I have a friend who works for a software firm in Pune. He is a mango aficionado. He salivates over the varieties that flood the stalls of Pune in summer. He, also, likes to drink and tell stories.

He comes from an area north of the Ganga in Bihar. This is a land famous for it’s mangoes, for it’s poets, for it’s profligate royalty. In the olden days, Amrapali lived here – the famous courtesan of the eponymous movie. Even before that, this is where the world saw, perhaps for the first time, a republican form of government.

It is a fertile land, and agriculture is the primary occupation. I have heard that Akbar planted mango trees in Darbhanga – maybe it’s just a story. It’s so difficult to separate myth from history in India. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. History is a set of facts that have come down to us, through different narrations. The narration will occasionally subsume the facts, sometimes just colour them subtly, but the act and the entity of narration will always bring their own personal history. So, you see, history is perhaps not very different from myth. Myth is richer, of course, since it carries a cultural intent; it abstracts things out of the universe of thoughts and leave them for posterity to discover.

Aah, but we’ve neglected the mangoes. Mango trees are grown from grafts. You take a stock tree, graft in a cutting with the right qualities, and you have your mango tree. These stock trees are, by themselves, very tall, and though their fruits are not distinguished, the trees have a great sense of dignity and, a very obvious, massiveness. Apparently, these trees are grown in this area for a very peculiar reason. The wood from these trees is used for stocking funeral pyres. My friend talked about an old relative who, as he moved from active life, into that period of discontented contemplation, awaiting death, planted a set of stock mango trees in front of his house. He was preparing his funeral pyre.

Stories, myths, luscious fruits... what a heady combo this thing called India is.