On eating a mango

( This is a very controversial topic I have chosen to write upon . India , being home to one of the most delectable fruits ever , has been blessed with hundreds of varieties of mangoes . So , everyone has a favourite of their own . Mine is Langda . It may or may not sit well with another mango fanatic who loves , say , safeda . 

To each . his own , I must say . Lets bury hatchets and  praise our own mango sky high ) 

 Summer comes with blazing sun, sweaty people, flared tempers and sunburnt necks . Loo, the feared mid-day wind with baking properties , also downs shutters during daytime. 

It also comes with mango .

To any mango lover ,or for that matter, any Indian, all that was tolerable just for the yummy juicy deliciousness of mangoes .

Mangoes come in various shapes and sizes and colours. There are hundreds of varieties all over India. Some are so exclusive that they have foreign sounding names . Miyazaki, Alphonso . These conjure images of blonde beauties . 

Then there are the desi sounding ones .himsagar , bainganpalli ( safeda ) , dussheri , chausa , bijju , fajli , sindoori , totapulli and the long awaited boss of them all , langda . 

In my humble opinion, langda or malda is the best. Just the right amount of flesh, just the right amount of fibre and glorious taste . A taste that ( not unlike the food critic Anton Ego of Ratatouille) takes you tumbling across the years to a grass filled maidan of your childhood, where heaps of freshly harvested mangoes are piled up, adults are haggling over the price and you have already laid your evil eyes on the most rightly ripened , not too soft to touch , not too hard , just the right amount of yellow around the umbilical stump of the stalk . 

Then the sniff test . Every mango connoisseur swears by the sniff test . I swear,  every mango has its own signature fragrance . It not only identifies the correct mango for you , it also yields a lot of information regarding age , ripening status and of course the variety . 

Once , on  a long, summery, visit to the south of the nation brought about introduction of new names . Amaravati , Neelam and of course hapoos . Even there , the waxy filmed , green among the red -orange-yellow  coloured charlatans , was our reigning king . The superstar . Langda . 

Malda is a tiny hamlet / town in Bengal , mostly famous for dubious politics . However , the mango has made it a household name . 

Langda , its other , more popular name , specially in the north , is unfortunate to think how does a mango come to be named after a disability in a human is beyond me . The popular theory goes that a person , mango -besotted of course , climbed the said tree to fetch himself some ripe fruit , fell off the tree , broke his leg , and hence became Langda (lame ) . But it still leaves diehard fans like me scratching my head , as to when and how the moniker stuck to the poor produce , instead of the  greedy person . 

Long years ago , I think we were nearing Howrah railway station . We were driving on what maybe called a service road , underneath a flyover . A beggar was eating a mango . I have never ever seen any one relish a mango or any food that way . He shut his eyes against the heat , the sun , the dust and the honking , the pedestrians , the coolies , the chaos , and just focussed on licking the seed ( bone ) clean . The seed was already white from being scraped numerous times by bony teeth .It was akin to watching a dog gnaw a bone .  He would have cracked the hull open and eaten the dicot inside had it been edible

There are several ways of eating a mango  . People slice nowadays , and scrape off the flesh with a spoon . Wrong .They peel , dice and eat it daintily with a "fruit fork" or a toothpick. Sacrilege. They cut the beauty around its girth .(Aaargh. ) twist it and eat the two halves , the satan worshippers. 

Each of these is sin and veritable evil . 

A mango should be cut next to the stalk, wasting as little pulp as possible, then the hands and teeth should go to work . Even a single drop of mango juice dripping out through your forearm out via your elbow is a brownie point deducted . If you don't want Gryffindor to fail , you will slurp ,lick , do whatever you can, but every single bit of pulp , every fibre and every drop should be consumed. Inhaled, if possible 

That is how you will graduate out of the mango eating academy whose Dean was the beggar with shut eyes , devouring a single mango beneath the flyover in Howrah.