Book Extract: Know your onions, er, mangoes

The mango is a unit of measuring relationships in India. Just a mention of it triggers nostalgia. People go into raptures, retelling stories of emotional connections. An interviewer once asked the Bikaner-born Pakistani singer Reshma about her child’s birthday. She said he was born in the season when mangoes and musk melons arrive in the market. It indicated rootedness and the fact that fame had not changed her. It also revealed how the fibres of our memories are tangled up in this fruit. One way to remember something is to link it with the mango. It is a memory disk, the involuntary Aadhaar card of India’s socio-emotional life. Everything is linked.

Many deities old and new are linked to the mango. None more so than Kamadeva, the ancient god of desire and love, of sex and procreation. He is a troublemaker in ancient stories. Sporting a bow, he shoots arrows of love. His targets drop their better judgement, their fears and insecurities. He distracts them from the straight and narrow, from the safety of the familiar. He drives them beyond the edge into the unknown, towards temptation, towards adventure. Kamadeva’s fruit is the vector of desire.

The mango is a luxury, not a necessity. India has numerous other fruits, sweets, decadent foods. But no other comestible fuels such an elaborate culture, business, and hysteria. Our passion for mangoes has turned an indulgence into a requirement. But the craving is actually atavistic. Watch a person eat a good mango, even in a refined and cultured setting. The mango has a way of drawing out the child inside. The politesse slips away like the skin off the flesh. There is no dainty way to truly enjoy a mango; it’s been called the bathroom fruit. If you look clean after eating one, most likely you did not enjoy it.

It is a result of the risk we take for desire. Who takes it? Everybody! You could be a consumer, buying fruits in the market, weighing the odds. Is it ripe enough or overripe? Is the price right? Is this the best time and place to buy? Is this the best variety? Will it bring smiles to the family or to those who will receive this gift? You do not have the information to make a thoughtful choice. Yet you will set aside the calculations and give in; you will buy the mangoes. No other fruit is bought in quite the same way in India.

Or you could be a trader. Mangoes arrive in the market via a vast, invisible trade network. Whether you are a retailer or a wholesaler, each deal is founded on speculation and little else. What price will secure the deal while keeping it profitable? Again, there’s no benchmark, no data to accurately judge the price that will maximise profit or minimise loss. Each decision is a gamble. There are no guarantees.

Or you could be a mango producer, the most risk-prone part of the mango business. To grow mangoes commercially, you have to tackle a wide range of variables. Capricious weather, pests and diseases, labour shortages...so much is up to chance. The markets for agricultural commodities are volatile. Poor production results in a waste of labour, time and capital. A bumper harvest is even worse; the glut drives down prices. There’s so much risk at every stage of the mango sector, it is surprising that growers grow the fruit, traders trade in it, consumers consume it.

It really does go all the way. All the way up to the mango tree, which also takes numerous risks to produce the fruit—with the soil, weather, pests and plant diseases. What does the tree desire? To spread its seed, contained inside the fruit. Plants are rooted to the ground. The mango tree cannot disperse its seeds without animals carrying them to new grounds; so it attracts them with fruit. Yes, the tree takes all those risks to give you pleasure, seducing you to do its bidding. It is driven by a compulsion going back millions of years.

Two words appear repeatedly in conversations about the mango: risk and shauq. Over and over, from India’s north to south, in one form or another. In orchards, markets, research labs and drawing rooms. Shauq means several things in Arabic: desire, craving, longing, fancy, pleasure, curiosity, nostalgia and, above all, passion. If you are ‘kam-shauq’, the Urdu dictionary says you are indifferent.

Biology abhors indifference. The story of life is propelled by seduction, by taking a chance, by the kind of give-and-take that makes it difficult to tell a winner from a loser. Did we humans domesticate the mango? Or, as the author Michael Pollan might ask, did the mango domesticate us? Your answer is determined by who you are. If trees had their own eighteen-minute TED Talks, they might hold up the mango as a case study. Title: ‘How to domesticate a primate and compel it to propagate your seed’!

[…]

“It is really irritating to deal with reporters during mango season,” a mango grower told me. “They want nothing more than a few quotes to go with a prefabricated storyline. They do not want to get to know the farmer at all. Are we not human? Are we not worth knowing?” Many growers have ranted at me in a similar vein. In fact, they do not know how to react if a reporter shows interest in them, in their work, in their life. Scientists, too!

Editors, though, need mango stories each season. They go to the features desk, where the smart writers with degrees in literature and history can produce attractive text without getting any reporting dirt on their shoes. Their literary bent allows them to draw from poets like Kalidasa and Mirza Ghalib. Their familiarity with history brings forth grand stories of nawabs and kings. Talented food writers can whip up a hyper-detailed write-up on the just-so taste of an exotic variety in a trice. This means each season produces several readable feature articles on the mango, on festivals and the choicest varieties. There is little reportage on the actual fruit or those who grow it or those who research it. Many Indians consider themselves mango experts; almost all are mistaken and poorly informed—from consumers to traders to growers.

Scholars and scientists also get things wrong. More often than not, historical details and backstories of mango varieties are twisted, embellished with apocrypha for special effect. Such material pops in research papers and gets published in academic journals! This explains why a mango-obsessed country actually knows so little about its obsession. Not many know that trees of almost all prize varieties produce fruit only once in two years. That only two dozen varieties out of India’s thousand-odd have any commercial value. That you cannot rely on most names of mango varieties because they change from region to region, sometimes within a region.

[…]

No crop gets similar editorial leeway. A subject so tasty can carry even the tiring accounts of farming and agricultural research that are anathema to the media’s short attention span.

About the book:

Title Mangifera indica: A Biography of the Mango/ Author Sopan Joshi/ Publisher Aleph/ Pages 432/ Price Rs 799 (hardcover)