10 things I hate about Mangoes

1. Their cloying sweetness. My taste buds crave the sour rather than the sickly sweet.

2. The bathing ritual. Growing up in a mango lover’s home means that you have signed up for bathing, drying and putting mangoes to bed at night. Bed is the paal – a temporary arrangement of rugs and sheets. Therein they are laid gently after being washed and dried, to ripen naturally. And though I am not eating any mangoes, I still have to wash each one, dry it, and carry it to the steamy paal where abbu lines them up like orphans. Except, these are not orphans; they are little princes who would be kings (of all fruit).

3. Being forced to eat them. This by my father, whose greatest disappointment in life is that his daughter — his daughter — dislikes mangoes. Every year, he peels them like potatoes, cuts them into cubes and makes me eat them in the hope that this year, maybe — just maybe — my taste buds will display his genes rather than my warped ones.

4. Their lingering smell. It is everywhere! On my mother’s hands, when she caresses me. On the telephone receiver which she’s held when she talks on the phone. In the house, as they are ripening in the makeshift paal.

5. Their floating peels. Mangoes and monsoon come hand in hand. Unfortunately, storm water drainage and urban waste collection does not. As the rains fall and submerge our city streets, they sweep away mango peels from open-air garbage dumps, unleashing a flood of slimy flotsam.

6. The way they make me feel — like an outsider. Everyone LOVES them. And I don’t. During mango season, I’m as at home in my family as George W Bush in a library.

7. Sharing a car ride with them from Hyderabad in the heat of June. My father used the opportunity of a family wedding in Hyderabad to visit his friend’s farm and fill the boot of his Toyota Corolla hatchback with as many Sindhri mangoes as would fit. In the glorious heat of June, these blessed fruits emanated a heat that rendered the car’s air conditioning redundant. It was a sauna scented by the nauseatingly sweet smell of mangoes.

8. Hearing Ghalib’s renowned anecdote about mangoes and donkeys ad infinitum. “[Even] donkeys don’t eat mangoes,” said Mirza Ghalib’s friend, who wasn’t too fond of the fruit, when he noticed that a wandering donkey had sniffed at an uneaten mango and turned away from it. “[Indeed] donkeys don’t eat mangoes,” Ghalib retorted with a smirk.

9. Their pervasiveness. Our fridge stores nothing but mangoes for three months, leaving no room for anything else. They cause global warming in the fridge, depriving me of chilled water to quench my thirst in summer.

10. Their dominance of the dessert menu. Mango milk shake. Mango ice cream. Mango kulfi. Mango burfi. Mango lassi. Or just plain mangoes. You can’t eat out anywhere — or even at home — without being offered the fruit in every imaginable form and combination for dessert.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2010.