Udita goes for mangoes

The Dehradun girl Udita Goswami can't get enough of mangoesu00a0 -- she has them in her fridge, on the table, on her mind and she's even wearing the colour. "I grew up having Langda aams but it's the Alphonso now that tops my preference list. My dogs also love biting into the juicy fruit," says the pretty lady. She speaks to CS about her love for mangoes:


Pic/Satyajit Desai

Mango mania
I grew up in Dehradun, which is famous for its litchees. The mangoes there were great too. We used to have the Langda and Dasheri varieties. I remember my grandmother making mango pickle in the summer. It used to be a huge family affair - from the cutting of mangoes to the grinding of masalas to bottling them and finally drying the pickle on our terrace -- we had a lot of fun making it. Even now, when we go to Dehradun after the summer, she gives us jars of homemade mango pickle. I also recollect feasting on 'Amoth', a dried mango confectionary from Kolkata.

Facing it
In summers, I love mango milkshake and the mango ice-cream at Natural's. But I can't really consume many mangoes because they give me pimples. It's sad because I really don't eat a lot of them. Yesterday, my dad was telling me that it would be nice to have some mango milkshake in the fridge. I told him that it was a good idea for him but not for me (laughs out loud).

Time to indulge
A couple of days ago, my dad did some serious mango shopping at Lokhandwala. We went to this wholesale store. I was in the car while he selected and bought some three kilos of mangoes. He was very happy with his purchase even though he just got a discount of ten bucks on the buy. In Dehradun or Delhi, where I grew up, mangoes weren't sold with such fervour as they are in Mumbai.

Here, you get Alphonso mangoes at every street signal. Frankly, I didn't know much about Alphonso mangoes before I came here. We rarely had them in Dehradun or Delhi. Today, I know how crazy people are about Alphonso mangoes. When my domestic help, Puja told me about the prices I was totally shocked.

I am planning to buy some land on the outskirts of Mumbai, where I plan to build an animal shelter. I also plan to plant mango trees on that land. Hopefully, in the next five-seven years I shall be able to enjoy mangoes from my own farm.