ItIt was almost midnight when I pulled up to the drop site in a borrowed car, the rear seats pushed down to make room for the product. My cousin knew a Pakistani guy who had acquired the best stuff money could buy, rare varietals that were spoken of in hushed, reverent tones at parties. But the dealer had a strange system: You had to message him on WhatsApp, order in bulk a week ahead of time, and send someone to pick up the product from an airport cargo bay. My cousin had explained this to me, his voice conspiratorial, during a summer visit to my hometown in Michigan. I knew if I hung around, he would share the goods. But then his driver pulled out at the last minute. I wasn’t about to miss my chance, so I volunteered to grab the stuff myself.

That’s how I ended up driving two hours each way to and from the Detroit airport to pick up 12 boxes of irradiation-treated mangoes from Karachi, Pakistan. When I arrived at the airport, I pulled off on a side road I’d never been on before. The cargo facility’s waiting area was small, with only one attendant. I showed him my phone; a green WhatsApp message displayed the information for the package. “You’re here for the mangoes?” he asked.

Apparently this wasn’t a first for him. I pulled the car around and watched a massive garage door open to reveal my prize: a stack of mango boxes on a dolly cart, this batch with a going price of about $8 per fruit. After dropping off most of the load at my cousin’s house, I took my cut, a private stash of two boxes. The next day, my family gorged. The mangoes were unlike anything I’d eaten in America before — they were fragrant not just in smell, but also in taste. Powerfully sweet. Bursting with juice. I tried to take the time to savor them, but there was no point; they’d go bad within days. So, decadence it was.

In my 33 years as a red-blooded Pakistani American, I have eaten mangoes from my parents’ home country fewer than 10 times on U.S. soil.

It was 2018, and that order of mangoes was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. For years I had been asking members of my community why we couldn’t find Pakistani mangoes in America. Although the Pakistani mango has been approved for import to the U.S. since 2010, supply chain and logistics challenges have limited it to a scant national presence, even in the specialty groceries where you might expect to find them. As such, the vast majority of the Pakistani American diaspora are unable to procure their homeland’s national fruit easily. We’re not even guaranteed to find them on trips to Pakistan, where mango season lasts roughly from April to September: Some of the most prized varieties are available for only a few weeks at a time, and the heat makes summer a challenging time to visit.

But for a group of internet-savvy immigrants and their children, a new option has emerged over the past few years: Middlemen and logistics experts acquire the mangoes from farms in Pakistan and sell them over WhatsApp at a premium, often only a few days after harvest. In my 33 years as a red-blooded Pakistani American, I have eaten mangoes from my parents’ home country fewer than 10 times on U.S. soil, each time within the past three years. In every single case, the mangoes were sourced off WhatsApp. Erratic weather conditions and complications from the pandemic have challenged Pakistani mango exports, but the industry persists: A viral photo this May showed a plane flying to Kuwait with no human passengers due to travel restrictions; mangoes filled the seats and luggage bins. Pakistani mangoes began arriving in the U.S. in May, and on June 7 I picked up my first batch (ordered off a website) from a middleman in New Jersey.

On that night in 2018, I knew I had stumbled on something unique. So I started digging into the workings of the WhatsApp mango trade in an effort to learn more about the story behind it. And I’m still digging through its many layers: the bureaucratic headaches, the customers determined to get their mangoes no matter how onerous the inconvenience, and the surprising amount of engineering that goes into this decentralized economy. And yet all the effort that goes into maintaining the WhatsApp trade still far outstrips knowledge of it: Desis of all backgrounds still ask me, “How can I get Pakistani mangoes in America?”

The best option, still, is ordering them off WhatsApp and picking up at least eight boxes from your local Southwest Airlines cargo bay. But why, more than a decade after the mangoes were allowed to be imported here, is it so hard to find them? Over the past three years, I’ve spoken to the customers, middlemen, and scientists so hungry for the fruit that they’ve managed to create an American fruit subculture unlike any other.

Mangoes are among the most beloved fruits on the planet and inspire feverish devotion — especially on the Indian subcontinent, where they’ve been cultivated for thousands of years. Here, their popularity is only growing: Americans nearly doubled their mango consumption between 2000 and 2018.

As a generally tropical, hot-weather fruit, mangoes require copious sun; they suffer if they’re exposed to frost or freezing temperatures. This isn’t quite so true of the varieties sold in the U.S., where one of the most common is known as the Tommy Atkins. Like Red Delicious apples, mangoes in America are meant to thrive in supermarket fruit aisles. They don’t take ill easily, have a nice shape and color, and boast a great shelf life — a crucial attribute, given that the U.S. is the second largest importer of mangoes in the world, with the majority sourced from Mexico.

Growing up in Michigan, I ate plenty of these giant red and green Atkins monstrosities after my mother started finding them in the local Meijer’s. She would compare them to the ones she ate growing up, always unfavorably. I thought this was impossible: Mangoes were definitely the best fruit I’d ever had, even these American supermarket ones.

But, as I learned after I tasted the mangoes I’d procured through WhatsApp, I was wrong. Whereas the supermarket mangoes I grew up eating are fibrous and weirdly crisp and have little discernible fragrance, Pakistan’s Anwar Ratol and Chaunsa mangoes — the kind I picked up from the Detroit airport’s cargo bay — smell strongly of flowers and have a custardlike creaminess that drips with sticky-sweet juice. A popular method of consumption involves rolling the small, yellow-green fruit around, slicing off the top, and sucking out the liquefied pale-yellow or ochre flesh, like you’re drinking a juice box from nature. These mangoes, Pakistanis contend, are among the best varieties in the world.

This year, the Chaunsas in particular were sugary bombs of caramel, citrus, and grassy flavors, with a hint of rose that lingered on the tongue. My father, honestly not a big food lover, was praising God upon eating them. If the Mexican mangoes were a night out at a dinky jazz club, the Pakistani ones were a full-on Beyoncé concert, capable of changing your whole life.

It’s no surprise, then, that mangoes play a huge role in South Asian culture, to the extent that there’s some resistance to their overuse in literature. In 2010, Granta published a satirical piece titled “How to Write About Pakistan” by Pakistani writers including Mohammed Hanif, the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The first rule of writing on Pakistan? “Must have mangoes.” Literary critique aside, there is no denying the mango’s historical importance. If you go back to pre-independence, the vibrant subcontinental poetry tradition has mountains of flowery verse dedicated to the fruit. The poet Mirza Ghalib’s love for mangoes was legendary, but an especially modern and lusty-sounding sample of dialogue comes from Amir Khusrau, a poet from the 13th and 14th centuries who wrote, “He visits my town once a year. He fills my mouth with kisses and nectar. I spend all my money on him. Who, girl, your man? No, a mango.”

Damn.

According to the most recent figures we have pre-pandemic, about a half million tons of mangoes were imported into the United States in 2019. And yet only about 100 tons of them came from Pakistan, according to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the agency responsible for protecting American animal and plant health and welfare. It’s not for lack of product: Pakistan is the world’s sixth-largest mango exporter by volume.

Growing up in Michigan, I ate plenty of these giant red and green Atkins monstrosities after my mother started finding them in the local Meijer’s.

Pakistan’s government and its exporters are hoping to increase the fruit’s U.S. presence, first by using the diaspora as their customer base. One obstacle to this goal is the nature of the fruit itself: Pakistani varieties, such as the esteemed Anwar Ratol, are notoriously delicate and have a short growing season of just a few weeks. The mango “is a very challenging fruit to grow,” Dr. Khalid Akbar Khan Daha, the head of a third-generation fruit-growing family in the cities of Multan and Rahim Yar Khan, told me on the phone from Lahore. “Compared to the kinnow [a type of citrus hybrid], which we also grow, we have to give everything possible to the mango tree to give better yield. We have to work all year round, and it’s very labor intensive, from growing to ripening to harvesting.”

The result is a product so precious that people have risked hefty fines for acquiring it outside regulated channels.*“*There is kind of this whole illicit feel to getting Pakistani mangoes in the States,” the Aams Dealer, a New Jersey-based attorney who operates under a pseudonym as a Pakistani mango middleman, told me. He used to smuggle the mangoes across the Canadian border for personal pleasure, he continued. “I (would) put a few mangoes in my suitcase, hide them under my dirty socks.” Eventually, through contacts on WhatsApp, he was able to purchase and eventually distribute mangoes out of his house.