All Good Things Come to an End

Reflecting on the tragedy that is the end of Mango Season.

Eat seasonal, they say. Enjoy optimal nutrition and flavour, they say. It’s better for the planet, it supports local economy, it’ll be more economical for you too, they say. 

But they don’t say anything about how to handle the grief each time a season comes to an end, do they? There’s nothing about how to fill the emotional and physical void; how to distract from the longing, the hunger, the emptiness; how to find that excitement in the next fruit or vegetable coming round the seasonal carousel. And in my case, there is no advice out there on how to remove the pin from the record that is Dylan asking ‘is it mango season?’ over and over and over again. 

Yes, the annual tragedy is upon us. Mango season has come to an end. 

My last box of mangoes was delivered on Sunday evening and my seasonal acquaintance, the mango wala, made very sure I understood that this was the very, very last box I’d be getting this year. ‘This is last day’, he said. ‘Now I finish,’ he said. ‘No more mango, is rain coming,’ he said. As far as I’m concerned, he hibernates until next season. His stack of boxes outside the barbershop disappears without so much as a piece of straw left behind as evidence it ever existed. I know, in reality, he must have another job because, even with top-tier addicts like us anchoring his customer leaderboard, I don’t imagine the mango trade is hugely lucrative. Not when mangoes are so ubiquitous as to give the entire city a faint, fruity aroma for three months of the year. And that’s no mean feat given the intensity of the traffic and potency of the public toilets in downtown Mumbai. 

He wasn’t wrong about the rains. For the past few weeks the city has been an oven but someone has finally opened the door to release the pressure and allow us all to breathe again. The leaves on the trees have turned from dusty brown to shiny green and the average temperature has dropped by 10 degrees. It’s a huge relief, but there are a couple of downsides to the arrival of the monsoon. 

Firstly, every monsoon arrives as though it’s the first ever monsoon. People panic about things that happen every year, and the city grinds to a halt while the municipal authorities scramble to unblock drains, clear fallen trees and direct traffic around large potholes. Every year I wonder why they don’t deploy some preventative measures instead of waiting until the rains descend and then addressing the issues that we all know will arise. But this is not how they work. And anyway, after a few days of chaos, the city slowly finds its rhythm again; we get used to seeing the traffic police dressed as fishermen in their buttery, yellow oilskins and we live with the expectation that a 30 minute trip will now take anywhere between 60 minutes and ‘it’s not worth it’. 

Secondly, and more importantly, the mangoes disappear. 

Just like that, the little bowls of sunshine I lovingly prepare each morning, are gone. In their place, a 15 minute lie-in for me, and a distinctly average fruit offering for us all. Lacklustre lumps of melon, blueberries apparently as anti flavour as they are antioxidant, golden kiwis with an unpredictable softness-to-sourness ratio and the seediest seedless oranges I’ve ever encountered. One small glimmer of positivity is that the departing tide of mangoes often leaves a small stack of lychees in its wake, but as syrupy as they are, even their sweetness tastes bitter after mango season. 

Our grief for the King of Fruits taints everything at this time of year. In the past 24 hours alone we’ve journeyed through shock (the realisation that I have very little other fruit in the fridge besides those last two mangoes), denial (refusing/ forgetting/ not bothering to order other fruit), anger (directed at a bruised banana), bargaining (with myself about whether or not we really need to eat fruit at all when it’s not mango season), depression (staring at photos of mangoes as inspiration for the piece I’m writing about mangoes), testing (I peeled a kiwi and was instantly back in depression). Today, I think, the intensity of the monsoon rains have washed away any lingering hope and I will finally reach acceptance. 

For the past nine weeks we have been collectively consuming a dozen mangoes every two to three days. Give or take the odd rotten one, and a slight variation in size between the austere weeks when I ordered medium and the unbridled gluttony of the weeks I went big, that’s around thirty-six a week, 144 a month and around 300 over the full nine weeks. This means that Dylan, Jasper and I have each, individually, eaten around a hundred mangoes this season. I am quite sure that’s a personal best. 

But a personal best won’t stock my fridge’s empty fruit compartment. And a century of mangoes offers little comfort to me as I stare down the long road to April 2027. This is no time to celebrate. Instead, we must work through our recovery and rehabilitation as a family. I ask for your kind support during this difficult period. 

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