Growing up in Pakistan, Kauser Ahmed visited mango orchards each year, with 20 or more cousins, aunts, and uncles all hitting the road together to gorge themselves on fruit until sticky and sated. The founder and chef of local Pakistani food company Karachi Kitchen remembers keeping the mangoes cool by stashing them in a stream that ran through the farm. They would hang their feet in the water and sit for hours, eating the chilled, sweet fruit, until satisfied and messy, as plump and juicy as the mangoes themselves.

Buying Pakistani mangoes here in the Pacific Northwest is far less idyllic. When I called Bellevue’s IFB Market on Thursday morning to see if my pre-reserved, $43 box of mangoes had arrived as expected, I was told they would come in the afternoon. When I asked if I could pick them up on Friday, I sensed hesitation on the other end of the line. “Okay, but it’s very important that you eat them within two days,” the man warned me, already concerned for the fate of my fruit.

As it turned out, my mangoes did not arrive until midday Friday, meaning I fought weekend traffic to the Eastside to retrieve my fruit. I also did not finish my $43 box—seven mangoes—until Tuesday. I am a poor steward of the vaunted Pakistani mango. I am also not the primary audience.

“A big part of it is the nostalgia,” says Ahmed Pirbhai, the manager of IFB Market. “For people who grew up there or grew up visiting there, they just want to recapture that flavor and those memories.” IFB brings in somewhere between 30 and 80 boxes of mangoes a week throughout the season, which lasts from mid-May through August. Even being able to reserve the mangoes on IFB’s website and pick them up in a regular market is simpler than how many Pakistani Americans find the yellow gold.

The Urdu word for mango is aam, Ahmed explains, and her family and friends often talk about their “aam dealers.” She recounts how one cousin’s normally overprotective mom sent the girl to a shady exurban gas station to meet a guy in a black car, give him money, and pick up the mangoes. This is typical of the lengths to which people go for Pakistani mangoes, as I first learned from the 2021 Eater article that alerted me to the coveted fruit.

Intrigued at the time, I started to look around for where to find them locally. For four years, I’ve hemmed and hawed, joined WhatsApp groups, and followed suburban fruit markets as they announced their deliveries. But getting the precious mangoes isn’t as easy as just visiting the right store on the right day.

A limited season, strict import restrictions, and extreme perishability make it difficult to find Pakistani mangoes in the US. It took my mangoes five days from when they were picked and packed in Pakistan to arrive in Seattle. First, they flew Emirates via Dubai to Houston, where they received irradiation treatment and a quick quarantine before hopping an Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. Which is why the man on the phone at IFB market reminded me to eat my mangoes within two days.

Though Pakistani mangoes were first approved for import in 2010 and IFB has been bringing them in for almost a decade, only in the last two or three years has Pirbhai started to see people from other parts of the community coming in for mangoes—often people like me, with a passion for fruit and a surplus of culinary curiosity.

Both Pirbhai and Ahmed immediately asked which variety of mango I’d purchased, and made approving sighs when I said Chaunsa. With green skin, even when fully ripe, and bright yellow-y orange insides, the mangoes were deeply sweet with a complexity that almost reminded me of caramelized squash. Juicy and soft, each mango was a delight to eat. I tried not to think about the $6 a pop price tag.

As someone with no varietal nostalgia, I struggled to justify buying more mangoes at that price when the Filipino champagne mangoes at Lenny’s cost $1.50 and I had bought a few the previous week on sale for $0.50 each. Yet, listening to Pirbhai describe how you don’t even have to cut Anwar Ratol mangoes because you can just remove the part where the stem attaches and squeeze the insides into your mouth, I’m still tempted to buy more. He lovingly talks of the enormous—and enormously sweet—late season Langra variety, while Ahmed waxes on about the excitement for fragrant early season Sindhri, and explains how Anwar Ratol mangoes get packaged into elaborate baskets, the ultimate gift for diplomats and other important people.

Even at six dollars each, I wish I could purchase one of each kind to try. Unfortunately, it’s just too expensive and risky to sell individual mangoes, says Pirbhai. Anyone who wants to try them needs to commit to the whole box—he suggests using it as a way to get people together: “You get a box of mangoes, you say, ‘Hey, I got this new box of mangoes. You never tried this before in your life. Let’s get together and make an event out of it.’”

Most of IFB’s mango audience has no such hesitation about the complicated and expensive purchase. As someone born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I can imagine if I lived across an ocean, just how much I would pay for a single pound of Rainier cherries or a live Dungeness crab. I couldn’t taste someone else’s nostalgia in a pricey box of mangoes, but I found a different kind of happiness inside the blue-taped cardboard box: that we live in a place where other people can. 

“They are just so grateful that we are able to bring them in,” says Pirbhai. “To allow them to relive their childhood and have the flavors from back home.” And, Ahmed points out, it gives the aam dealers the chance to hook a new generation as parents share the joy of waiting all year for mango season with their American-raised children. “They want the kids to have it, so they really go out of the way to get it,” she says. “I think it’s worth it.”

In addition to IFB Market, Imran’s Market brings in Pakistani mangoes to its two Everett stores.