^{Fenton R. Kay}

When my Uncle Hollis returned from India at the end of WWII, he regaled me, a curious young kid, with numerous tales and remembrances from his years in India, much of it in the Punjab region. His stories included tales from the war, some of which I have rendered as short stories under “Tales from the CBI”. Others were simply descriptions or remembrances of things he had experienced. Some of those remembrances are not suitable for repeating here, but others are.

He talked about chewing betel and getting red-stained teeth, and he raved on about mangos. According to Hollis, they were the fruit of the gods. Nothing was as good. As a kid, that stuck with me, at least partly because at that time the stores that my grandmother and mother shopped at didn’t yet have mangos. There was no opportunity to taste the fruit in the small chunk of the world that I occupied. Today, of course, all supermarkets and corner groceries (where they exist) stock mangos, often two or three varieties. Unfortunately, they are seldom ripe.

I didn’t taste a mango until I was an undergraduate in biology. In the summer of 1965, a group of us traveled into Mexico on a biological survey of the Volcan de Nieve, in the Nevado de Colima in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The five were me, two other biology students, our professor, and a Ph.D. candidate in biology from the University of Arizona. The guy from Arizona was our guide, spoke Spanish, and was familiar with the place we were going. We drove from Las Vegas, Nevada, via Tucson, Arizona, down the west coast of Mexico to the mountains. Along the way, we stopped at an open-air market in Guadalajara to buy some fresh fruit and veggies to supplement our canned beans and potatoes. The market had tables stacked with bananas, guavas, corn, and mangos. I bought a hand of ripe finger bananas and a fresh, ripe mango. I had also never seen or tasted little bitty ripe bananas.

The bananas were terrific, but the mango was to die for, as people would now say. The juicy, yellow-orange, sweet fruit exceeded all my expectations of flavor that had resulted from my uncle’s tales. The fruit of the gods, to be sure! The yellow and red-blushed skin needed to be peeled, which resulted in gooey hands. The flesh had a sweet, fruity odor with hints of citrus—orange or mandarin, and the juice fairly squirted and cascaded down my chin when I bit into it. The big oval-shaped, flat seed made eating the mango a bit difficult, but the slightly fibrous, aromatic, and sweet fruit was the payoff. I couldn’t wait to get back to Vegas and regale my uncle with my mango experience. Unfortunately, stores in Las Vegas still had not discovered the fruit of the gods. I was to go without another taste of ripe mango for years.

One day, in my fifties, I discovered mango lassi. Now, I have to say that I had, over the years, had plenty of mango from the stores, seldom as ripe and sweet as that first one. Lassi is made from yogurt and mango, blended into a smoothie, in current parlance, and comes from the Punjab of India. Although I don’t remember Hollis specifying lassi, I suspect that he had enjoyed something like it in India in the 40s.

My discovery was the result of trying a new Indian restaurant in Las Cruces, New Mexico. My wife and I went to the restaurant for supper not long after it opened. There, on the menu, was mango lassi. It was described as a blend of yogurt and mango. I had to try it. We ordered our supper, which, of course, included Naan, and the lassi for our beverage. I couldn’t believe my taste buds. The gods had reached down and touched those glasses. The restaurant folks knew how to make mango lassi, and they used fully ripened fruit—shelf-ripened to be sure, but ripe.

That place became one of our favorite supper establishments, and we drank mango lassi at every meal. Sadly, they went out of business. We have, however, found another small Indian restaurant that makes the beverage. It is delicious. We’ll be going back there.

Uncle Hollis is no longer with us. I only have my memories of his tales and stories, but I recall those stories about how wonderful those mangos in India were, and I relive, via mango lassis, my first taste of the fruit of the gods in Guadalajara.