Forbidden Fruit
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
But this one fruit caught my attention … I think I have seen it before … and tasted it ... that is now how long ago ?... mmm... 1978 or was it 79 ...
We lived in Pune . In those days it was ok to call it Poona… We lived near five-O-nine area in a place called Tingre nagar. For those who know Pune , this is on your way to Viman nagar .. .or the pune airport. Indian Air-force has a base there.
A good part of my childhood, the most memorable ones were spent there.
Me and my sister walked about 3-4 kms to school and it used to be fun. There was a matador which picked up children from 2 kms away but it did not make economic sense to take it.
Those were not the days of traffic and pollution . And it was relatively safe for children to walk to school. A lot of children went with us to the same school.
If you know what sibling rivalry is you will understand this. My sis and I never acknowledged each other when at school or with school friends. Not that we were enemies or anything, but were embarassed to acknowledge that we were from the same family. She took a different route home with a set of her friends and I went with mine. She usually reached home a little earlier than I .
It was vast empty lands with not many buildings around and we used to stay on the first floor . So my mother had atleast a one km view from the balcony of my way back home.
I would meander around, pick up flat stones for Tipri( I think they call it hop skotch in English and pandi in Tamil ) and round marble stones for five stones game that we played with other girls in the evening. There were wild flowers, and butterflies all round to catch as well. But the most interesting part was a couple of Jamun trees on the way. Jamun – not as in the guava fruit as the delhiites call it. It is a dark violet coloured fruit which when eaten in excess causes sore throat. They call it nagapazham in Tamil.
Girls and boys would throw stones on the jamun tree , collect the ripest ones , dust the mud off them and then eat them on the way.
A little ahead was another jamun tree but was in the backyard of Bhagat Ram's Grocery store.
( Till about six -seven years ago Bhagat Ram's existed there ...dunno if it is still there. )
None of us quite ventured near it coz’ Bhagat Ram Seth was a not a very children friendly Seth and was busy running his grocery shop with his two sons and a helper man who had pock marks on his face like the ones you see on Om Puri's face.
There was a tap adjacent to the compound wall of Bhagat Ram seth’s backyard which we discovered we could put to good use by washing mud off the soiled jamuns. Many of the ripe ones would get badly bruised because of stone throwing and when they fell, they would be heavily soiled.
It was not long before a whole lot of us started using Bhagat Ram Seth’s tap for washing jamuns . Seth would instruct the pock marked helper man to shoo us off. The pock marked Helper man was a meek, middle-aged fellow, had a Sachin Tendulkar like voice , always looked lost and was probably a little slow at the uptake. Seth would relentlessly order him around. I guess that is how it is with all Seth log and their servants.
Me and my then best friend ( don’t remember now whether her name was Vandana or Kiran or Rajni ) once were persistent and were pleading with the pock marked Helper man to just get this one bunch of jamuns washed over in his tap. We used that charm that only little girls can use ( they assume a different meaning when you grow up) to plead with him while putting our case forward.
We got friendly with him thus. We continued using his tap. On days when the Seth had gone home for siesta or out to the city market he would invite us to partake some jamuns that he had picked from the tree inside the compound. He would offer us some violet jamuns from his tree .
It was when we became good friends he once introduced us to the tender, sweet red looking fruit that grew in the backyard .
Flash forward 2004 – High street – Guildford – England :
‘Straw berries… Raspberries for one pound ‘… calls out the man selling fruits on the friday fruits market in a clipped British accent.
I give him a one pound coin and pick up a plastic bowl full of the tender, sweet red looking fruit …mmm… they taste just the same … Oh ... so RASPBERRIES is what they are called …never knew it then … we were introduced to it as ‘lal jamun’…
Flash back 1979 – Five O Nine Area - Pune – India :
We got invited almost every other day to the backyard by the pock marked helper man.
Even when the Seth was'nt having his Siesta. Afternoons were the time you would hardly expect many to drop into a grocery shop ...so i guess it was off-peak hours and the Seth let the pock marked helper man retire to this backyard once in a while.
The backyard was one of those quaint –cozy ones which little girls typically take a liking to.
A room opened out to the backyard and if you peeped in you saw it had a big trunk box, a old rusted frame with a photograph of Shiva and Parvati and a calendar poster of Goddess Durga on a lion with an agarbatti stand beneath it. The bed covered with a colourful quilt made of left over cloth from some tailor’s shop.
The room smelt of ... can't say what ... that is how grocery shops smell. A little damp , a little smell of wheat sacks stacked beneath the bed mixed with the smell of detergent bars and phenyl . The door on the other side directly led to the grocery store. He shared the room with sacks of wheat and other grocery items which Bhagat Ram Seth stocked along with the pock marked helper man in the back room.
He got talking to us and we probably rattled out the history of our entire khandaan to him.
We told him which class we were studying, where our fathers were working and where we went during our summer holidays all the while eating away the Raspberries.
Although we did not ask him , he told us about his daughters back home in Rajasthan who were now married . Bhagat Ram Seth was a rich relative of his and had got him to Pune to help him around to run the stores. I felt that he was sorely missing his family .
It became an everyday routine to peep into the backyard of Bhagat Ram Seth’s dukaan to see if the pock marked helper man would invite us for jamuns. Sure enough he kept some of the red ones for us at the backyard. We would eat them, chat up with him and then head homewards.
My then best friend’s ( was It vandana or kiran or Rajni .. I still cannot remember … ) family shifted out to another quarters and soon I did not have her company for my trip back home from school. It was in a way good because the quota of lal jamuns was all mine and did not have to be shared from then onwards. The Lal jamuns and the pock marked helper man would remain a secret with me.
I developed a taste for the Lal jamuns while the usual violet jamun was discarded from my wish list. As long as my pock marked helper man supplied me with Lal jamuns it was not necessary for me to slog it out by throwing stones on the other tree only to share the booty with others, especially those rough boys from 4th standard who bullied and teased the 2nd standard girls and thought no end to themselves. They would never get to experience the Lal jamuns anyway ???
And so the pock marked helper man at Bhagat Ram seth’s dukaan continued to treat me as his preferred vendor for jamuns. He would repeatedly tell me that I looked exactly like what his younger daughter was when she was my age . He would get overwhlemed and keep repeating that the resemblance was stark.
He would kiss me goodbye before I would take leave and insist I return his kiss .
In the kind of family that I grew up, Physical display of affection ceases at about 2-3 years of age. Amma or Appa never really kissed or hugged the children when they went to bed or when we were leaving for school unlike in my best friend’s home ( Vandana or kiran or Rajni I don’t remember) . Her mummy kissed her on both her cheeks before she left for school. I know it because I would wait for her at the door and her mummy would hurriedly peck the kisses on her cheek after zipping off the lunch box in her bag.
It was kind of embarrasing and awkward when the pock marked helper man kissed me .
But he was a kind man … for you do not see too many of them offering some nice red jamuns to little girls everyday . So I got used to it and returned his favours with a quick peek on his cheek and leave homewards.
And thus I continued have my share of Raspberries for many months to come.
*************
On a different track … Raspberries in Pune !!! in the late 1970’s …
This was long before MAPRO commercialised Strawberry and Raspberry cultivation in Mahabaleshwar. These days , you can see strawberries selling in super market stores and traffic signals in Mumbai for exotic prices. But in the late seventies when emergency was at its peak and licence raj ruled , Strawberries and Raspberries were unheard of by the Common Indian .
Well it was one more of those imprints that the British left in India ...I guess. It must be worth researching.
We lived in 509 area. It was pronounced as five O nine area- just like the way in London they say O ( as in oh!) instead on zero. It was an air-force camp for the british before independence. I guess a lot of British Air-force personnel lived there before independence.
Pune or Poona as it then was called is a place with a pleasant and gloomy Englnd-like weather for most part of the year, which is probably why the English took a liking to the city in the early 1900’s and set up base.
I suspect, a home-sick Englishman’s wife must have experimented with Raspberry seeds with the fruits that she got from England and had sown it in her backyard. (William Dalrymple ... may find this a worthwhile lead to write another bestseller after the White Mughals)
About 30 - 40 years later after the English left India, I was probably reaping the fruits of the seed sown by a homesick English man’s wife at the backyard of Bhagat Ram’s grocery stores. Thanks to the generosity of the pock marked helper man.
*************
As they say , all good things must come to an end. And so it was with my pock marked helper man and his supply of raspberries.
It was I who left him .
One day after school , my mother noticed stains on my white school uniform shirt and asked me what they were. I told her they were from the lal jaamun that I ate at Bhagat ram's backyard … I told her about the pock marked helper man and his supply of raspberries in exchange of a kiss everyday on the way back from school.
She was angry ... a little more than angry , I felt .
For what though I could not make out.
It was not unusual for me to dirty my school uniforms , she would mildly reprimand me but never had she got so angry . Her face was red . As red as the Raspberry stain on my white school uniform.
I remember she whacked me and said I better come back from school without any stop overs anywhere. My sister was instructed to accompany me to ensure that I was back home from school in the shortest possible time.
Taking any favours ( or fruits for that matter ) from strangers, kind or otherwise was strictly forbidden ... she declared .
That put an end to my Raspberries and my stop-overs at Bhagat Ram's Backyard . I would accompany my sister on a shorter route back home.
Our family continued shopping at the Bhagat Ram’s for our monthly groceries. The pock marked helper man would smile at me and I would look away from him . If Amma was not looking , I would then quickly return his smile.
Don’t know why ... but I felt a faint tinge of guilt in doing so.
I noticed Amma would get very stern, straight faced and unkind with him when he would indulge in small talk while measuring out our groceries. On our way out, she muttered 'porukki ' (loosely translated for non tamil readers - 'Porukki ' - loafer / eve-teaser / womanizer in varying degrees depending on the context) .
' Porukki ' - that was the first bad word in tamil that me and sis learnt. We were not sure of its exact meaning , but began to use it generously in our fights against each other.
She behaved like that for many months after the stained white uniform incident… I did not like the way she was being unkind to him.
The stain on the white uniform went away ... thanks to surf or rin or ariel ( no could not have been ariel... they did not sell ariel in those days ) that Amma used to wash the clothes.
So what was she still angry for ?
It was the stain in her mind I suppose that remained …
That was long long ago... so much water has flown under the bridge since then ...
She was a young mother with two daughters ... probably younger than what I am today.
Am not sure if I would behave any different today if I had a daughter , that age ...
Previous Posts
Archives
No comments:
Post a Comment