The man not three meters away from me on busy Waigani Road in Port Morseby is wielding in one hand a knife around a meter in length, blade blinding silver in the sun. But I am unafraid. I smile as I pass by, not submissively in hope of avoiding an imminent attack nor smugly, sure of deflecting any on-coming blade with my laptop-stuffed billum. No, I am smiling because in his other hand he is holding a lasciviously yellow mango which he is casually slicing, and I am sharing a moment of pleasure with him, anticipating the sweetness of the fruit sliding off the blade of the knife into his mouth.
This is not unusual behaviour in Port Morseby in mango season. Yesterday, I passed a young woman walking during her lunch hour, a smaller knife in hand, also slicing, almost unthinkingly as back home in Sydney someone might walk along chewing on a sandwich. Tell the truth, just plain carrying knives in public is not that unusual in Papua New Guinea generally. And I had to stop all my child protection adviser instincts going into over-drive once as a child of perhaps five walked happily around his house yard slicing a cucumber with a kitchen knife easily as long as his forearm with nary an adult or elder sibling in sight. But this blog isn’t about the risky business eating can be in PNG. It’s about mangoes.
When did I first meet a mango? Probably infancy, a slice or mush fed to me by my ayah, or a seed to grasp in toddler hands and suck, a more satisfying soother than a sterile dummy. I can’t remember when I first had firm just-ripening tart mango slices, pale yellow tinged with green, dipped in salt and chili powder, but it’s those bought as an after-school snack wrapped in a pocket made from no-doubt-lead-saturated-inked newspaper, sold by the women vendors at the school gate, and consumed on the bus home, that are remembered most strongly. Mango appeared early in fruit salad after dinner, too, alone or with chunks of pawpaw and pineapple, a squeeze of lime juice, and thin slices of lambent green chili. Strongest in food memory is the first taste of mango acharu, fat slices of golden succulent sweet ripe fruit soaking in a souse of vinegar, sugar and chili powder, served again in a newspaper dish that deteriorated satisfyingly as you scoffed the mango, inevitably leading to licking palm and fingers as the finale.
In the early years of life in Australia, mangoes were a rare and expensive treat, unless you lived in northern Queensland or the Northern Territory as my brothers did, where they grew in every backyard and on every street as in Sri Lanka. When I had them in the dry heat of a Singleton summer in Singleton it was out of a can, flaccid, stubby oblongs in overly sweet syrup with that peculiarly glavanised tinny underflavour, spooned gracelessly over a mound of imitation vanilla ice cream. From there it was not much of a step up to the no-real-fruit-used-in-preparation-of-this mango syrup in milkshakes and smoothies, just a thicker, creamier version of the emulsion that resulted when you left canned mango and ice cream too long in the bowl. Granny Smith apple wedges dipped in salt and chili eaten off a plate were a tragic t.v. snack post school.
When I began to travel in South East Asia, I somehow managed to always arrive post or pre mango season and this has continued in the last few years when I’ve come to PNG for work. Last year I at least had the pleasure of making a mango pickle from small unripe mangoes scrounged from a roadside tree, splitting them in half, removing the soft white of unformed seed, salting drying them for a few days, soaking them in vinegar, turmeric, chili powder, ground coriander and cumin, fresh red bullet chilies and vegetable oil and bottling the mix for a couple of weeks in a dark cupboard till the mango rehydrated and softened. It accompanied a couple of night’s curries and I bequeathed it to my hosts.
This year I came in September just when the first fruit began forming, dangling tantalizingly on their slender stems (and isn’t the mango most generous of fruits, putting itself within such easy reach of hand or stick?). It was a stay too short for pickling or ripening. I spent an anxious couple of months back in Sydney hoping that my final visit for the year would coincide at least with the last of the season. And so it’s proved. Mangoes are everywhere in all stages of fruitfulness. At lunch today I bought from a women vendor outside the office what’s locally called a ‘pawpaw mango’, a good hand span long and a fist thick, hence the name I imagine, in an elongated S. I also bought a knife, albeit a petite picnic one. Tomorrow I hit the street.
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