Who are these people eating mangoes in March? What does it say about them? Obviously, it says some of them are NRIs. Well, they adjust their clocks to the seasons, so why not their season to the craving for mangoes?
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Frenz, when is the correct time to eat your first mango? I think it’s at a very particular intersection of time, fragrance and price. It should be unambiguous summer, passing the fruit stall should wrap you in a Wonder Woman lasso of ripe gold perfume and one mango should not cost the same as your first salary (unless you are over 73). Yaniki, mid-April.
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But, it has recently come to my notice that there are people who eat mangoes in March. Yeh kya ho raha hai beta Duryodhan? Should someone call Greta Thunberg?
Who are these people eating mangoes in March? What does it say about them? Obviously, it says some of them are NRIs. Well, they adjust their clocks to the seasons, so why not their season to the craving for mangoes? But chalo, they happen to be here in March and not July so they must gather their rosebuds while they May so to speak.
But what of others? We can only surmise that they have never heard that song by The Cavaliers, a long-ago band from Kolkata, called Love is a Mango (on an album called Getting High in India), which carries clear instructions about love and mangoes alike—“love is a mango that grows on a tree, wait till the mango is ripe (don’t make love, if it’s still in the growing, don’t take love as a guest without knowing)”. Patience ka phal meetha hota hai. Besides it’s just good manners to wait for an invitation from the seasons.
But some people think they are too modern for such climactic politesse. No sooner have they glimpsed those mellow yellow babies, amid the papeetas and watermelons, then they must have them. Then, they will then put the mango through everything—swaddle in a sack of rice, smother in crushed newspaper—to speed it from Marchness to Aprilness. One person confessed that they zap it in the microwave while another says they’ve tried heating it on a tava. I don’t know what is happening in their love lives. I don’t think they do either.
There are the opposite types of course, the mango fundamentalists. Those who don’t eat any mangoes till July or August because only dasseri or langda count as mangoes. Is it worth being so persnicketty about pleasure? They have taken to heart the lines from that same mango song, “think again, relax, look up and see for yourself, the mango your love has grown into.” Tastes are not by numbers, so we need not account for them.
Nothing beats cutting open that first mango and finding the sensual miracle of perfect flesh. But in truth all too often that first mango spreads itself open only to reveal one of those angry fibrous centres or a curdled black heart and we move on to the next one, a little sobered. The song says “love is a mango that never grows old” but is that really true? Wait too long, postponing pleasure in hope of absolute control, and both love and mangoes rot a little, festering within.
Life is short, the seasons even shorter. My friend sent me a Tenesse Williams poem that said, “we have not long to love/A night. A day…”. So, if your tongue longs for it, let it ripen your heart I guess. (But try to do so mid-April preferably)
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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