Fruits, Juices and Salads - 4

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I was talking of mangoes and flies in Vizagh. 

Flies made my life miserable for my seven years' stay there. They were breeding sinfully and flourishing in all the seasons. They tickled my nose. Also arms and face. And hopped all over the floor. 

There was no fly-repellant then.  Nor a fly-catcher. The only way was to try and catch and hope to smite them with the hand. But they would always escape and fly away (that's why they are called 'flies'). 

Saha & Srivastava's bulky tome was too heavy to wield. Finally 'The Hindu' Newspaper folded into a Quarto turned out to be the best weapon...it is just a matter of Scattering Cross-section. 

Red ants were also rampant. They were great scavengers. I watched them clean up a heaven-bound lizard in no time. Despite their voracious appetite they never grew in their size. Remained red and tiny. Maybe all that food they took in was going into making their prodigious progeny. That could be a great way to shed weight for British dames. Britishers like Churchill used to deride Indians as 'breeding like pigs'. Totally unfair. India's projected population fell drastically due to artificial famines created by the Brits intent on plundering the wealth of their richest colony.

On the other hand, Wiki says that the great limericist Edward Lear was the 'penultimate of 21 children' :)

My cousin (sister) was convinced (in 1957) that there was only one way of coping with red ants: Write "Sri Rama" (శ్రీరామ) 1116 times in a loose note book, roll it into a pipe, and store it in the attic. All the red ants in the house, according to her, would rush into that tiny note book, suffocate, and die, singing:

"శ్రీరామ! నీ నామమెంతో రుచిరా!"

(Sree Ramaa! Your name is so sweet!)

Also spidermen.

I find happily that, wherever I dwelt in Hyderabad, it was free from red ants and hanging gardens of spider webs. And houseflies are limited to a month before the monsoon...and then they vanish I know not where.

Flies are diurnal; mosquitoes nocturnal.

The odd fly found hopping in the night is called: "Blind Fly" (గుడ్డీగ)...he can't tell day from night (like me now).

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It was in Vizagh again that I first saw handcarts loaded with sugarcane. Whenever I see sugarcane I recall the Train Scene of Pather Panchali:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y2qIPSf7Ig

Urchins used to flock to the cart, pool their money, and ask for one of those 6' canes. And the vendor would cut the chosen one into six pieces and hand them over. It was fun to watch the kids attack their canes summarily with their teeth from peeling to chewing to spewing. I never ventured...I didn't have that strong teeth and didn't like to spit out the remains on the road.

At KGP, I saw the first 'sugarcane juicer'...a couple of huge rollers with gears and a hand-driven crank. In Hyderabad there is its 'electrical' cousin. Still...the iced juice in the tumbler never fascinated me...I felt better gulping Coke instead.

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It was in Viazagh again that I first saw the pineapple fruit. During our trips to Simhachalam we used to watch entire slopes of hills by which pineapple were cultivated in rain-irrigated ridges. The sight was unforgettable...the whole hillside dotted with golden brown pineapples.

Pineapple were sold whole in the Poorna Market. But I didn't have the courage to buy them...didn't have the knowhow of cutting them...as bad as jackfruit 'with thorns'.

Their slices also were sold by the roadside. Flies again...

It was in 1964 that 'Pineapple Juice' appeared in Vizagh food stores in cans. I bought one and brought it home. There was a mini-party I was throwing to our two lady-classmates.

My two sisters and I looked at that tin wondering how to go about opening it. The tin was hermetically sealed. And the lid was a thick shiny brassy thing fused into the rim. We didn't have a can-opener. All we had was a tiny screw diver sans a hammer. I fetched a stone from the street and my younger sister held the screw driver. After hectic efforts we could tease out the lid (with bleeding fingers). 

And we greedily tasted a slice dripping sugary syrup. It was great. But left a fearsome itch in the throat that persists till today in my memory.

There never can be a better-narrated story of the 'pineapple tin-opening adventure' than written by Jerome K Jerome. 

Here it is in all its glory:

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We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

...'Three Men in a Boat'

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To be continued

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