Around this time of year, with mango season afoot in India, I confess to just a twinge of mango envy, and not a little nostalgia.
Picking through a few select memories, I find myself dreaming of long ago summers, and of coconut leaf mats, spread with rosy mangoes from my aunt’s farm ripening in fragrant quiet in my grandmother’s store room.
In boarding school, much longed for treats of Neelam or Malgova mangoes after lunch, came charged with the additional, if dubious, thrill of encountering a mango seed weevil scuttling out of the kernel, and the ensuing schoolgirl hysteria that it would set off!
In blisteringly hot summers in Delhi, my father, the official fruit (and fish) buyer in the family, would bring home baskets of mangoes from INA market, to be demolished in sittings that saw some of us put away four or five mangoes at a go. (I’ll not be naming names, besides Dussheri, Langda, Chausa… 😉 ) To say nothing of all those mangoes consumed in milkshakes, in ice cream, and with fresh cream, or in savoury delights like chutneys and pickles. There were so many ways to love this fruit and all those wonderful Indian varieties to choose from!
