Mangoes!
Mangoes! The magic word that conjures up visions of luscious, succulent fruits with many a shade of sweetness that can defy description by the goddess Saraswathi herself!The harbinger and redeemer of hot summer afternoons!So many varieties of them-malgova, salem guNDu, badam,neelam, raspoori in Bangalore,rumani,banganapaLLi,alphonso for the Mumbaiite and so many others for which the names are not known and the taste not defined.
The morning started once with the vendor women of these heavenly fruits came along in front of our house and gave a shout which reached the backyard.It was hardly necessary for we were already there along with grandpa who was busy bargaining with them not hard enough according to my great aunt.Soon dozens of fruits woudl be in the basket in the kitchen to be distributed among us at the sweet will of my grandaunt who ruled the home.
We would vie with each other for the koTTai, the portion containing the seed.Often we wanted to eat the whole fruit without it being cut into pieces.We used to even have kozhambu made of a small variety of mango.
Alas!Those were days which have gone by for ever.These are days when a mango costs tens of rupees in the city.They are mostly forced into fruition artificially and have little of their taste left in them.The rapacious juice industry has all but grabbed the choicest of them leaving us only with the rest.The papaya, poor cousin to the mango,has become more popular because of its availability.One has to retreat to the rural areas in order to taste mangoes of those days.
We had a surfeit of mangoes in our quarters within IIT campus.We shared them with the monkeys, squirrels, urchins and passers by.Our house came to be identified by the large mango tree which was the target of attention for every one in the area.
Oh! for a bite of the truly sweet and delicious mango!
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