I took a long deep sniff as it was one of my favourite olfactory moments — the jackfruit had arrived

Last year, at this time, I was a fellow of the Newhouse Center at Wellesley College, in Boston. It was winter and it was beautiful in a frozen sort of way. One day, I sent a series of photographs to a friend who is also a photographer and she asked, “Were these shot in black and white?” I looked again at them and could see the blue of the Wellesley College banner over the entrance and traces of green on the trees. But to an Indian eye, these were traces, Schindler’s roses, barely visible.

This week, I was walking towards the railway station and as I turned a corner, I took a long deep sniff because this is one of my favourite olfactory moments in my city. There is a little temple, a Saptakoteshwara temple and from it flows the smell of incense and burning and ghee. Outside, a little old lady and her daughter sell gajras, lovely evanescent art, strips of flowers twined together for a woman’s hair. And another old lady has Gauri the cow, who adds a tang of her animal smells to this bouquet.

Oh smiling Shiva

Next to it is a Mangaluru store — this is where the homesick come for tastes of home. It is rich with aromas of food — tamarind and bunches of onion and garlic. I get lucky. Someone has just asked for a 100 grams of pickle and a jar has been opened and the sour and piquant flavours rush through my nose and into my mouth. Gush of saliva. Swallow.

This time, there was something new and in a second I knew what it was. Smiling Shiva and his jackfruit had arrived. The first jackfruit of the season, harbinger of summer. Yes, I know. Summer means the endless heat and sweat and fatigue but it also means mangoes and flowers. My city will burst into flower, the green of Malabar Hill will be slashed through with red as the pala blooms. The sonchafa will spray the streets. And the bougainvillaea will go mad, trying to compete.

But here it is: jackfruit. The prefix jack means ‘male’ or ‘large’ or ‘heavy’ and hence jackpot as an overloaded pot and jackass as a male ass. This is a huge fruit, and a single tree can give you many more fruit than a family could eat; it offers an embarrassment of riches. In the Goa of my childhood vacations, you cut one open and three houses down, they could smell it.

You had to make sure you had oiled your hands and the knife for the sap was thick and sticky and would coat you for a day or so. The men of the family cleaned the jackfruit, sitting in the sun, scooping out golden pods into huge bowls and trying to get it all over with. Once the carpels (as we should call them) were rescued, the rest would be thrown to the family pig. There were two kinds: rosso and kaapo. Rosso was soft and squelchy and close to unbearably sweet. Kaapo was firm and fibrous and suggested sweetness. (You can tell which one was my favourite.) Some was eaten and the rest was dried, and eaten later. Jackfruit flap, the more Anglicised called it. Saataan, we called it.

It was hard work getting the jackfruit done and often some would fall off the tree with the sound of a body falling, a dull thud. Then the birds of the air would descend upon it and feast and one of the women of the house would exclaim at the waste but without too much energy.

For years in Mumbai, I never ate jackfruit until Niloufer bought a vacation home in the hills and was confronted with nature’s bounty. But for most people, the effort of a jackfruit is just too much and Shiva is therefore a wonderful addition to the aromascape of my walk to the station. It means I will go and get as much jackfruit as I want and I will be able to eat it without feeling sick and the smell will evaporate in an hour or so from the house.

(Right now, there is a guava getting ripe in the kitchen and from time to time, it sends out a tendril of aroma. Soon it will be insisting on being eaten and if it does not have its way, those tiny fruit flies will begin to appear.)

Jack of all trades

I had no idea anyone ate jackfruit any other way until I went to college and was confronted with the glorious variety of the Indian encounter with fruit. Mitali brought along banana flowers dipped in batter and fried. Not to be outdone Bajirao brought raw bananas cooked as if they were potatoes.

My Mapla friend brought us a dessert in which delicate baby bananas were cooked, with their silky skins, into coconut milk and milk. And Suchita introduced me to the idea of jackfruit eaten raw.

This seemed to be the default way of cooking jackfruit. In Anurag Kashyap’s film, Gangs of Wasseypur, one of the characters is in the market, buying supplies and stops to load up on jackfruit. Of course, this being a Kashyap film, there is a bunch of people waiting to kill him and one says to the other, that kathal is meat for Brahmins.

Then Madhavi brought over a young North Indian student on a day we had some ripe jackfruit, courtesy Shiva, and he ate it and cocked his head.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Jackfruit,” I said.

“Kathal,” said Madhavi helpfully.

“I’ve never eaten it ripe,” he said.

I wonder if he will again.

The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.