Unit 4 - 4.3 - Exercise 2

For the last two months, across much of India, temperatures have soared daily to over 40 degrees Celsius — perfect ripening weather for the mango, perfect wilting weather for humans. The thing about India, and Calcutta in particular, is that everyone here eats seasonally and mangoes are everywhere — in every home, on every hotel menu, and sold on every street corner. In the markets, they're beautifully arranged, stacked up according to variety on big wide wicker baskets.

The main mango-growing areas are situated to the north of the city. I headed out to an old family estate where they still have a number of the original orchards. This estate, laid out around an old indigo-planter's house, is wonderfully peaceful and the air so clean — a million miles from Calcutta. Against the exotic foliage of the coconut palm and the banana plant, the mango tree looks like a shiny- leaved evergreen oak. It has a massive, gnarled trunk and can easily grow to a height of sixty feet. Many trees were planted over a hundred years ago.

Indians today have the Moghul dynasties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to thank for the amazing diversity of mangoes available now. They established large plantations across the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. lt was the Muslim leaders — the Nawabs — who cultivated the fruit in Bengal. They were great fruit-loving people and they missed their apricots and their melons. They cross-pollinated the mango, they got 101 varieties, and these are the sophisticated mangoes that grow mainly in eastern lndia. When the Moghul empire was in its decline, the Nawabs moved southward and here they cultivated their mangoes, planting them according to their different varieties in orchards - they gave them the most romantic and poetic names, names like ‘passari', the loved one, ‘begum pasan', the Nawab's wife's favourite...