. “Neither letter nor message from my beloved send to me,
If you must send something this season, mangoes let them be.
Make sure there are some that I can keep to eat another day.
If twenty are ripe add another ten that can stay.
Your slave’s address, you know remains the same.  Dispatch them to Allahabad in a parcel in my name.” - Akbar Allahabadi, translated by Khushwant Singh May drags into June bringing in its trail more heat, more dust, occasional squalls of rain and a harvest of knocked-down trees. The temperature still averages 40 degrees and above. Pink cassias blush away unconcerned with the fierce sun. Laburnums, which have a delayed reaction to changing times, look as if they have just risen from their slumbers and are a mass of golden chandeliers. In June Delhi receives its best crop of mangoes. India has almost 100 mangoes of varieties grown in every part of the country save its mountainous regions. Fully half of India’s fruit trees are mangoes. Mangoes have been cultivated in India from time immemorial. The poet Kalidasa sang its praises. Alexander savoured its taste, as did the Chinese pilgrim Hieun Tsang. The Moorish traveller Ibn Batuta records that it had become the favourite fruit of the Tughlak monarchs. The Emperor Babar, who liked nothing about India, thought it was highly overrated but his grandson Akbar planted an orchard of 100,000 mango trees in Darbhanga, known thereafter as Lakhi Bagh. As a charming anecdote goes, once a friend of the legendary poet Ghalib, who knew of the poet’s weakness for the luscious fruit, tossed a mango to a donkey tethered nearby. The animal sniffed at it and turned away. “You see Mirza Sahib, even a donkey does not like mangoes!” quipped the friend sardonically. Ghalib was quick to retort, “You are quite right, my friend. Only donkeys do not relish mangoes.” . Image courtesy: Sultan Ali Adil Shah sits in camp under a canopy erected beside a mango tree. 1656 - 1659 “Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin”, Yousef Jameel Online Centre at the Ashmolean.