THE MANGO HUNTERS

'Naadan Maavukal' started out as a Facebook group, but what it does offline has helped conserve many indigenous varieties of mangoes

- BECHU S.

The summer of 2020 was not a kind one. It was a scorching April afternoon when Sakhil Thaiyyil and friends reached Ottapalam in Palakkad, Kerala. As the road made a sharp turn, he noticed a gated house partly under the shade of a mango tree. The group stopped. On the other side of the gate, the woman of the house grew suspicious of the strangers staring at her property. When Thaiyyil asked her how good were the mangoes, she said, “Useless.”

The lady’s reaction did not surprise him, having had several such encounters. He did what he has always done—picked up a mango, half-eaten by a bird, from the ground and took a bite of its unbitten side. And, he was in sweet heaven. “Were you talking about this same tree, chechi (sister)?” he asked the woman. The fruit was fleshy with little fibre. The woman sheepishly replied that she was sleepy and was caught off guard by the group of strangers who wanted to know about a mango tree. When asked if the tree had a name, she was baffled. Who names trees in their compound? Thaiyyil spotted the name of her child scribbled on the steps leading to the house’s main door. “Shall we call it ‘Kunjoos’, then?” he asked. The family agreed.

Apart from ‘Kunjoos’, there is ‘Anaswara’, ‘Arya’, ‘Kairali’, ‘Thrissurkaaran’ and more. Most mangoes ‘found’ by Thaiyyil’s group are named with some reference to their discovery. “Mostly, it is nicknames of children. Obviously, you cannot give sweet mangoes adult names like Babu, Sabu,” he said, laughing.