The King Of Fruits

A Tribute to the Golden Yellow Fruit That Seduces Everyone Who Crosses Its Path...

- Devanshi Mody

The mango is the king of fruits. It is also the most dangerous of fruits, I realise, when one shatters millimetres from my head. Maya and Leela, housekeeping staff at my hotel Grey Suit, are aggressing the mango tree that covers the hotel, its branches laden with massive mangoes hanging outside the windows in irresistible enchantment. The girls have been shaking mangoes with an improvised stick noosed in a plastic bag when a sought mango misses, barely missing my head. No other fruit motivates such mindlessness (well, the apple, Eve would say…) Nothing perhaps unites India like the mango season in May, when madness spreads across the country like wild fire setting streets ablaze with stretches of golden mangoes on display.

My grandmother’s maharaj (cook) watching me demolish bowl after bowl of aam ras conjured the mango season in Rajasthan, from where he hailed, and offered to whisk me away to his mango-groved village. Lest I elope with the cook my grandmother took to freezing aam ras for my annual visits from the United Kingdom every December. Alas, defrosted aam ras does not retain the thrill of fresh, fragrant extracts. Moreover, there is only so much one could store and rationing diminishes the pleasure, especially as my mother would agonise me with childhood recollections of summering in Gujarat, where her uncles had ample barns carpeted in mangoes that she unabashedly gorged on for breakfast, lunch and dinner.