Mango mania

The papers have been full of how the fruit flies. For about a week, perhaps more, there have been happy faces beamed into my living room courtesy the television news channels. And ever since it happened, my email box has been throbbing with junk mail telling me about how delicious it all was. What on earth is this all about? Very simple: The average Americans, a people I dearly love but will never forgive for their unrelenting naivete, have finally taken a bite of that elusive delight – the Alfonso mango. And they are going gaga, or more so than they normally are and always will be. For, you see, it has been, literally speaking, forbidden fruit for too long.

It is not that the United States has never met a mango. After all, these vaguely rounded and ideally sweet products of nature do grow in South America, Mexico and even the US, where they are cultivated in small boutique farms, or so I am told. But for reasons of a one-time bug infestation, the true-blue – orange, really – Alfonso, aka Apus, aka Hapus, aka so many other pet names has eluded Yank-land. So after much diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing, many years of requests and rejections and (I bet) a certain amount of hardline bargaining, the fruit finally made its way across the seven (or however many) seas and was scarfed down by an avid and elite set of taste-testers. All of them still being alive and well, the next consignments will be aimed at the aam (ha ha!) janata, people who can get to the stores selling them early enough to manage to buy a few. And the crowds are going crazy, the reports say, demanding more than supply can produce and willing to pay the rather extravagant price asked for them.

Some of my friends are protesting, saying that if all the good fruit is sent to America, as is likely to happen, there will not be enough for mango-philes here. Which makes sense, in a strange kind of way, since I firmly believe that if we didn’t have enough, we would not be doing this export stunt and once we do this export stunt we would as a nation have enough money from the sale to grow more, if not now, at least for the next season. When I said that to someone, she looked haughtily at me and sniped that I just did not have the sensitivity to appreciate something that was as close to ambrosia as fertilisers could make it. I somehow thought she meant sensibility, but she was clearly not in the mood for an argument.

As for me, I wouldn’t mind if every mango in stock – but for the few that Father will enjoy - was sent to wherever wanted it. I am not a fan of the fruit, even though I was born one. Rumour has it that my mother ate so many mangoes when she was expecting me that her family firmly believed that I would emerge a tasteful orange in skin colour with a nicely rounded shape and a sharply upturned little nose. Sort of paisley-ish, you know. When I was a little girl, I ate my share and more of the fruit, tucking in with a bib tucked neatly around my neck to keep me neater than I would have been otherwise. But, as I grew up, my skin and my tummy refused to keep up with my food habits and protested every time I ate a mango. As a result, there was more for the rest of the family and I turned my button nose up (mercifully it was not sharply upturned) whenever I was offered the fruit. As per contract with my mother, I did eat one spoonful from hers, as a mandate, but protested each time at the strange aftertaste and new spot that I knew would sprout on the very tip of the aforementioned nose within the next hour.

Call me a philistine, call me a tasteless boor, call my comments sacrilegious and blasphemous, but a mango and I are not soulmates. Whether we ever will be again, I do not know, but I have my doubts. Until then, all I can say to the Americans who are wallowing in delectably luscious orange fruit is: Bon Appetit!