Mangifera indica? Is that the latest model of a car, you might ask. Before you start to look for the plush upholstery of the car, let me stop you right in your tracks. Mangifera indica is not the name of the latest new car to hit the market. Rather it is the biological name of that very luscious fruit - the irresistible mango. Mangoes tend to make me nostalgic for a variety of reasons.

Tiny green mangoes soaked for months in salt and later garnished with oil and spices remind me of Manjula Aunty who sent her bottles of such carefully pickled mangoes to her sons settled abroad. Year after year she would bear the sweltering sun of the summer noon to shop for those particularly tender green mangoes. She never did write many letters to her sons - instead she poured her affections into those bottled pickles.

Big green mangoes remind me of Vaishali Chandratre; rather they remind me of her mother who used to boil big green mangoes in water and then extract the juice from them. Smelling of a heavenly essence of crushed cardamom and sweetened with lots of sugar, this juice would then be offered to me in a tall glass on the summer afternoons that I visited her house.

Trees laden with the green fruit remind me of Ratna and my childhood days. When we climbed trees with carefree abandon and greedily plucked at the half grown fruits. Later we would amass all our shares and divide them equally among our younger siblings who were too young to climb the tall trees. A small penknife pilfered from the house, some salt and powdered chili was all we needed to transport ourselves into a green-tinted sour tasting yet heavenly world. Sometimes fights would ensue over who would get the bigger mangoes, sometimes a younger sibling would burst into tears over what seemed to him or her an unfair bargain.

Grated green mangoes make me homesick and I yearn to taste the tangy mango rice or mango chutneys prepared lovingly by my mother. Luscious yellow mangoes take me back to those countless summer vacations, the juice of the ripe fruit covering my whole mouth, sticky hands reaching out despite my mother's stern warnings to yet another of the ripe fruit, holding my father's finger as a little child and looking in awe at the giant Alphonsos that dotted the market here and there.

Today you can easily walk across the air conditioned aisle of a supermarket and pick a carton of mango juice during any season of the year but somehow I sense there is something missing. The tinge of warm nostalgia that I experienced with the real fruit of mango can never be triggered by a carton no matter how fresh the company claims its product to be.