Sour
Think of a food that immediately makes your mouth water. Chances are more often than not, it’s something sour. Sour foods are quintessentially of the summer. Perhaps it’s the instinctive need for the vitamin C loaded in sour fruit or the human body’s craving for the electrolytes in the form of sugar and salt that are often used to temper the same sourness.
The first and best of all sour things is the salted dried wild bor fruit. Growing on brush like thorny trees with tiny leaves, I think these are cousin to the larger and fleshy bor fruit commonly found in city markets. But these are the poor country cousins, uncultivated and wild. Much has been written about the amazing nutritional qualities of this Indian berry but all I know is how delicious the little ones are. These are dried in the sun and then stored in large jars with a generous amount of rock salt. The salt dissolves and pickles the little fruit. Depending on the ripeness of the fruit when it was picked, a few fruit plump up and these are always the sweeter ones. The reddish brown skin of most, though, wrinkles and shrivels just as fingertips do after a swim in the ocean. The fruit dehydrates and turns dry and sour inside, and these are the ones whose memory is making my mouth water as I type these words and remember the taste. Hot summer afternoons in Baroda, dry and dusty, a katori of stolen bor and a swing under a shady tree. Each bor had a tiny seed which could be sucked on endlessly. Finally, when all the last remnants of salty juice had disappeared, the seeds were spat out in a competition of who could spit furthest. Summer afternoons didn’t come much better than these.
Except if a nellikai tree was involved. Again, the ones I refer to aren’t the large gooseberries or amla, but the little ones that grew on a tree overhanging our garage shed in Ernakulam. We would climb up the sides of the shed, haul our dog up too, sprawl on the corrugated iron roof with books and comics and a thali filled with red chilli powder and salt dissolved in water. The nellikai were doused in this firewater and the first crunch was enough to shrivel every pore of the body. All juices drained away from the mouth which puckered up against the extreme tartness. The only defence was to eat one more and then again one more. The seeds were spat out in time honoured fashion. The chickens would come pecking at them, but never ate one. Too astringent. The tree was beautiful, with tiny leaves on branches drooping gracefully down from the canopy top. Blue skies, the smell of the sea two streets away, head resting on a dog’s back, sun through the leaves, as many nellikai as we could eat before Mom remembered to shout out dire warnings about upset tummies…
Cut to Madras. Tamarind trees are mysteriously dark and cast a deep shade. I vaguely remember being warned about snakes that lived under tamarind trees but I’ve never seen one. We would sneak into the local convent school grounds after hours, illicit visitors waging an endless battle with the cantankerous watchman. Tamarind trees are not easy to climb, the trunk punishes you with bites from angry red ants and scratches from the rough bark. Up we’d go, shushing each other’s giggles, the youngest amongst us left at the bottom with the bikes as caretaker/gatherer/lookout. The greenish pods were the raw, sourest ones. Sucking on these made the teeth ache and the throat dry. The dark brown pods were the best. Cracking one open, it was tempting to eat the sticky sour-sweet flesh inside right away. But there was no time to dawdle. We’d pluck as many pods as we could reach and drop them down to our gatherer friend. Before long, the watchman would spot us from a distance and come hobbling as fast as he could. The careless slither down the trunk was always sharply painful. We’d ride away, still giggling, our friends who attended the same convent school in their morning avatars of demure, docile schoolgirls hiding their faces as we rode past the apoplectic watchman.
Up to the terrace of our apartment building we’d swarm. Someone would bring up a two-in-one, the music would blare out tinnily. The fruit was divided up and we’d lie there on the hot cement, laughing at the adventure, speculating over the fate of our friends at the hands of the nuns if they were ever caught stealing these little jewels that no one except us coveted yet which were gaurded so zealously. That tamarind pulp was the best I ever tasted. Many years later, I was at a Mumbai market one day when the fruitseller offered me some Thai tamarind. My mind flashed back to Madras and our stolen summer treasures. I asked him, Kyon, bhaiya, hamare desh mein ab imli ke ped nahi rahe? He laughed ruefully and replied, Bhabhi, aapne theek baat kahi par aaj kal, phoren imli hi chal rahi hai.
That was the saddest thing I’d heard. It made my heart shrivel, just as the bor or nellikai or puli shrivelled and inflamed my taste buds through a wonderful childhood of sour tasting summers.