| Sunday, 17 March 2024 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Hello again, and welcome back to First Principles. We’re in official mango season down south!
One of the joys of living in, well, the country that gave the world “the king of fruits” (it’s called “Mangifera Indica” for a reason) is the sight of seeing them all around us on trees. Seriously, the sight of a mango tree laden with fruit is something!
“What is that variety?” I’d ask my mom as we hurtled past roadside trees laden with mangoes in rickety KSRTC buses back in the ‘80s. The highlight of my childhood were the two summer months of every year that I spent in my ancestral village in Kerala.
“Thathachundan,” my mom would say. Parrot beak.
“And those ones?” I’d ask again, after a bit.
“Moovandan,” she’d say.
“And are there fish in that pond?” I’d point at some small half-pond, half-puddle in the distance. Or sometimes a man-made tank adjoining a temple.
“Perhaps.”
“What fish?” I’d continue.
Depending on your perspective, kids are either incredibly curious or incredibly annoying.
Having been both a kid and a parent, I can tell you the answer is… they’re both!
Perhaps it was all those childhood summers spent staring out of non-air conditioned trains (that took nearly three days to transport you from Delhi to Kerala!) and bus windows, the wind and dust in your eyes and hair. We stared out at the landscape rushing by and wondered about trees and fruits and ponds and fishes because what else was there to do?
Usually, I like to open mango season each year with what I like to think of as “the king of the king of fruits”, aka the Imam Pasand variety of mangoes. But tragically, our favourite neighbourhood fruit seller from whom we’d been sourcing mangoes for nearly a decade had to shut down operations around six months ago. He told me no one liked to visit shops any more. They preferred online shopping, even for fruits and vegetables.
So, we bought and ate Banganapalli mangoes, normally a variety I’d keep for the fag end of the season, once the Imam Pasands and Mulgoas had run out.
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