While growing up, there was a dinnertime ritual we followed in our household every summer. My mother, brother and I would wait with food on our plates, while appa walked in from the kitchen, holding a bowl of golden-yellow mango slices to eat with our meal. The slices disappeared within minutes; but appa wouldn’t touch a single one. Instead, once the fruit was licked off the plate, he’d relish the mango seed on which clung a thin layer of pulp. “The flesh close to the seed has a unique taste,” he’d say.
My family worships mangoes. During summer, the fragrance of mangoes is our oxygen. They are everywhere in our household — inside onion baskets, on the dining table, in carry bags by the sofa…all thanks to appa.
Show him a mango and he can tell you what variety it is, where it grows, and how sweet it will taste. He’s quite the connoisseur; I’ve seen him spend several minutes by the mango rack at supermarkets, sniffing the fruit and turning it over in his hands, before deciding if he wanted to bring it home. He’d purchase them in varying stages of ripeness, so that we could eat one every day, without refrigerating it or worrying if it’ll go bad.
‘Guda dutt’, ‘sappattai’, and ‘naduchalai’ were strange words till I discovered that they were names of South Indian mango varieties. Appa is a mango purist — to him, there’s nothing more sinful than making juices, milkshakes, or jams out of the fruit. “It ought to be eaten as a whole,” he would say.
According to him, the most superior mango variety is imampasanth. “It’s ordinary-looking, but tastes fantastic.” Then there’s the malgova that caught even Gandhiji in its spell. “He went on a fast after he ate the fruit, to punish himself for wanting more. The taste is that good,” narrated appa one evening, as he cut into a juicy malgova.
There’s also the well-marketed Alphonso; the golden-yellow banganapalle; the not-so-famous nalli; the naduchalai or grape mango, which offers a home-grown flavour; the bulky guda dutt; the longish kilimookku or kalla maanga; the deep-pink senthooram; the rare Rajapalayam sappattai; the kasa laddu that signals the end of the season…appa has a database of mangos in his head, backed by years of experience in eating them. “There’s also a sweet-sour variety called naatu maanga that old women sell by school gates,” he observes.
He taught me that South India boasts a wide variety of mangos, each with a unique taste, texture, and appearance. “Our soil is such,” he feels, and says that the mangoes of our land are superior to those available in other countries. “Once a friend tried growing mangoes in Indonesia from a sapling he took from India. But the fruit the tree bore tasted bland.”
Appa’s love for mangoes was nurtured by his father who worked in a wholesale onion godown in Madurai. Every evening, grandpa would bring home a mammoth guda dutt for his children, wrapped inside his dhoti.
They feasted on every bit of it — from the flesh to the skin; they even barbequed the seed and ate the nutty portion inside. I moved to Chennai for work a few years ago, and hence, do not eat as much mangoes as I did during my younger days.
I never buy mangoes myself — I can almost hear appa tut-tutting from my hometown, some 500km away, as I extend a hand to pick mangoes in a fruit shop. “Alphonso? What are you thinking?” admonishes his voice. “Imampasanth is sitting right there!”
