Mango indulgence that transcends time, borders
The mango season is here, and it brings with it memories of old seasons. All of us, I suppose, must have had close encounters of the mango kind whose account can fill a large part of a garrulous evening.
The sight of a sun-baked, supple, succulent, syrupy mango is beyond the limits of human resistance, least of all in childhood. Today’s cultured practice of scooping the flesh with a spoon was nowhere to be seen in my younger days. Mangoes were eaten with fingers, teeth and tongue with not a care in the world how messy you looked.
I can never forget the school summer vacation at my aunt’s house in Hoshiarpur where the daily after-dinner ritual was a fiercely competitive round of mango sucking. At that time, mangoes did not come by kilos but by sacksful and were waited upon in the evening with more desperation than longing as they were kept for cooling in an iced tub.
This form of mango indulgence stretched till quite late in my youth. On our frequent work visits to Haridwar, the evenings were devoted to two nearly identical-in-effect acts: One spiritual and the other temporal. After watching the divine spectacle of aarti, we would stretch ourselves by the side of the Ganga whose icy cold water hurtling down was doing us a great favour by cooling our stock of mangoes slung deep in a sack of thin fabric. The act of eating mangoes in semi-darkness that TODAY’S CULTURED PRACTICE OF SCOOPING THE FLESH WITH A SPOON WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN IN MY YOUNGER DAYS camouflages your untidiness added to our secret pleasure.
Indians, including from the Mughal emperors to commoners such as Ghalib, are famous for patronising the king of the fruits. But let me also share that the mango experience is not unique to us. In most tropical countries, mangoes are experienced with same intensity as here. Mariatu Kamara in her, otherwise, horrifying book called Bite of the Mango tells us how as a child of 12 she was captured by rebels in Sierra Leone and maimed by cutting both her hands. Left to die, helpless and alone, it was the bite of the mango fruit that infused in her a fresh desire to live. One can’t imagine a more gratifying tribute to this fruit than that. May be that is the reason, it is sometimes called the food of the gods.
On a less sombre note, John Agard, a Jamaican-British poet, presents a rather comical portrait of an English girl when she eats her first mango. He instructs her to eat it, as we do, by peeling it with her teeth or making a hole in it and sucking the juice. After finishing the mango, when she asks for a hanky to clean her fingers, he tells her, “When you eat mango, your hanky is your tongue.” Not only this, but he also accords the convention of licking the fingers while eating mangoes the respectability of culture. And on a triumphant note, declares that learning of the mango eating culture by the English girl amounts to a kind of reverse colonisation.