A dense thicket of dead betel nut trees forms a kind of blockade to a small mango plantation in a hilly part of Dapoli, a seaside town in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. Heaps of dried leaves form a thick, squelchy layer on the ground but once you wade through this curtain of grey and brown, the plantation itself is an oasis of green, neat and ordered. There are about 300 trees, spaced out, most bursting with the fruit that is this region’s most famous produce—the Alphonso mango.
To the untrained eye, most of the fruits on the trees look alike in shape and in their light green colour. Some seem to have been over-exposed to the sun and have turned a little yellow.
It’s the first week of May. The heat really kicks in this month, but there’s also the moisture from the coast, which together provide the best conditions for the Alphonso to ripen and be ready for plucking.
Noshirwan Mistry surveys each tree carefully. He is the owner of the farm. He carefully examines the top of each fruit, where its stem connects it to the tree. “The shape is everything,” he explains, holding two fruits together to display the difference.
“When a mango is ready, there is a little dent that comes from the stem it’s hanging by.” In healthy fruit, the stem recedes into the upper portion of the fruit and the fruit itself has a pronounced curve upward and outward. “Like a pregnant woman,” says one of the workers on the farm. Another describes it as a plump cheek. But if the top surface is even and the severed stem still pointing upward, the mango is not going to ripen.
It may be the subtlest of differences but Mistry, who bought this 14-acre farm 10 years ago, places a high premium on the little details. In the highly commercialised market for Alphonso, or Hapus as it’s called in Maharashtra, Mistry is one of the few farmers who insists the fruit should be grown and ripened completely organically. That means a patient waiting process, and even more testing to see if the fruit is perfect.
Once his team of five workers has plucked a pile of fruit that passes muster in terms of shape, two or three mangoes are dropped into a pail of water. If they sink, the mango is good and whole. If it floats, there is likely something wrong, possibly a cavity inside.
Note the curve and dip: the difference between a good mango and a spoilt one.
“The ones that float are sold off to local people here who pickle it,” says Mistry. The good ones are carefully cleaned and packed into boxes. Mistry then mounts a one-man distribution operation—taking the mangoes in a tempo traveller to Mumbai, a roughly seven-hour drive. But he travels only at night so that the fruit is not exposed to too much heat. He then stores the mangoes in a small flat in Mumbai’s Marine Lines, where he says they take 10-15 days indoors to ripen naturally. When orders start to come in, mostly through his Facebook page, Mistry delivers the mangoes personally in a taxi, mostly late at night.
“Because space in Mumbai is so constrained, not everyone is able to find a place to let the fruit ripen indoors,” he explains. That’s one of the reasons why, especially over the past few years, complaints about artificially ripened fruit have abounded, with chemicals like calcium carbide used to ripen the fruit that finds its way to markets and homes.
In truth, Mumbai’s craze for Alphonso, and its popularity in other parts of the country too, was always likely to lead to this situation.
Partisan tastes
Discerning mango lovers have, of course, long contended that other varieties of mango found in India are far superior—from Andhra Pradesh’s Banganapalli to Tamil Nadu’s Imam Pasand to the Kesar from Gujarat. In Mumbai too, there are those who will admit that the Rajapuri is, in fact, sweeter, and that the Pairi is better for making aam ras.
But over all of these fabled regional varieties, the sheer commercial appeal and reputation of Alphonso looms like an overweening shadow. Many consider it the best mango in the world and, for a majority of Mumbaikars, nothing else comes close. Add to that the fact that Alphonso is the easiest to export, its thick skin allowing it to withstand transportation, and you can see how its legend and reputation have grown.
Sadly, though, if you speak to the average Mumbaikar these days, you’re likely to get complaints that the Hapus just don’t taste as sweet any more, that they are not as big as before. On the other hand, though, you have the fruit flooding shelves as early as mid-March. By the end of April, a kind of mango fatigue sets in.
A May 16 news report in Pune Mirror , for instance, says there are over 80,000 boxes of Alphonsos from Ratnagiri lying unsold in the city’s central market while there are also reports from wholesale markets in Mumbai that the price of mangoes hit an all-time low by mid-May this year as there is too much supply.
The best Alphonsos from Ratnagiri need the heat of late April and May to ripen fully, but traders say that these days they face substantial competition from what they call the ‘Southern Alphonsos’. “As you go south of Ratnagiri, to Goa and then to Karnataka, the mangoes ripen faster and many parts of Karnataka are now selling their own variety of Hapus, which hits the market earlier,” says Ashok Pansare, a trader in Navi Mumbai. The glut of unsold mangoes in May means that much of the stock has now been earmarked only for export.
Swinging fortunes
These conditions are, of course, difficult for a mango farmer to contend with. Back in Dapoli, Mistry explains that the Alphonso has always been a shy crop. A good yield one year could mean that the next two years might well be poor. “In the first year that I bought this property, I got mangoes worth about ₹6 lakh and I thought ‘This is great! You can’t get a return on investment like this from any bank.’” The following year, he got 120 mangoes from 300 trees.
For farmers in Ratnagiri who see trees bulging with fruit in April then, it’s hard to resist the temptation to make the most of a good harvest. At any time, a hailstorm, a rather common occurrence in Maharashtra this time of the year, could destroy their entire crop. And if they wait too long, there’s no telling what kind of price their mangoes may fetch in the market. Picking the fruits early and ripening them artificially to make them look yellow is often an unavoidable option for them.
Ripe mangoes ready to be packed.
There’s one other thing these farmers do. In order to improve yield, many of them apply pesticides and fungicides. Mistry argues that these affect the health of the trees. His own mentor in the business, Anil Shantaram Bal, one of Dapoli’s oldest mango farmers, taught him everything—from when to pick mangoes to how to transport them, but Mistry disagrees with Bal and his fellow farmers over the use of chemicals.
“My suspicion is that this has led to a decline in productivity for their trees. There is a chemical that you can put for the tree called Cultar that will make a tree give 500 mangoes, for instance, when its normal capacity is about 200. But that means the tree is going to die faster.” For a couple of years, Mistry did haul equipment up to his farm and tried spraying fungicides, but decided that it wasn’t making any difference to his crop. “In fact, it took a couple of years after that for the trees to get out of that cycle, once we stopped, because they were giving poor yields,” he says.
Nowadays, the only method he relies on is to continually clear the weeds that grow between the trees and leave it in the soil as natural manure. This year, he is going to experiment with goat manure as fertiliser and see if it bears good results next year.
It’s not always a profitable business and there are obvious challenges to his model of single-handedly taking care of production as well as marketing and distribution.
By the time the mangoes are brought to Mumbai, there’s no saying how many customers will be willing to buy the mangoes, especially at a marked-up rate in the organic fruit market.
The real deal
Over the past two years in particular, he says, he has found a better market in the pulp industry, where institutional buyers like hotel chains are eager to buy high-quality mango pulp that they can use through the year to make dishes like aam ras, mango ice cream and other desserts. This year too, with the glut in the market, several boxes in his Marine Lines flat lie unsold and they will be taken back and pulped.
That’s a huge pity, because the Hapus from Mistry’s farm have the kind of full-bodied taste and aroma that is now impossible to find in the market. A number of people we gave the mangoes to for sampling say that they reminded them of what the Hapus used to taste like many years ago. They were amazed that they could eat them the ‘real’ way—squeeze the mango with your fingers to squish it and give the pulp a semi-liquid consistency, then drain it like juice from a small portion lopped off at the top of the fruit.
There is still, of course, a small discerning clientele that will wait to buy mangoes in May and store them through June. Mistry says he even has some regular clients from cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru who are happy to pay ₹2,000 as transportation costs in addition to the ₹2,000 that a two-dozen box costs.
Yet, the maths is just not working out. By next year, Mistry plans to give all the mangoes from his farm for pulping.
