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For the best part of my life I was allergic to fruits.
During my school years in the seaside village Muthukur, not many fruits were available in the market. Even vegetables used to arrive from Nellore by the first bus. And they were expensive.
We had a large number of palm trees, and a few coconut trees.
Palm fruit is lovely to look at. It is spherical and shiny violet in color.
But those 'fruits' were never allowed to ripen. They were plucked and cut open at their throats with a sickle. And they revealed three tender jelly-like pale white sockets covered with a thin pale yellow-brown skin. Those jelly-sockets were filled with tasty water. It was a pleasure sucking and munching them in their season. But they were not fruits, no way...they would ripen into fruits if they were allowed to cling to their mother trees a while longer.
Then I am told they are swell.
The emptied shells were great for us kids to make a cart pulled by a string...two palm fruit shells formed the wheels when joined by a stick as their axle.
Taala Sakatika like the Mrichchakatika of Shoodraka.
And coconuts. They are as much 'nuts' as betels are nuts. They are the 'fruit' of their mother tree.
Bringing down the green coconuts, slicing their heads and drinking their water with a pipe was unknown to us. I first saw that craft in Bengal much later. Nowadays that commerce has seeped into the whole of AP and Telangana...villages, towns, and cities.
The coconuts too were not often allowed to ripen into mature fruits. They were downloaded midway, broken, peeled and their innards (with a little sweet water) gave us their white flesh useful for chutneys, and coconut-rice. But too rich to eat aplenty.
The proper ripened fruit, giving the copra, is a thick spherical dielectric shell...and a very cute illustration to cite for Problems in Electrostatics (among other things).
Whenever I felt hungry and asked my mother for a snack, she used to break a piece of copra and give it to me along with a pinch of jaggery. Very filling and was good enough for another couple of hours play.
There were a few guava trees but they never bore ripe fruit. The white flower fell off one day revealing a slowly growing sphere that stayed green; and turned black in a few days on the tree.
(It is dangerous to eat raw guava...I had to fetch Dulcolax Suppositories (Pediatric) for my kid-son at Kharagpur 30 years later).
There were also a few sapota (chikoo) trees. Their fruit too didn't ripen on their mother trees...apparently they had to plucked at the right moment and buried deep under the rice stored in its Britannia Biscuit tin...and then we forgot all about them till they stank.
I never saw in Muthukur a full-blooded golden yellow Orange Fruit that I heard later on called Santra...much later in Hyderabad the sight of their heaps drove me to poetry (pray don't Google Translate):
గోరింట పూల గుత్తులు
కేరింతలు కొట్టు పాప కిలకిల నవ్వుల్
నారింజ పండ్ల మోపులు
తూరీగల దండ్లు జూడ తొందర తీరున్
https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2016/01/for-eye-feast.html
The only relative of it found in Muthukur was a poor cousin, a green sphere with a thin skin. It was tough to peel it off. And when peeled it revealed a thick white shield covering its slices. These slices were often sour or bland, with lots of seeds. The effort was a waste of time. But those half-dry slices were supposed to be the 'ideal diet' for sick kids, who hated them. Later on, father brought from Nellore a heavy weird circular implement of thick glass (very breakable) called 'orange squeezer'. It was fun to look at it. The fruit was cut into two hemispheres and each half inverted and pushed onto what can only be called its squeezer's phallus; and squeezed. Some little juice flowed down into the outer compartment while the seeds got stuck in its inner. Nice exercise; but too little juice for too much effort. And the juice poured into the tumbler was so sour that fever fled. Often request was made for a little sugar, in vain.
I never saw in Muthukur a grape fruit, either green or black or brown or violet. All we got when asked for grapes in the dry goods stores were shriveled wrinkled reddish chaps. They swelled when used in payas. We fought for them. It was only much later that I had to mug up 'semi-permeable membranes'.
The best fruit that was ubiquitous was from the tamarind tree. These were allowed to ripen on the backyard tree and were downloaded with sickles tied at the end of long poles...often like in multistage rockets...the trees grew very tall.
And half a dozen kids (paid and unpaid) were set to peel the thick brittle off-white skins. And the pulp had to be separated from the seeds (playthings in many ways). And the fruit were inedible...too sour...and that is their secret. Tamarind is used in chutneys, sambar, rasam, tamarind-rice, and in many other ways including cleaning of copper vessels (now extinct). We Andhras love sour taste. Unlike Bengalis who don't know what to do with the yield of their wild tamarind trees...we had a tetul-tala in our campus at IIT KGP. Bengalis' love starts with sweets and ends with fish.
And there was an occasional banana fruit of the yellow kind. But it turned out to be too heavy on my tummy. When eaten, it tended to stay in the belly and make its presence felt for hours. I hated them.
Much later, in our Faculty Hostel at Kharagpur, the Allahabadi professor I talked about the other day used to feast on dozens of bananas on Tuesday nights (he said he fasted for Hanumanji on Tuesday nights religiously and ordered them as his free dinner substitute :)
But I was glad when I came across this shloka:
अभुक्त्वामलकं पथ्यं भुक्त्वा तु बदरीफलम् ।
कपित्थं सर्वदा पथ्यं कदली न कदाचन ॥
It is appropriate to consume gooseberry before eating food. It is recommended to eat the fruits of the badari tree after eating food. The wood-apple fruit is considered as an appropriate food at all times. Banana is not considered as a pathyam food at any time.
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To be continued..
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