Currently it is twenty-one degrees outside. It’s the middle of winter in New York City. Days like these, I can’t help but pine after summertime. Even with its thick, brain-draining humidity, the New York City summer calls to me from the deep, dark recesses. ‘Remember me?’ it says. ‘I’m not as far away as you think,’ it says. Summer, with its abundant sunlight, invincible spirit, and glorious edible offerings. I miss it so.
There are certain events that I’ve come to think of as marking summertime in New York City: the popping-up of open-air performances, the explosion of greenmarkets, the descent of sweaty tourists. However there’s one event in particular that I look forward to with the heart-consuming eagerness of a child. It’s when the Indian mangoes arrive at Patel Brothers market in Jackson Heights.
The Alphonso mango from western India is regarded as the most prized mango on Earth. Alphonsos are different from the larger, more familiar Latin American mangoes with red, green, and yellow skins; and they’re different from the yellow kidney-shaped mangoes of Southeast Asia. The Alphonso is compact and round, with smooth, yellow and red skin. It smells sweet and faintly floral, and when you cut one open it reveals bright, almost neon-orange flesh. It tastes, in varying degrees, like honey and flowers, underlined by an intense mango fruitiness that renders it estranged from its cousins.
In our play Jackson Heights, 3 AM, I like to think that the mango which lovelorn Devaj gives the equally lovelorn Adela is an Alphonso mango. His delivery of the precious fruit, in place of words (which are useless anyway, as neither character speaks the other’s language), is an act of poetry. It’s a gift that represents affection, generosity, and even cultural exchange. It is with this same spirit that Jackson Heights, 3 AM was created and developed.
Just as the 2011 summer was beginning, and just as the first shipment of Alphonsos were coming in, Devaj and Adela first appeared on the page. A line that Devaj spoke to Adela back then (which has long since been cut) is ‘It should always be mango season for you.’ In the cold grip of winter, watching the play during opening weekend brought me a bit of mango season. And it makes me look ahead to next summer, when the Alphonsos come around again.
I’d never stepped foot in Jackson Heights prior to working on 167 Tongues. And now, as I pushed the green door and walked out of the subway station on 74th St. and Roosevelt Ave. to attend the JH3AM meeting, it feels like a second home. I think I know more about this little neck of Queens than I do about my own neighborhood.
