At Jervis, spreading the joy of mango season

George Kurane’s head appears first through a small gap in the double doors. The rest of him follows.

He has found what he is looking for.

At the bottom of an echoey stairwell in the Jervis Shopping Centre is a tall cage on wheels stacked with boxes and boxes of mangoes. Half are labeled “Kesar”. Half are labeled “Alphonso”.

Gold, says Kurane, once a man has handed him a couple of boxes. “Really, it’s like gold. Absolutely like gold.”

Sure, you can find varieties of Indian mangoes in small stores in Dublin, says Kurane. But they’re still not the quality of these, he says.

Kurane had ordered his boxes a week earlier. The Indian Mangoes in Ireland WhatsApp group had been dormant since last summer.

It sprang to life on 31 March. “Hi Friends, I hope you are all looking forward to the upcoming mango season,” wrote Jay Monpara.

“We are in comms with our suppliers, and hopefully, we will start collecting the mango orders soon. So stay tuned,” he said.

Pre-order now, said a message on 9 April. “Don’t miss your chance to grab the best of the season!”

In the stairwell in the shopping centre, Janice Kurane, with a shy smile, stood a little to the side of her father.

She hadn’t known.

All Kurane had said was that they had an errand in the city centre, he says. “This is a surprise, I didn’t tell her. My wife doesn’t know as well.”

They’ll take the mangoes home to Beaumont and enjoy them fresh, he says. Maybe, after a selfie, he says, with a grin.

That bit sweeter

Most of the shiny mangoes shipped to Ireland and piled in supermarket aisles year-round travel from Peru and Brazil.

The most common types are Kent and Keitt mangoes, hardier for export.

“They’re not the same,” says Kurane of these. “They’re not completely ripe. They’re hard … sour.”

“The mangoes in the supermarkets are … not as sweet,” says Jeevith Ganesan, another customer, later. “I wouldn’t consider them as mangoes even, if I’m honest.”

Jay Monpara said that he and his friends had felt the same years back. “We were missing the mangoes from India,” he says.

That’s why, in 2008, they started to source their own.  A few of them pooled together at first, he said, but they quickly calculated that the bigger the order, the cheaper it was.

“We spread the word,” he says.

Last year, they imported eight containers full of mangoes. Each container holds 600kg, he said. That’s nearly 5,000kg of the fruit.

For the first three years, the group bought in bulk from the UK. But they switched to buying direct from India.

The chain had been too long from farm to plate, says Monpara.

Cold storage doesn’t work great for delicate Kesar and Alphonso mangoes, he says. “Because mangoes have a very short shelf-life. We were losing the life of the fruit.”

These days, the mangoes through the group arrive within 24 hours of leaving India, he says. “They send it by air cargo.”

They’re quickly transported to pick-up points around Dublin – and a few further afield too in Athlone and Galway.

Spreading mangoes around is a side job for Monpara. He has his own IT company and a couple of software projects, he says. “I’m just doing it, because.”

Varieties

There are an estimated 1,500 varieties of mango grown in India.

Mango harvests travel across the country with the weather. They first blush in the south-west each year in March and April, and the season sweeps up towards the north-east of the country through June and July.

The monsoon chases the mango season, putting an end to it when it catches up.

The rains usually land in south India in early June, and move northwards through the month and through July – until the season is all over for another year, and the wait for the next season begins.

“If you consume only by the season, that’s what nature has given us,” says Monpara. This batch came from farms in Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, he says.

In the Jervis Shopping Centre, Jeevith Ganesan raises his eyebrows.

Three boxes of Alphonso mangoes are carried through the swinging doors of the stairwell and out towards where he is stood, in the main concourse at the corner of the Nutty Delights kiosk.

Three boxes. One box for a lunch party, one for friends and family, and one for his friend’s brother.

“Mangoes are a very big part of my life,” says Ganesan.

His family farms mangoes near Salem in Tamil Nadu, he says. He would play there, surrounded by trees dripping with big fruit.

That area is famous for large Malgova mangoes, he says. “You can grab them in your hand, just take a bite.”

Malgova mangoes aren’t on the order form. He has ordered Alphonso, he says. They’re sweet too, says Ganesan.

He always finds a way to have South Asian mangoes around, he says. Friends flying back and forth to India may lug a bag. He freezes some in case of hungry gaps.

Ganesan’s jacket is zipped up, almost to his chin. Outside, the rain is sideways and it slaps at shoppers and the streets and buildings.

“Almost perfect day to collect mangoes,” says Ganesan, amused, as he slots the three boxes into tote bags. “I sweeear, I sweeear.”

Each mango has a cushioned net wrapped around soft green skin. In the coming days, they will brighten with hints of pink and sunny yellow.