Mango moment!

The mango season is getting over, and I am left wondering if last year better… I mean, save for a few really delicious ones, my longing for quality remains unfulfilled. We tried everything – langda, dasheri, hapoos, kesar, payri, even desi ones of many kinds. Unfortunately we didn’t eat the highly-recommended ‘himsagar’ while in Kolkata but ate almost every other variety. We were intrigued by this himsagar one while on a train to Sikkim, when a Bengali couple seated next to us waxed eloquent about it and even dared to rubbish the chauvinistic hapoos claim to be the king of mangoes. We took it sportingly but when we narrated this to another family from Maharashtra sharing our coupé they dismissed it with their typical ‘Puneri’ disdain. “How can they even think of comparing this ‘himasagar’ to our hapoos?”
So our quest for that ultimate mouth-watering mango continued until we visited our farm near Sinnar. Many years ago we had bought 4 acres of land and had planted a variety of trees on it, including mangoes. This year, when we had visited it in April before going to Sikkim, we had seen a mango tree loaded with raw green ones.
So when Chandu (the person who tills the land for us) handed a bunch of them to take home we couldn’t believe that the sapling we had planted years ago had actually borne fruit! We took it home, and let it ripen naturally. In a week’s time the mangoes’ aroma started wafting across the room, their colour started changing from green to golden until it was time to eat them. I will never forget the day or moment when I tasted the first mango from our farm. It was juicy, just the right amount of sweetness, and it melted in my mouth with ease. It was heavenly, the best we have had for years. In minutes many of them had disappeared in our mouths. Qudrat, an eleven year old boy—son of our friends— who was visiting us from Ahmedabad, would keep looking at its color and sniffing it for hours until we had to remind him, hey, don’t you want to eat it? There weren’t many, so the good time didn’t last for long. Yet, the taste lingers…
Of the many mango trees that we had planted, only two bore fruits this year. We tasted only one variety and it was an enriching and unforgettable experience. I grew up hearing stories from my father about how they would sit in a room stacked with mangoes from their orchard in their old ‘wada’ and how unlucky we were to eat mangoes bought from the market! We never saw the so-called Paranjape orchard as it got swallowed by the backwaters of a dam and the vagaries of ‘development’… But somewhere, the memory of having one’s own land with mango trees bearing fruit had stayed. When I got even those few mangoes home, I went to my father and handed him half, my face beaming with joy of having reconnected with the past. I told him, “Soon we will have our rooms too, full of farm-fresh mangoes, and we will not have to go from one shop to another searching for good organic ones.” He smiled and later told me that the mangoes were really tasty.
The season is over but our eyes are already on the next one. Hopefully, there will be many more – mangoes and moments!

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