I read Following The Equator by Mark Twain not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I was editing a book on my city with Naresh Fernandes, the anthology that was to become Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (Penguin India), and I felt one had to have read as much as one could. That was where I bumped into the durian for the first time, though he calls it ‘dorian’.
“There was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence. It was never the season for the dorian. It was always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other, but it never did. By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment.
We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture. They said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the fruit was in your mouth, you would faint. There is a fortune in that rind. Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for cheese.”
So how could I resist? I wanted to eat a durian, in the way other people want to drink a certain single malt. I like fruit, and when I get to a new country, I poke about looking for fruit to eat.
And then in Macao, I was told it was the season for durian and it would be easy to get in the market.
I had also been warned that hotels would throw you out if you brought durian back to your room, and that it was best eaten out of doors and all the rest of that. So when I was walking down a series of steps that lead from the ruins of the 17th Century church, Saint Paul’s in Santo Antonio — which is only a façade now, the rest having been destroyed by a fire — I came upon a market, and in that market, I saw signs: Durian, ready to eat.
Ha, I thought. We’re here. Are you ready, Jerry? Can you take this, Jerry? I went up to one of the stalls and pointed. A smiling woman — her smile looked like it had been tacked on to her face — dug about in an ice-bucket and pulled out a plastic bag. I paid, I can’t remember how much, but I don’t remember any conversion pangs, so it can’t have been much. Then I found a quiet place on the steps and unwrapped my prize.
What I found inside looked like a jackfruit that had grown up in China. Now I like jackfruit. In Goa, there are two kinds: rosso and kapo (pronounced rawsaw and kaapaw). Rosso is nearly liquidy and goes down like gloop. It’s the sound a Gollum makes. Kapo is all precise and hard and chewy, and so is much more the thinking person’s jackfruit. I like them both.
Ha, there was still a wrapping to go. Underneath would be the terrible scent of the...
Nothing.
Jackfruit was more powerful. If you cut one open, the neighbours know. In Goa, the neighbours sigh because they know they’re going to have some inflicted on them. The jackfruit is a magnanimous fruit and insists on a socialist sharing of both its fruit and its smell. This is what I had grown up on, and it was a little difficult to hear it described as ‘the meat of Brahmins’ ( Gangs of Wasseypur ) and resembling ‘dinosaur poo’ (a British friend). A North Indian friend ate it ripe for the first time in my home.
That’s all it was. Jackfruit with a Chinese passport.
The author wonders why we don’t grow those monster cherries at present in the market and which cost ₹1,800 per kilo
