DesiLit Daily

Why do so many writers from the subcontinent write about mangoes? It's almost obsessive these fervent descriptions of mangoes. Their , selection, their preparation into pickles, their eating...just talking about them.

There is Amulya Malladi's 'Mango Season,' and David Davidar's 'House of Blue Mangoes.' Mangoes (whether or not they're in the title) appear with regularity in diasporic Indian writing.

My cynical self says this is to inject the proper dose of the exotic East, hot, lazy days and sweet (or sour, if we're talking of pickles)mangoes. They're different...well for Western readers anyway. Not apples or grapes or pears. But mangoes...the name itself is mysterious somehow.

Is it a literary shorthand? A lazy shorcut? Just writing the word brings their sweetness into my mouth. Not the stringy, rock-hard, coarse textured, too-sweet mangoes I find in grocery stores in the US. I can taste the real ones--sweet, silky-textured, bursting with subtle flavor (not just sweetness)-- mangoes of several varities that arrived every summer into my life.

Okay, I am falling into the mango trap, staking my place in the Indian diaspora of writers.

I don't think Indian writers in India are that obsessed with mangoes. Maybe mangoes are a tangible, concrete symbol of India itself. An India lost. Symbols of departed chilhoods and youths. For those still living there, mangoes are part of the landscape. They are real, not mythical symbols of a fictional paradise lost.