Like most great love stories, the mango is all about pining

Mint

2 days ago

My friend N turned out to be a mango smuggler.
His family owned a mango orchard in Tamil Nadu. The Imam Pasand mangoes from that orchard were the stuff of family legend. But N rarely got a taste of the mangoes in their prime. For an Indian immigrant in the US, fresh mangoes from home were forbidden fruit. Mangoes from India, like most agricultural products from abroad, were strictly banned in the US.
One year while visiting home, N was unable to resist the temptation. He buried some not-quite-ripe mangoes deep inside his hand luggage. But over the course of the long transcontinental flight from India, they slowly ripened in the overhead compartment of the aircraft. When he landed in the US, his heart was thudding. He said he was convinced that every customs agent and their sniffer dogs would surely zero in on him and his contraband cargo. It wasn't quite a case of exploding mangoes but close enough.
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The mango has always been the ultimate distillation of desi immigrant nostalgia in one fruit. Because Indian mangoes were long barred from the US, desi immigrants had to make do with Filipino and Mexican pretenders while dreaming of Alphonsos, Himsagars and Langdas ripening in orchards back home.
It was the 2008 US-India nuclear deal that finally resulted in an Indian mango detente. President George W. Bush warmed many Indian hearts when he said, 'The United States is looking forward to eating Indian mangoes." The shrink-wrapped mango with stickers proclaiming 'Treated by Irradiation" (to eliminate pests and increase shelf life) is a far cry from the mango summers of India when pyramids of the golden, red and green fruit pile up in the markets, ripening slowly in the muggy heat. Only one or two varieties were cleared for import, like the Alphonso, from a country that boasted of some 1,500 kinds of mangoes.
But the irradiated pricey mango, had finally been offered a pathway to legal immigration, was the symbol of a changing world. As well as India's growing soft power.
I remember going down to my local Indian grocery store in Silicon Valley and seeing the first sealed boxes of 'legal" Alphonsos. I had to buy a whole box, at a hefty price; there was no picking and choosing, no pressing the flesh to test the ripeness. I worried if irradiated and healthy, the freshly naturalised mango might also have had their lifeblood zapped out them along with every potential bug. But at least it was better than trying to relive the taste of Indian mangoes through a dented tin of mango pulp from the local Indian supermarket.
That mango mazaa American story hit a roadblock recently. In May, 15 shipments of Indian mangoes were rejected by US authorities at ports of entry like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta. After getting irradiated, mangoes need to procure a Form PPQ 203 to comply with agricultural requirements for entry into the US. The mangoes were irradiated, but USDA (US department of agriculture) claimed the PPQ 203 was 'incorrectly issued"—apparently a case of mangoes that did not mind their P's and Q's. The exporters argued otherwise, but $500,000 worth of mangoes were dumped at the border anyway.
The spurned shipments of mango now begged the question—is there still room for Indian mangoes in MAGA America? A friend quipped that America barring the mango from India while the US President warns Apple not to go to India shows we are living in a time of strange fruit indeed. As Billie Holiday sang, 'Here is a strange and bitter crop."
At one time, for generations of South Asian immigrants, the mango was a symbol of loss and somehow all the sweeter for it. It became the stuff of cliches. In her 2021 essay on the mango in Literary Hub, writer Urvi Kumbhat points out that in the 1999 novel by Atima Srivastava Looking for Maya, a character sneers at diasporic writing as being all about 'mangoes and coconuts and grandmothers." (I plead guilty. When I eventually published a novel myself, I had both mangoes and grandmothers in it, as well as some coconut oil.)
Twitterverse even came up with the mocking term 'mango diaspora poetry" for all that bad poetry out there where mango serves as a stand-in for heritage, loss and erotic longing, sticky fingers, dripping juice and all.
Kumbhat writes, 'In mango poetry, the accusation goes, the homeland is superficial and populated with tropes—it reinscribes an exoticizing gaze even while claiming belonging and authenticity." Bangladeshi-American poet Tarfia Faizullah asks in her poem Self-Portrait as a Mango, 'Doesn't a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn't a mango a placeholder in a poem filled with burkas?" As Kumbhat points out, the poem denounces desi stereotypes in the diaspora like spelling bees but it uses the mango, which is as much a cliche itself. The mango, clearly, is hard to escape or deny.
That's probably because we just love it and cannot deny that love. Like all true love, it's messy. At a time when New York mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani is being attacked by some for being 'uncivilised" enough to eat with his hands, a mango remains the epitome of messy eating. I am waiting for a video of Mamdani eating a mango.
And like most great love stories, the mango is all about pining. The very unavailability of the Indian mango in the US was part of its allure. The mango was the price of immigration, a reminder that we could not have it all—a cushy Silicon Valley lifestyle and perfectly ripened mangoes, a season both fleeting and sweet, perhaps all the more sweet because it is fleeting.
When I moved back to India from California, as summer approached, friends and family wondered how I would weather my first full-fledged Kolkata summer in years. 'But at least I will have mangoes," I would reply. And I did. By then the Alphonso was already readily and legally available in the US, especially in South Asian grocery stores but it still didn't compare to the mango bonanza India had to offer, the many varieties that marked the progress of an Indian summer like some golden metronome. At my home in Kolkata, the Gulab Khas with its red blush was the harbinger of summer, followed by the silky smooth Himsagar and then the meaty Langda. I ate them all with relish and posted pictures on social media to gloat to my NRI friends.
In fact when boxes of Alphonso first showed up in California, I wondered (even as I bought myself one) if it was not a mixed blessing. Would I still love the mango so dearly if the next time I walked into my regular supermarket I found them piled at the entrance like watermelon, 99 cents a pound? I took some reassurance in the fact that though the Alphonso was coming to the US, for the other 1,499 varieties one needed to go back home and brave an Indian summer.
Or American customs. My friend could never figure out why the sniffer dogs and the customs agent didn't zero in on him and his richly aromatic contraband fruit. Perhaps if he had been an Indian aunty, they would have paid more attention. Indian mothers are well-known for trying to smuggle in the taste of home for their homesick offspring. N was so sick with relief at having escaped the eagle eyes of customs officials, he said, he gave the 'illegal" mangoes away to friends. Mangoes without papers, illegal aliens in America, they quickly vanished into the great American melting pot leaving no sticky trace behind.
But now as America tightens the screws on immigration, ratchets up trade wars and rounds up those without papers, might it be time for the undocumented mango again?
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
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