Luscious and sweet, mangoes are India's summer passion

Eat a mango during the summer season here and you will understand. The Alphonso mango is the sweetest, coolest, most luscious mango you will ever find.

In April, when the season starts in this city, Indians clamoring for their share of this fabled fruit can push the price up to 1,500 Rupees (about $30) for a dozen Alphonsos. That's a week's wages for many people.

But this year, a national transport strike and reduced exports to the Middle East - where there's usually a huge demand for Alphonso (or king) mangoes - has dropped prices to as low as 200 Rupees (about $4) a dozen.

''Normally we can only eat mangoes once or twice a season,'' says a beaming Trilok Lal, 42, a New Delhi restaurant manager. ''But this year they are so cheap.''

Inside the chaos at Crawford Market in Mumbai, a worn railway station-like colonial structure built by Rudyard Kipling's father in what was then called Bombay, sellers banter their way through thinning profits.

''Mine are the real thing - sun ripened and sweet,'' says a seller as he weighs the sensually curved golden fruit in his palm. ''Eat one and go straight to heaven.''

The seller's boasts are ignored by the buyers (who are almost all women surrounded by excited children) in this major mango-trading center. Prospective buyers sniff the mangoes to ascertain their sweetness and ripeness.

''I have to be careful. It pains me to cut open a bad one,'' says Shakuntala Pradhan, a shopper. ''My husband scolds me for buying so many, but I ask, is there anything better one can eat?''

This year, consumers have been cautious about buying the fruit. Unseasonably early rains along India's western Malabar coast, where Alphonsos are mostly grown, have tainted some of the crop. That has only heightened the great game that is played out in Bombay's high society, where the grand families compete for the cream of the year's crop, and for word of who can supply it.

Some are fortunate enough to have mango sellers come right to their kitchens. Mrs. Mehta's aamwalla(mango seller), has been faithfully arriving at her posh south Bombay flat for more than two decades. He brings Alphonsos nestled in a hay-filled basket on his head; the fruit comes from the famed Malwan region. Mehta says she has no idea where he is from or even what his full name is. Yet every week of mango season he is there, and she must work hard to keep him coming.

''I really don't need so many mangoes, but if I don't buy from him, he will stop coming here,'' Mrs. Mehta says with a sigh, gesturing toward the six dozen mangoes lying in a heap of hay. ''Maybe I'll make a mango souffle for the kids.''

Hundreds of miles north, in Delhi, the Alphonso is seen as an almost unattainable delicacy. ''Such things are not in my destiny,'' laments Bajrangi Dubey, a cigarette vendor. ''It's OK for car-wallahs [car owners], but how can I think about Alphonsos when I can barely get by?''

In that sense, the Alphonso is India's ''anti-mango.'' Mangoes are considered the fruit of the people. India cultivates more than 1,000 varieties of the bright-colored ovoids, and brings in more than half of the world's mango harvest. Wild mango forests can still be found near Assam in the northeast, where mangoes originated.

The mango tree, also known as the kalpavriksh(wish-granting tree), has an honored place in the Indian imagination. Countless romances have blossomed beneath its shady fragrance and the poet Kalidasa likens the blooms of the mango flower to the darts of Manmatha, the Hindu God of love. And fragrant mango leaves, festooning doorways, are an integral and auspicious part of Hindu rituals and religious ceremonies.

India's many invaders were also not immune to the lure of Alphonsos. It is said that the conqueror Alexander quickly became a fan, and the Portuguese carried Alphonsos and other mangoes off to their territories in Latin America. Muslim invaders developed such a taste for them that many Indians joke that the only thing keeping oil flowing into India today is the flow of Alphonso mangoes going to the Middle East.

British colonials had a more ambivalent relationship with the mango. They savored its taste, but frowned upon the very un-Victorian propensity of mango juice to run down one's fingers and onto shirtfronts. Gossip mongers of the era whispered about ladies who devoured vast quantities of Alphonsos in their bathrooms clad in nothing but their drawers.

''Mangoes are about pure hedonism,'' says Zend M. Zend, who grows his own mangoes on his weekend farm. ''Why not just embrace the fact?''

This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 6/11/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.