Fruits, Juices and Salads - 2

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And then in 1958, I reached the splendid city of Vizagh, nestling between the Bay of Bengal and the Eastern Ghats, for my university 'education'.

And started living in the home of my MD Uncle, a formidable dictator whom I feared from Day 1...he had one of the sharpest tongues I ever watched, and loved lashing it. I avoided him as a stag does a lion.

I had very little pocket money and the awesome city simply frightened me...fresh from my sleepy village.

One fine morning my Uncle handed me a slip of paper saying it was an RR from Nellore. And he asked me to go to the Waltair RS railway station and redeem its hidden contents.

I walked all the way to the blessed station, 7 km from our beach-front Maharanipet home. In the hot and humid sun. 

Upon entering the station, buying a pricey platform ticket, I showed the RR to a porter who told me to go out and travel to the Goods Shed (a km away) which turned out to be a stinking oven full of gunny bags with their malodorous contents. 

And the steaming clerk saw my RR and asked me to pay Rs 2. I asked what for. And he said:

"Demurrage"

That was a new word to me and sounded as fearful as haemorrhage (whose weird British spelling I had mastered while appearing in my high school 'spelling bee'...why 'bee'?). 

Demurrage is a result of our 'demurring' to retrieve goods and so causing costs to the blessed railways...whoever thought they would be that prompt! The RR had arrived by its lazy cousin: India Posts. The matter ought to have been settled between the two behemoths.

Anyway I shelled down the exorbitant demurrage and was handed a HUGE jackfruit...raw (thankfully).

Any thought of my carrying that heavy 'fruit' on my head back to Maharanipet was out of the question; so I had to hire a cycle rickshaw (man-driven)...with its own brilliant etymology:

"small, two-wheeled carriage drawn by a man," 1885, shortened form of jinrikisha (1873), from Japanese jin "a man" + riki "power" + sha "carriage."

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My Auntie fell all over that jackfruit....it was her father's gift, and helped silence her demanding hubby for the nonce.

But she had as little idea as I what to do with that ghastly green giant staring at us. And there was this round-table conference of the friendly neighborhood ladies. And it was declared that the skin-shavings of the fruit with its greenish spikes would make a delicious curry...knowledge gained from their cookbooks. But what to do with its innards, they had as little idea as what to blog tomorrow has for me :)

But none of the ladies dared touch or attempt to peel or cut that presumptuous fruit. Expert help from the rickshawala was taken; and the curry tasted great. The wages for the rickshawala were the jackfruit's sumptuous contents.

I didn't see many jackfruit in the Kharagpur veg shops, but it must have been a common fare in Bengali villages. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa often talked about it...(he was a motor mouth :).  Apparently if you dared to cut jackfruit with a dagger in your bare hands, it would be a sticky affair. The fruit would ooze a thick milky syrup which would stick to your hands like that girl friend to your soul...refusing to go away. You must spread mustard oil on your palms before attempting the job. The Paramahamsa says, likewise, you must immerse your soul in the mustard oil of  'Bhakti' before trying to gorge on the fruit of your sansaar.

(Hyderabad is truly savvy. The other day, as a rare outing for me from my year-old lockdown, my son drove me to his favorite veg shop. And pointed out to the shopkeeper his choicest jackfruit...middle class. And the shopkeeper beckoned his assistant who sanitized his hands from a hanging bottle, slipped his hands into polyethene gloves, placed the jackfruit on a meat-cutting-table, took up a machete in his hands, shaved the skin off the fruit, cut the damn thing, and sliced its innards into a dozen odd equivalent whitish cuboids that looked like hardened Agra-ka-Petha, slipped them into a polythene bag and handed the bag to my son...all in a jiffy.

And my D-i-L cooked a supremely delicious Jackfruit-Biryani with them...the golden brown boiled-and-fried jackfruit cubes acting as mutton-substitutes).

A couple of years later I traveled to the temple-town Simhachalam, 20 km away on a hired pushbike sharing the driving with one of my friends. The temple stands proud on top of a hillock. Those days there was no road winding up the hill and so we had to walk up a couple of hundred broad steps, on either side of which were a plethora of huge jackfruit trees. It was the first I saw those heavy fruit hanging from the trunk of the tree rather than its branches...God is Great...He is a great innovator...He would have launched many unicorn startups were he living in Hyderabad now...

Back downhill I saw dames selling REAL pieces of the fruit-of-jack...spread on their rickety tables. Those slices were golden yellow in color...succulent and inviting.

But houseflies and jungle-flies were swarming and buzzing on them...their feast of a lifetime...flies don't have machetes apparently.

Of all my friends in the insect kingdom I am scared of houseflies...read a lot about their naughty ways in science books at school. 

So I never ventured to feast on all those salivating bowels of jackfruit...

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To be continued...

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