Sex, backstabbing, infidelity and mangoes
Early treat back home in Fiji became a passion at age 12 while watching Beverly Hills, 90210
My mother visits Toronto often and she rarely brings me anything.
But when I met her at her hotel during a recent business trip from Vancouver, she reached into her carry-on and pulled out a lone mango, wrapped inside one of those ultra-thin plastic produce bags.
“Your dad sent this for you,” she said. Although that may appear odd to some, I wasn’t fazed. I’ve been crazy about mangoes for as long as I can remember.
My older brother once called me a “mango pig,” based on my ability to go through a box of a dozen within a couple days.
If they didn’t ripen quickly enough, I would sprinkle salt on the flesh to mask the rawness — a trick I learned from my tata (grandpa). Sometimes my tongue would itch but, for this girl, a raw mango was better than no mango.
My introduction to mangoes was romantic. I was 6 when my mom took me on a holiday to Fiji, the group of South Pacific islands my family comes from. Everything was lush and dirty and beautiful — no paved roads, sugar cane fields abound, random cows and chickens, that kind of thing.
My uncle and aunt lived in an epic bungalow overlooking a cliff. Their backyard was essentially a tropical orchard. They had coconut trees, guava, papaya, bananas and so many mangoes.
I was enchanted. The idea of eating a fruit you’d just picked was novel to a kid who grew up in Vancouver. Granted, we had an apple tree at home, but Granny Smith apples are far less sexy than mangoes.
My mom didn’t do anything fancy with the mangoes. She didn’t even peel the skin, she just cut the fruit into slices.
I would pop a piece into my mouth and then slide the skin out, grating it against my bottom teeth to ensure I got all of the flesh. I consumed mangoes the way I imagine a coyote devours its prey, leaving only juice smeared all over my face and bits stuck in my teeth.
I liked mangoes then, but my mom says I wasn’t truly addicted until age 12.
“We started getting more boxes of mangoes as opposed to one or two,” she said. “That’s when you really got hooked on them. We would be afraid you’d get sick off them.”
The summer I was 12, I had a routine. I would eat mangoes and watch hours of Beverly Hills, 90210 reruns. I learned about sex, backstabbing and infidelity, eating mangoes all the while.
As I entered my teenage years, I developed an affinity for bubble tea — Asian fruit smoothies with tapioca balls.
Mango was almost always my flavour of choice.
One of my best friends in high school was Filipina, and her parents
“I liked mangoes (as a young child), but my mom says I wasn’t truly addicted until age 12.” MANISHA KRISHNAN STAFF REPORTER
always bought the small, yellow mangoes native to the Philippines.
I was instantly appreciative of their sweetness and softness when compared to the Mexican mangoes more common in grocery stores. They became my new favourite.
Once, my friend looked over at me in the movie theatre and noticed I was slicing a mango I’d sneaked out of her house earlier that day.
I still love a good mango, but I now eat them rarely. Mostly it’s because I’m bad at being an adult and generally avoid grocery shopping. When I do have one, I get a little nostalgic, thinking about my family, spread out all over the world, my childhood and 90210. In this weekly series, Star writers reminisce about a food that reminds them of summer. jbain@thestar.ca