Last week, my house help handed me a handful of what looked like the Indian mangosteen — ‘leteku’ in Assamese. It looked all too familiar and I was rather excited. I dug a nail into the skin of the berry and ewwww! something sticky and slimy oozed out. I hadn’t expected that at all.
“What is this?” I asked her disgusted. “It is called irki pandu, ” she offered and urged me to pop the translucent fruit encased within a thick skin into my mouth. But I was unsure. What if I die? Was this poisonous? She laughed and reassured me saying the kids in their homes were emptying them by the basket. As I reluctantly popped it in, I found it was sweet, like an ice apple. But wait, as I reached the seed, the fruit tasted tangy. It was an interesting combination of flavours. That is when my help said, “These are sold at ₹80 per kg by tribal fruit vendors.”
Intrigued, I asked her where they were sold and texted a friend, who does street photography, to see if he knew what they were. As I gave him the Telugu name, he sent me photos of the fruit and said, “The vendor called them gunda .” But gunda is actually the name of the tree where these fruits grow.
The berries are called glue berry, snotty gobbles, manjack or scented manjack. In Hindi, they are called lesuda . But not satisfied by Google search, I went over to the nearest vendor. I prefer the information provided by vendors over the search engine. The vendor reeled off several names for the fruit, but couldn’t actually describe the tree itself. But he offered, “I’ve found that it is the Hindi-speaking people who buy the unripe fruit for pickling.”
Several locals rely on the fruit to cure colic. It is also believed to help with joint aches, and my house help said they often eat the fruit instead of popping calcium or vitamin D supplements.
Commonly known as glue berry, the fruit is listed in the glossary of locally-found fruits and berries. It is found mainly in hot, dry regions; the wild tall trees bear the fruits in huge quantities and its leaves and fruits are good as fodder.
The slimy secretion from the fruit is as tough as any branded glue but does not harm or irritate the skin.
It’s a different story that eating the fruit can sometimes make that stickiness feel like snot.
