Just Another Member of the Diaspora, Writing About Mangoes

Kesar mango season arrived like the greatest FOMO. A friend posted on her Instagram stories that they were back, $40 a case at Patel Brothers (my closest South Asian grocer) behind the cash register, and I already felt like I was wasting time. I could make it there myself a few days later, but every day felt like a clawing panic. What if they ran out? What if, somehow, they weren’t as good as I remembered? I carried two cases home by myself on the subway, biceps and shoulders burning by the time I eased them on the kitchen counter.

Now every morning for the past two weeks, I take my knife and split a mango down each side of its pit, hatch-cut the halves and scoop cubes of marigold flesh into a bowl. I slice crescents off the side and do the same, and then take the pit and gnaw. I never quite understood fawning appreciations of summer peaches eaten over the sink, even though I love a good peach, and I am bad at remembering to hit the farmer’s market when ramps or strawberries are at their peak. But slicing and scooping and sucking this juice and fiber feels so wonderfully natural. I forget I didn’t always know how to do this.

“The term ‘mango diaspora poetry’ (see also here) has emerged from the collective consciousness of Twitter snark to index diaspora poems (South Asian and otherwise) that always seem to turn on the symbol of the mango, invoking a romanticized, left-behind home,” wrote Urvi Khumbat for LitHub. In 2010, a group of Pakistani writers joked that any writing about Pakistan “must have mangoes.” It’s a reference that reduces the region to images of bounty and aesthetically messy joy. To evoke the mango in diaspora writing, even if its place and importance in the culture is real, is to use an easy stereotype, tying heritage and food in a neat bow.

Despite being of the South Asian diaspora, I thought I could avoid all that. I did not grow up with mangoes, aside from the occasional lassi at a family function. There was no flocking to the table when mango season came about (I didn’t even know when the season was), no watching an uncle suck juice from the pit, or welcoming some friend of a cousin with a WhatsApp hookup. The mangoes I knew were the ones carved into angular flowers next to plastic cups of cut watermelon and pineapple at street vendor stalls. They were fine, kind of fibrous and flavorless without a hit of lime juice or Tajin. I appreciated a good mango when I had one, on a trip to Sri Lanka or over coconut sticky rice at a good Thai restaurant, and I moved on.

It was instead friends — white friends, at that — who introduced me to the kesar mango. I had heard them speak for years of how they waited for them, reloading the Fresh Direct tab until the cases from Savani Farm were in stock. How these were not like other mangoes, but almost imbued with magic. And then last year, when my partner had surgery at the beginning of the season, they gifted us a case to aid in recovery.

I completely fucked up the first one, sawing right into the pit. I had to pull up YouTube tutorials and illustrated guides to figure out how to do it right. I thought this was a nice gift, but there was no way I would regularly put myself through this mess when you can just eat a raspberry whole. But then, the taste of sour sweet sun. Acid and juice and pudding on the tongue, a ravenous, animalistic instinct that must be signaling vitamins and sustenance. Oh my god, they make mangoes like this? We both started laughing, unable to form actual sentences in the face of such pure flavor. It tastes like taste. We immediately ordered another case.

So often in my life, I have felt the urge to say I am not. I want to point out the ways my diaspora experience was different, to carve room for those of us whose parents just said “I love you” instead of hiding it under cut fruit; who didn’t care if we were doctors or married or gay. I am exhausted with stereotypes and pre-packaged narratives, so often made to appeal to white readers, about the tension of feeling like you’re trapped between two worlds. I want to say this is not mine, that it doesn’t have to look this one way, and I’m not like other children of immigrants.

Except suddenly, I am. I am swapping intel on Instagram about mango prices and telling other people where to go. I’m gushing to my dad about the kesars, and hearing him reminisce about chaunsa mangoes soft enough you could pop the pit straight out. I’m telling friends about the superiority of Indian kesars and alphonsos, insisting if they think they don’t like mango it’s because they’ve never had it like this. I dissect mangoes with ease now, licking the juice from my fingers, looking with sadness and panic as each day the supply wanes.

I don’t believe this is some innate Indianness emerging like a dormant cicada, now screaming at being in the light. Anyone can taste a mango and feel the way I do, buzzing and lightly insane from experiencing so much flavor at once. I had to learn on my own where to look and how to cut. But I arrived here all the same, a member of the mango diaspora.