Sweet nothing

List your top 5 favorite fruits.

To taste life’s fruit, sometimes you have to go out on a limb

Jane Lee Logan

Guests coming over meant Mum opened the special snack box, filled with goodies. It also meant that guests came bearing gifts. I loved the gifts. Sometimes, they brought fruits, but sometimes they got some interesting candy, like 5-star or dairy milk. Yummy chocolates that we never had stocked at home. I was not too fond of fruits, but if you brought something exotic, you remained in my good graces. I must’ve been around 7 or 8 years old when Dad’s younger brother decided to visit us on a weekend. Usually, he would bring 5-star chocolates, but on this visit, he decided to get something healthy and brought fruits. As soon as his scooter pulled up, I jumped in front of him and checked his pockets. he always carried the chocolates in the shirt pocket, but this time they were empty. He just removed the packet of fruits he had got for us and handed it to me. A glance told me that it was just bananas. I was upset. How can you visit someone without having either chocolates or exotic fruits? Noticing my furrowed brows, he asked me what had upset me. Back then, the brain-tongue filter was still evolving, and I just yelled, “Why bananas? You live far enough away to pass through two or three markets on the way to our place, you could have stopped anywhere and picked up something exotic, like pineapples or grapes”. Mum was aghast. Dad and uncle had burst into loud guffaws, and he had hugged me and taken me back to the corner store to get me a chocolate for my impertinence. I had no clue about propriety and decency and had just blurted what came to mind. This is a story he still fondly recollects when I visit. The kids are embarrassed at my cringe attitude. I understand today how improper that behavior was, but in my defense, I was just a kid!

I was never fond of fruits, and it took a lot of cajoling to get me to eat them. Mum used to be so exhausted with getting me to eat food, that she gave up with the fruits. To be honest, we never had time to sit and relish fruits, school started at 9 and we tried to leave home around 8 to be on time. But there was always something and we left a little later and never had time to agonize over fruits and other such mundane topics. Usually, Mum got us seasonal fruits, so in February, there would be watermelons and summers meant mangoes and in October there would be Sapotas. Growing up gorging on seasonal fruits during weekends and holidays and then rushing off to play with friends just meant that we burnt all those calories off easily.

Then I got married. I was working in an agency at that time, and the cook hired to prepare meals for us used to make mango milkshakes. The choice was either the coffee or the milkshakes and I chose the milkshakes- because they seemed the healthier option. For two months, I would just have two glasses of milkshakes for lunch. I reached the office at 9 am and would not bother with coffee, and then would just have a milkshake at noon and one around 3 pm and then wind down and head back home around 7 pm for dinner. In my head, this was a good diet and should have helped me lose weight. Strangely, the clothes kept shrinking, and frustrated I blurted out my predicament to the siblings. I’ve never heard louder guffaws in my life. I promise you. Eventually, they calmed down enough to tell me that mango was not a fruit you ate if you planned to lose weight. And you never had it as a milkshake or with ice cream and cream. It took a lot of willpower and even more walking, to finally get back into the clothes I had outgrown. But mangoes and I grew apart.

Over the last few years, we visited Singapore often. My sibling used to pick up a lot of fruits and we got to taste a variety of fruits including the plain-old banana. Did you know that you get different kinds of bananas in different parts of the world, and they all taste different? I had no clue. But I’ve come to the humble conclusion that I like the Indian varieties the best. So, at her place, we often got to taste some exotic fruits like custard apples, pineapples, and berries. While at a waterpark, we were offered a platter of fruits that included Rambutans, and that was the first time I tried this fruit. I had to google it first to figure out what it was called and then figure out how they were eaten. They were quite good!

Fruits in our house are divided into individual and group categories. Fruits that you can eat at one shot, by yourself, without aid from another, are the individual fruits, like mangoes, bananas, apples, sapotas and then there are the watermelons and jackfruits which are cut by Dad or Mum, and we would sit around and munch the afternoon away. And then my older sibling had to go and convert an individual fruit into the group category. She cut and sliced the mangoes so artistically, that we were tempted to sit around and munch away dripping the juice down our hands in our hurry to eat faster than she sliced them. I remember the time Mum’s brother came to visit, and she sat down with a packet full of washed and cleaned mangoes and a knife and just kept cutting and serving us all mangoes. She made the fruit look so appetizing; that I finally conceded and purchased the fruit for the home. But I refuse to learn to slice like her, I don’t want yet another chore added to my list. In the long list of fruits that we do enjoy eating the top few slots will be reserved for the seasonal Alphonso (Mangoes), Oranges, Sapotas, Jackfruits, and of course the Watermelons. Then there are the festival varieties which include Custard-Apples, Pineapples, and Oranges. Then there are the health or diet-friendly ones like Avocados, Papayas, and Bananas. Then we have the travel-friendly Apples and Musk Melons which we carry around so we can slice and dice them anywhere. There are a lot of overlaps in how we sometimes segregate the fruits as purchased only during festivals and those purchased because they fit in the meal plan. But to be honest, at the end of the day, I think it’s about sourcing them fresh.