Mangoes Memories: Stolen, Soaked, and a Ghalib Verse
In Hyderabad, mangoes aren’t just fruit — they’re nostalgia served by the crate
Hyderabad: Intrinsically associated with childhood, mango season comes with a flood of memories. Near Gudimalkapur, a boy lifts a crate of Banganapalli, and for a moment, the heat smells like one’s grandfather’s courtyard. "The kind of mango you love depends on what you grew up with," says Arijit, a corporate employee, "Mine has always been Dasheri."
That is where most conversations in Hyderabad begin this season. The fruit you’re loyal to is almost never about flavour. It’s about familiarity. Reddit’s Hyderabad page has been collecting such fragments over the past week. One user described stealing mangoes from a nearby farm with a new classmate, only to be caught and shouted at while the friend ran off.
“I stopped being friends with that guy after that day,” he wrote. Someone else recalled summers in their village, where all the cousins arrived just in time for mangoes to be picked and pickled. "We used to spend three to four weeks there every year. Mangoes and cousins were the only things that mattered."
Shireen Shaik, who works in a PR firm in the city, remembered sucking on the smaller, softer varieties straight out of a bucket of water as the fondest mango memory. “Dad would soak them and then we’d all pounce,” she said. Neha Sharma’s memories were associated with chilled shrikhand. “My sister makes the best Shrikhand. It doesn’t cover up the mango flavour. It lets it be and it is delightful.”
There is also a kind of freedom in how loosely these memories are held. Anwesha Saha, who grew up in Bengal, remembers guarding the mango tree in her grandparents’ yard as if it were a fortress. “Neighbourhood boys would come to steal. We were quite territorial. My grandparents didn’t care, they were happy to share. But we would stand guard and pluck mangoes the moment we saw any ripe ones.”
The mango, of course, has had a longer life in the Indian imagination than most metaphors deserve. It is everywhere from wedding menus, ad campaigns like Katrina Kaif’s Slice Aamsutra, the Mango Frooti with its “fresh and juicy” jingle, and Amitabh Bachchan’s Kacha Mango Bite. It also finds itself in literary titles, and poems that keep coming back to the same stickiness of childhood. So much so, in fact, that Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie once advised South Asian writers to avoid using tropical fruits in titles. “No mangoes, no guavas. None of those.”
Dozens of books written by South Asian authors have mango-laced titles, and there are endless poetic metaphors with Alphonso. Social media users have responded to them by turning the trope inside out. Parody tweets now lined up online stating, “Me in a desi novel: the mango tree swayed like Ma’s pallu the day she left.”
However, Fareed Sahar, a well-loved Hyderabadi humour poet sees no reason to let mangoes off easy. “Mirza Ghalib loved mangoes, but his friend didn’t,” he said, as he recalled a popular mushaira involving Ghalib’s love for mangoes. “One day Ghalib was eating mangoes near him, threw the skin aside, and a donkey came by, sniffed it and walked away.”
“The friend said, ‘See, even donkeys don’t eat mangoes.’ And Ghalib replied, ‘Exactly. Only donkeys don’t eat mangoes.’” Sahar laughs. “That line has stayed in our family’s mushairas for years.” His own memories are far from literary. “As kids, we’d go to the farms, climb trees like monkeys, eat whatever we could grab, and run. That’s what we did every summer.”
The fruit remains too tangled in the memories for many to be dismissed. There is something absurd and touching in all of it. Mangoes remind us of who we were, even as we laugh about who we pretend to be in fiction. Whether mocked in mushairas or memed into extinction, they continue to stick to our summers and our stories.