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For Proust, it was a madeleine. For Shanthala, it is a mango.

Returning home from work two weeks back, a little earlier than expected, she decided to stop by a baby store. Maya needed some sundry items. As she drove home from the store, down the road that housed the local public library, standing at one of the street corners was a guy selling strawberries. During this time of the year, I’ve often seen Hispanics selling strawberries on some residential street corners. I’ve often wondered who they are. Daily farm workers or farmers themselves ? People with relatives in the farming industry trying to eke out an existence ? We’ve never bought anything from them because we get all our fruits from the local farmer’s market and we’re not big fans of strawberry. But Shanthala spied that this guy had something more than strawberries. She eyes were drawn by a flash of orange color, though the fruit was not shaped like an orange. The corner had a STOP sign and so she used the opportunity to pause. He was selling mangoes.

Summers in India are indelibly linked with the mango. The hot, sweaty days made sweet with the succulent and aromatic fruit. From about March till about the end of May, mangoes are very much the craze. Even for a household like mine where fruits were never in much demand, mangoes were the exception. I remember my father bringing in a crate or two of the most loved mango variety, Alphonso, each layer of mangoes separated from the next with hay. My mother would sift through them, picking out the ripest and those almost ready to spoil to be eaten first. The sweet aroma of mangoes permeated the house.

In season, the mango finds its way into so many foods. “Aam ras”, a thick paste of mango pulp that is sometimes sweetened with jaggery or sugar and eaten with hot pooris or chapati. My mother would make mango rice made from slightly unripe mangoes. There is even a popular mango-based soft drink, Maaza. When I had tonsillectomy, unable to eat any regular food, I had stayed on a diet of ice cream and Maaza. The painful experience was enough to turn me off from Maaza for the rest of my life. In the US, mango lassi is a perennial favorite. Available only in summer, people take to mango pickles and mango chutney to get through the rest of the year. Maharashtrians and Goans make a spice, amchur, made from dried unripe mangoes, that is added to various dishes such as dal. Shanthala like many others, also enjoyed eating a slightly unripe mango mixed with chilli powder. Besides the fruit, mango leaves adorn the doorways of Hindu houses during religious festivals or on propitious occasions such as a marriage.

Indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, mango belies its roots in being a difficult fruit to tame with a fork and a knife. As you suck the very marrow around the core seed, juices drip down your arms. Eating a mango with your hands is the only way to get a full measure of the fruit. I was raised to eat with a spoon, never cultivating the Indian habit of eating with my hands. When I had to mix pickles or chutney powder with rice and ghee, I turned to my mother to help me mix the combo, a spoon hardly upto the task of mixing the ingredients well. My mother sliced the two sides of the mango providing an easily scoopable cross-section of the fruit. But the heart of the fruit lay inaccessible. I never knew what my mother did with the core of the fruit. Did she eat it ? Did she throw it away ?

Our first mango season together after our marriage was in Mumbai where Shanthala pursued her residency and I was chased by my demons, trying to quell the voices that said that abandoning higher studies in the US for a job in a small company in Mumbai foretold the end of my computing life. The evening we got our first batch of mangoes home, she watched in amazement as I sliced the mango the way I had seen my mom do. I finished eating the scoops and not having known what my mom did with the rest of the fruit, I dumped it in the trashcan. Shanthala had a apoplexy. “You won’t eat any more mangoes, not if I can help it, how can you waste so much”, she said, snatching the box of mangoes out of my reach. Taken aback, I suggested that she could eat the middle if she liked, but I would not sully my hands.

Shanthala grew up in many ways that seem more Indian than my own upbringing. Nothing exemplified it more than how she ate mangoes as a kid. Her parents would take off her dress (as well as her brother’s), seat them in their underclothes, put a plate in front of them, cut the top off the mango and offer the whole fruit to them. They’d suck on the fruit, peeling off the thin, easily removed skin as they devoured the fruit, their arms coated with the juices from the succulent fruit. They’d lick the juices off their arms. After they were done, they would wash up and get dressed. When time was limited, her parents would slice the fruit into thin slices for devouring. Another friend of ours remembers eating mangoes in a similar fashion. Here is a description from an article in New York Times:

“She first holds out a cupped hand, in which sits the imaginary
glistening orange oval of a whole peeled mango; she then deftly flicks
her hand at the wrist to propel the phantom mango against her mouth,
which gets busy sucking the flesh down to the seed; finally,
outrageously, she deploys the full length of her tongue to lick her
arm, elbow to wrist, to recapture an inevitable trickle of invisible
mango juice.

“That,” she says after a long moment’s rapture with
a fruit that’s not even there, “is the best bit.” She goes on to
speculate that there is something alchemical in the mingling of
sweetest mango juice with a salty sheen of sweat.”

For Shanthala, mangoes smell of home, a home she misses all the more after Maya’s birth. When we came to the US together in March 1996, she left home at the start of the mango season. With another friend of ours, as fanatic about mangoes, she searched for mangoes in Indian grocery stores without much success. Mangoes here are imported from Mexico and other Central American nations and lack the aroma, flavor and juice of what she had left behind. That they were expensive made the fruit even less palatable. They tried various stores and even tried tinned mangoes. At Thai restaurants, sweet sticky rice with mangoes is a staple dessert. We ate the sticky rice casting the mango, tasteless or sour, aside. Each year, Shanthala lamented the lack of mangoes.

US banned Indian mangoes starting in the 80s over fears that Indian farmers used harmful pesticides on the crop. Japan had imposed a similar ban. About the only thing that Shanthala will cheer about our ex-president, Dubya, is that he lifted the ban on Indian mangoes in the US (in return, the Indian government offered to open the Indian market to the Harley-Davidson bikes). The largest producer of mangoes in the world, India produces upto 50% of the world’s mangoes. On April 27, 2007, the first batch of Indian mangoes arrived in the US after a hiatus of 18 years, made up of 150 boxes of the famous Alphonso and Kesari varieties.

A few weeks back, we encountered a stall at the farmer’s market selling a few mangoes. Though pricey (each fruit cost $2 or $3), they were delicious. Unfortunately, they were exhausted in a couple of weeks. Shanthala’s mango urge, latent all these years, had begun to itch and had not yet been satisfyingly scratched.

So, when Shanthala spied the fruit being hawked by a street vendor, she decided to give them a try. She bought a box of about 20 mangoes for about $13, a steal. Unaware of her find, I came home from work and as we headed out for dinner, Shanthala said, “Can we swing by the library for a second ?”. Always a sucker to be at the library, I agreed. She explained what had happened on the way. We weren’t going to the library, but only upto the corner. Shanthala had sampled the mangoes, found them to be excellent, remembered the guy had one more box and so she wanted to pick that up, hoping no one else would have already snapped it up.

He still had the box. Thirteen more dollars were coughed up for about 25 mangoes and we left with a big smile on Shanthala’s face. Shanthala wanted to know if he had more mangoes and if he would be back. He spoke no English and we No Habla Espanol. We called Maya’s nanny to provide us with the appropriate words, but she didn’t pick up the phone. Shanthala and I continued to gesticulate, trying to get our question across. “I don’t want to lose this opportunity to get such good mangoes”, Shanthala kept saying. The guy finally understood what we were trying to say and said that he was all out of mangoes.

That night, I decided to give them a shot. I finished five of them in a row. Maybe not in the same class as an Alphonso, but these were still excellent: juicy, sweet and aromatic, just like we remembered mangoes. I made my favorite mango drink with milk a couple of times and have otherwise been devouring them along with Shanthala. I have since learned to use my hands to get all the meat off the fruit.

A week ago, Shanthala ran into another streetside vendor selling mangoes and she lightened his load of two boxes of mango. These are excellent too. Maya ate the fruit the first few times we bought the fruit. Since then however, she’s steadfastly refused to eat it, though she continues to eat other fruits such as blueberries and cherries.

As she stands by the counter, diligently slicing the mango into thin strips and sucking the fruit off the skin, I sometimes feel she’s sucking deep into the well of her memory as well. For us immigrants, such are the small mercies helping us remember what we’ve left behind.

P.S: Picture is courtesy of !ºrobodot, via Flickr