treelogy . The many shades and many names of mangoes

That sweetness should have a stone hiding somewhere, we learn early. Childhoods turn everything into a moral — and so this too registers as other memorised adages. Soon after, as if to test the moral, its rhyme arrives — jaam , part of the rhyming couplet of a Bengali summer ( aam-jaam and sometimes part of the trinity aam-jaam-kathal — mango-Indian blackberry-jackfruit). The same: Stone hidden behind taste and the stain on the tongue.

Then the names, as if they were no different from mine, a catalogue as long as the names of my classmates in the attendance register. We’re not used to it — we know air as air and grass as grass. That a fruit could have names is a surprise. It is as if the mangoes were grandchildren and all of us grandparents, each having a favourite grandchild. The first name I can recall was a shock — that a word that we’d been forbidden to use could be an affectionate name for a mango. For, we knew this intuitively, that sweet things were always baptised with affection, and anything or anyone approximating sweetness would immediately be called sweet, the adjective often turning into noun too: Mishti, sweet. That name was lyangra . In Bangla it meant someone who walked with a limp. The name was therefore confusing — how could a fruit, which by common understanding couldn’t walk, be lyangra , and why should something so sweet be abused by that name?

Only recently have I begun to notice that many of these names for the mango have to do with the human body, its behaviour or the behaviour of its senses. Not just lyangra , which is said to have been named after a farmer who walked with a limp, and who dropped — or planted — a mango seed in Benares, from where the best lyangra mangoes still come, but also the chausa , for example. The name suggests the method in which it should be eaten — chausa , by sucking. And so I’ve seen many I know bite off a tiny part of the mango skin and turn it into a hole from which the flesh must be sucked. The sensuousness of eating a mango — mango and papad are meant to be eaten with your fingers, not with a fork, and with accompanying sound, not silence, a friend’s grandmother would say — has been abused by advertising and writing from the diaspora, but I know of no other fruit that one tastes with one’s eyes first as one does the mango. Here too, it’s the behaviour of the senses that marks nomenclature — and this naming, these arbitrary and affectionate baptisms by the anonymous, filled with the history of looking, of an intimacy with colour that makes us imagine the history of the moment of casual baptism, and its journey since then. The mango tree, too — with its unexpected geometry of branching, the branches often curving into figures in repose, as if tired of all the sun necessary for the sweetening of its fruit — inspires a new grammar of looking. Not just the individual tree but mango orchards too — their bluish-green shadows as fleshy and sweet on a summer day as the fruit itself.

My favourite among those which invoke seeing — all these names so much more poetic than the official or scientific names — is the benishan from Andhra Pradesh. Whatever its etymology might imply, I read it as ‘without nishan, without marks’. A mango skin as unmarked as its flesh — the poetry in the names often sweeter than even the mango. Or gulab khaas , named so for the colour of its skin, as if it were meant to be a compliment about a woman’s cheek; and cheek it is, for that is what it’s called, a curved slice of mango. Sindhura — named for the mango’s vermilion-stained skin. Kesar — for its saffron skin, a prologue to the colour of the flesh hidden inside, as dawn gives an intimation of the colour of the day. Badami — after the almond, particularly its shape. Neelam — bluish mangoes, whose cloud-coloured skin hide sunlight-coloured flesh, as the cloud does light in the sky. It is not only colours and pigments that we see in these names. There is also the history of imagination and playfulness — take the southern totapuri . Its curves are so beautiful that even the knife must feel some guilt to puncture its skin. Named for its parrot-like ( tota ) shape, I find it the most affection-seeking mango for the posture in which it is laid, as if it were a child waiting to be oiled before a bath in sun-soaked water. If I were an art teacher, it is this species that I’d ask students to draw for their lessons on ‘still life’.

My favourite, however, is the himsagar , with a name so poetic that one has tasted the cooling sweetness even before one has actually put it inside one’s mouth. Cooling, because of the name, which would literally mean the sea or ocean’s mist, or even the dew hanging over a lake. That is what it is — the sweetness of dew, its colour hidden as all things inside our mouths are, only imagined, the flesh moving as gently as mist. And then one bite — and the mist clears, and all is sweetness and light.

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree ;

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri