Sketching in Goa: Part 3: The Best-est mango in the world!

Suhita Shirodkar in Goa, India

Back to mangoes (which I said a little bit about in my last post.). My all-time favorite mango? The Alphonso mango. Lucky me, my parents own a mango farm and I visited during mango season.

This is what a fully grow Alphonso mango looks like. Green, with just the barest touch of yellow. Picked by hand, these fruits are ripened in hay and smell heavenly when they are orange-yellow and ready to eat. I sketched while I sat under a tree in the orchard in Deogad, Maharashtra.

Once the mangoes are ripe enough to pack, they are graded by size and shape and those with spots and blemishes are set aside. (More for me: when you sell mangoes, like my parents do, you don’t eat the perfect-looking ones-but you keep all the ones that taste as good but can’t be packed for sale) That’s my dad standing and watching the sorting and grading operation.

The mangoes then go into green cardboard boxes that hold 12 mangoes each.

Every box has a bright pink colored tissue paper that covers the mangoes when they are all packed.

Mango season is short: it starts with the hottest days of the summer and ends as soon as the monsoons hit India. During this short season, it is mango madness. The markets are overflowing with mango. And every little street vendor sits around with a basket of them. You can never have too many mangoes.

Because everyone loves mangoes!