotly debated by radio jockeys and fielded by celebrities. One Page Three personality advised deep breathing, “cooling” foods and lots of water before and after mango banquets.

Mughal emperor Akbar is said to have brought the mango to Murshidabad, in today’s West Bengal, along with the Bengali calendar. Sher Shah Suri named the chausa variety. Shah Jehan was reportedly furious when one of his sons guzzled all the mangoes from his favourite tree in the Deccan instead of sending them to Delhi.

Even the British caught mango fever, settling into their enormous bathtubs to enjoy a pleasure that was presumably borne in on silver trays by pompous butlers. They referred to it as the Bathroom Fruit simply because their khansamas were unable to dish it in any ‘propah’ way for their pucca sahib’s table, and so it remained a guilty pursuit.

Some people make a hole on the top of the fruit and squeeze out the pulp. Others slit the sides and spoon out the flesh. In my family, the fruit arrives cold and neatly cubed with the inner stone discarded — which is an art in itself as the knife has to carefully slice about without destroying the flesh.

Today there are 40 variations of Akbar’s original Murshidabad mangoes alone and most people don’t even know what they are, though mango aficionados swear they can name them blindfolded. In 2013, a rare mango sapling was named Hirer Angti (a 1992 film) in honour of the remarkable filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, who had just passed away. Murshidabad’s annual Mango Haat teaches the delicate art of peeling and slicing the fruit, besides showcasing a host of dishes that the new century has added to the mango repertoire. However nothing beats the original fruit — ripe or green; the empty branches outside my window bear witness to that.

Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based writer