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Fruit-bearing Trees

You can even pickle its magic

Lover of Mango that I am, please pardon me for inflicting upon you this long account of mango's delights, if by any chance, you happen to be mango-phobic.

Come April, the mango season still to come into its full swing, the Andhra homes in Chennai get busy readying themselves to making 'avakkaya' and other varieties of mango pickles. The husband is on the look-out for outlets that sell pure Samalkot gingelly oil, Hyderabad chilli powder and crystalline salt.

Meanwhile, the woman at home gets mustard seed, sun-dries it and keeps it ready to be powdered, just on the eve of launching the process. At long last, the right mangoes are found, and then men who cut each the mango into quarter or octets in a proper manner, meaning that each piece has its own portion of hard shell left intact, are found. Before getting this work done, the queen of the home is alerted so as to get the muster powder ready.

Porcelain jars are kept ready and cleaned without even a trace of moisture on their walls. The husband arrives with bagfuls of cut mango pieces, helps clean them. And, finally, the husband-wife team mixes the mango pieces, mustard powder and the requisite salt, together with Bengal gram seeds/garlic cloves, as preferred, and stuffs the so-prepared material into the jar.

And there comes a respite, a night or a full day, depending upon the degree of fermentation, which is judged by the olfactory perception. Now again, work begins. Gingelly oil gently poured into the jars, hand-mixed to ensure that the constituents of the mixture are blended properly. Once, twice and sometime even thrice, the job is repeated.

For a week thereafter, the jars, which are sealed air-tight, are left untouched. When the time for it comes, avakkaya is ready. The Andhra’s mouth begins to water. On tasting the new avakkaya, he feels a sense of levitation.

The Tamil friend’s curiosity is aroused. Oh! that ghastly blood red colour! Is his Andhra friend a bloodsucker, he asks himself. Persuaded to taste it, he heaves a sigh of relief. It is not hot at all! He is surprised. Surprise over, he relishes the taste and asks for a jar of avakkaya, so as to experience the delight with his people at home. Soon, the recipe is on demand!

Be all this as it may, let me come to the mundane task of talking about the mango tree, in a botanical way. As a tree, it is a great sight. Large in size, with a big spread of branches, it offers a lot of shade.

Not for nothing Rabindranath Tagore chose a mango grove for starting his Viswa Bharati. In its early days, this university held its classes under the mango tree.

The leaves are lush green, lanceolate with an acute apex.

The tree is the home of the cuckoo. The young leaf buds have a slight reddish tinge, with a resinous taste. Curiosity aroused, you may be tempted to taste these buds and then begins the ordeal, you’ll have a gurgling throat.

The great Telugu poet, Devulapalli, put all these facts together in a song: he wonders whether the cuckoo’s unrelenting song is the result of the bird tasting the mango buds and goes on to further wonder whether the abundant production of leaf buds in the season is the result of the cuckoo feeding upon them! Poets have their licence! Who are we to question their conclusions?

If you want to be sure of the variety of mango that you are going to have in your backyard or in the field where you are planning to have a mango orchard, you better go to a nursery and get the right graft. Of course, you’ve to consult a horticulturist to ensure that the geographical location and the variety are properly coupled.

The phenology - study of an organism is affected by climate, especially dates of seasonal phenomena such as flowering - of mango is peculiar. In Chennai and a little to the south of Chennai, mango starts flowering around December 15, and to the north of Chennai, sometime around January 1. As you move northwards, the date of flowering tends to be later until in the sub-Himalayan region, it is almost as late as March 1.

There is (or was) a mango tree in the compound of a Vinayakar temple in Big Street, Tiruvallikkeni. I saw it yielding fruits - rather raw - all round the year, even in November and December. Flowering in mango is a photoperiodic phenomenon. Near the temple, there was installed a mercury lamp, providing light for longer hours than it would otherwise have had. That could be an explanation for the peculiar fruit-bearing habit of this tree. This is my explanation. Any takers? If you have another explanation you are welcome to contest my conclusion.

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The Mother of Pondicherry Ashram avers that mango helps a meditator to gain divine knowledge. No wonder, mango leaves have a special place in all Hindu rituals. No festival goes by without the housewife adorning her doorway with a festoon of mango leaves. When a ‘poornakumbham’ is prepared, the coconut, which crowns it, is supported by a padmam of mango leaves. And in rituals, where a homam is a part, the fire God is propitiated by pouring ghee from the mango leaves.

Mango cannot but be a native of India. It spans our religious customs, literature, ancient and modern. I understand that the natives of Nigeria, a west African country, learned to enjoy the taste of mango from Indians who went there on professional work. What about Florida, where also, I am told, mango grows? Do the Americans living there know the value of mango? I haven’t come across any American writing on mango.

It appears that God had created mango specially for Indians. How lucky we are!