Mango mania
• The war of words, and weapons, aside, legend has it that during one of the better phases in Indo-Pak relation-ship, the fate Zia ul-Haq sent a crate of mangoes to the late Indira Gandhi. The taste caught Indira's fancy and she immediately sought information on the mango only to be told that it was an Indian variety, rataul, cultivated in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. She promptly sent a return gift ham-per to the Pakistani president with, of course, the new-found information.
Today the scene is different: while rataul reigns as the num-ber one mango export to West Asia from Pakistan, it is rarely sighted in India. The plight of other species native to India is no different.
• When Deepika was a child growing up in Pune, holidays meant early morning treks to the nearby hills near Pashan village. At the foothills were mango orchards, and the smell of the ripe mangoes tickled the olfactory sense of people for miles around. Avoiding an encounter with the owner, she along with her friends would climb onto the tower branches, fill their pockets with the fruit and then proceed towards danger-free grounds. But if the owner came close enough, it meant clinging to the tree, hoping they would be mistaken for parrots. The trees have long since been replaced by a multi-storeyed residential complex, with "all modern amenities".
Naimuddin Khan gets nostalgic when he talks of his khandaani aam ka bagh at Gopamal village in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh. "Being next to a small pond, the bagh was named 'chota talabwala bagh'." And by Uttar Pradesh standards, the bagh was small with just about 200 trees, says Naimuddin. "But some of the varieties like nimbus were found only in our bagh," he adds while going into raptures describing the varieties of mango found in his bagh. A sample: nimbua, small mango with the flavour of lemon; khatua, sour when raw, sweet and sour when ripe; mithua, sweet even when raw; kin/a, so sweet that if left on trees it gets infected by insects; jamuni, small, taste like jamun; aamin, a seed planted variety.
"Have you heard of a variety of dussehri called Laila Majnu? Or hussnara, which tastes as good as it looks?" questions Naimuddin. "However, now the trees are old and are slowly falling," he says with sadness in his eyes. No one from the family stays in the village any more. The bagh has been handed over on a contract. And memories of childhood summers spent in the orchard are all that is left. The state of Naimuddin's bagh probably describes the state of other orchards in Uttar Pradesh.