Mango Fishing

A ripe mango is loved world over. This post is about unripe mangoes. The love for it stems back to my childhood, when we would relish eating it with salt for added taste. My mother would make pickles from it, which would last until the next mango season. As a child I had known the happiness of getting unripe mangoes from trees in my grandfather’s garden. The memories grew distant when I grew up, got busy with my medical work, and stopped visiting the grandfather’s garden after he passed away. But then someone planted a mango tree by the side of the road just below my third floor window. In a period of three or four years the tree grew to the second floor level, and started growing mangoes. School children would get the unripe mangoes by hitting them with stones. Older children and young guys started climbing the tree and taking down the mangoes en masse. No one objected, because it was a public tree, with finders-keepers policy applicable. It was then that I remembered my childhood love and decided to try and get at least one mango myself. I knew I could not climb a tree, and if I tried to throw stones to hit those mangoes, I would end up paying a lot of neighbors for broken window panes without any mangoes to show. That was how I was forced to develop the art of mango fishing. I took a long stick, tied a long wire to its end, tied a polyethylene bag to the end of the wire, and kept the inlet of the bag open with a 1 foot diameter plastic ring. Then I lowered it to the tree level, extended out with the stick. I positioned it under a mango, raised it and pulled it, so that the mango would come off and drop into the bag. I remember the security guard of the adjacent building watching me, and laughing when a mango came off and fell to the ground instead of dropping in the bag. I remember his crestfallen face when the next mango I fished fell into my bag successfully. I collected 5 mangoes that day, and proudly presented them to my wife when she came back from her clinic. She was a little concerned that it was not very appropriate for a person of my social standing to do this when we could have purchased unripe mangoes from the market for 10 INR per kilogram. Then I told her how wealthy people go fishing, when they can easily buy fish. They do it for the fun of it, and I had done mango-fishing for the fun of it. She understood and appreciated. Though I was out of practice for a year in between, I engaged in the sport again this weekend again, and collected 10 mangoes. I even threw the bag around swinging from the tip of the stick, having put a small weight in it to stabilize it in breeze. I am proud to say that my best effort got me two mangoes in one go. For those of my readers who think this is a childish thing to do, I will say “Do it once to experience the thrill. This method has not been described in literature before, but now it is. Feel free to try it. It will work on any other fruit too, provided the tree is near enough, and you are at a level higher than the tree. It would be a wonderful thing as a stress buster too.”