When Mangoes Make You Smile

“I’ve grown mangoes in my drawing room, in a flower pot,” said 53-year-old Roy Choudhury excitedly, as if he’ll get an immediate standing ovation.

So, what’s the big deal, we shrugged instead.

“I was sure you’d say that,” he replied. “When was the last time you saw mangoes growing in a flower pot? Think.”

Silence on the phone. We were thinking, for quite a long time.

“Are you still thinking?” Choudhury giggled.

A Qatar Petroleum (QP) maintenance engineer based in Dukhan, the country's heart of the onshore oil and gas industry, about 85 km from Doha, Choudhury, it seems, has defied all laws of desert agriculture inside his villa.

“There was no such intention,” laughed Choudhury, who hails from the East Indian metropolitan city of Kolkata and has spent three decades of his life in Qatar. “I was just enamoured when I saw such a mango plant in Kolkata during my vacation two years ago.”

Choudhury was just casually walking down a street in his home-town when he spotted a mango plant growing out of a regular flower pot kept on the third floor balcony of a building.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” he said. “I had only seen humungous mango trees at least 20-30 ft tall in vast farms.”

Curious by nature, Choudhury, who developed his passion for gardening and plants only when he arrived in Qatar realising a lot of free time on his hands and few things to do in the quiet small west-coast town of Dukhan, “requested a friend” to get him a sibling plant before he left for Qatar.

Two years since, Choudhury’s mango plant, which grows from a white-coloured flower pot inside his living room, has 11 yellow and green fruits hanging from it.

“This is the second time the plant has given fruits,” Choudhury said. “The first time was about a year after we planted it. A few months later it started flowering again. The result is 11 mangoes.”

“One ripe mango and fell off on its own. It was so sweet I can’t tell you,” he said.
The mango was really small but it was shared by his entire family – wife Dola, and two sons Amit and Neel, who take as much interest in caring for the plant as the head of the family.

“We managed a bite each,” Choudhury laughed.

For the first four months Choudhury nourished the plant only indoors. Then when it started to grow a little, he began leaving it outside in his villa garden for a few hours to get its share of natural sunlight.

“We couldn’t leave it out for long. The excessive desert heat would have killed it,” he said.

Choudhury said he didn’t do anything special. “I treated the mango plant like any other indoor plant – the right soil and manure, watered it regularly, gave it adequate sunlight.”

To see the results however, Choudhury, like a kid with a new toy, would wake up in the middle of the night to see if it is still there.

“It was like my own baby. I would sit in front of it for hours, even though I knew I wouldn’t really be able to actually see it grow bigger by the minute, I would make sure everything’s perfect, the level of the mud, the water, I would touch it to see how it feels. It was indeed like my baby. It still is, just a little grown up now,” he said.

Apart from the three-feet tall mango plant, which has almost reached its maximum height it can grow as an indoor plant, Choudhury grows lemon, drumsticks vegetables, and several variety of flowers in his backyard and front yard gardens in his villa.

Choudhury has Qatar to thank for his passion for plants and gardening – a passion he never knew in the fast and busy metropolitan life he led in Kolkata.

“I love it here. There’s so much peace, so much time to discover yourself. In Kolkata, I would have never imagined myself spending three hours everyday gardening. Now when I go back on leave, I crave to come back to my plants,” he said.

“Qatar is a place of small joys. As small as the mangoes that grow in my living room. The sweetness, however, is no less than the big ones – of the mangoes and of the joys.”