Mangoes too can be a vehicle of narrow, and avoidable, nationalism.
I ate a mango last week. Nothing unusual about that, because I like the fruit. But, as anyone who is familiar with these delicious drupes will tell you, what was strange about my act was that it took place in October. The season in India lasts from March to the end of June. And the only reason I was able to eat my mango at this time was because it happened to be from Pakistan.
The week I bought it from INA market in Delhi, hostilities erupted on the border; the Pakistanis killed 17 Indians. Commentators advanced all sorts of theories for this latest round of unprovoked firing and the most plausible seemed to be that troublemakers (with or without the sanction of the elected head of state) were testing the resolve of prime Minister Narendra Modi. India’s response was robust, and a fair number of Pakistani casualties led to the border quietening down. I have no idea if the border trouble had any effect on the mango trade, but a number of local markets continued to display carts full of mangoes out of season. I’m assuming a fair proportion of these were from Pakistan.
I ripened the mango for a couple of days and then my wife Rachna and I had it for dessert. Its skin was the colour of sunlight, and its flesh was firm and yellow. When we bit into it, the taste was very sweet, with high notes of caramel. The mango was a chaunsa, mainly grown in Multan and Sahiwal, and is almost indistinguishable from the Indian chaunsa. Unsurprising, because, according to legend, the chaunsa traces its origins back to Sher Shah Suri (1486-1545), who is credited with popularising this cultivar throughout the subcontinent. Indeed, it is said the mango’s name derives from Sher Shah Suri’s famous victory over Humayun in the Battle of Chausa in 1539, which marked the former’s ascent of the throne in Delhi.
This wasn’t the first time I was encountering Pakistani mangoes. About a decade ago, I remember discussing the relative merits of Pakistani and Indian mangoes with the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in a New York bar. Much of what was said that evening has been elided from my memory but I remember him adamantly declaring that the mangoes from his country were peerless. This was a patently unsustainable argument for two reasons. One, India has three times as many varieties of mangoes as Pakistan, many of these extraordinarily good; and two, as any mango lover knows, the only variety that is peerless is his or her own favourite. As far as I’m concerned nothing can beat a perfect Neelam.
Neither of us prevailed and there matters rested.
A short while after my inconclusive debate with Hamid, my wife and I moved to Canada for a few years and it was then that I was able to test the veracity of his claim. Every year, during the humid Toronto summer, we would drive down to little India, to a Pakistani-run small grocery store that stocked everything homesick subcontinentals might need. During the mango season it had both Indian and Pakistani mangoes for sale. We would wait for the Alphonsos to make their appearance. Although there were a few varieties of Hawaiian and Caribbean mangoes available in the supermarkets, as self-respecting Indian mangophiles we would have nothing to do with them. One day, during our regular mango run, we discovered that the Alphonsos available that week weren’t very good. The shopkeeper suggested, rather tentatively as I recall, that we try some of the Pakistani Sindhris instead.
“My own favourite is the Anwar Ratol,” he said, referring to another of Pakistan’s great mangoes, “but the Sindhri is just as good.”
“They will never buy Pakistani mangoes,” another customer at the shop, who was clearly from Pakistan, interjected. “They are from India.”
As if to dare the man, my wife promptly bought a box of Sindhris. As we were paying for the fruit, she asked the man who had catalysed her decision to buy mangoes from his homeland whether he had ever eaten an Alphonso, and he declared that he never had and never would. “Only Pakistani mangoes for me.”
And therein lies the root of the problem that leads to a variety of unpleasant situations, from the roaring of guns on the border to the shortening of the subcontinental mango season.
(David Davidar is the author of The House of Blue Mangoes. His new book, A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Fiction from the 19th Century to the Present, is out in December)