Strawberry ankhein

The world is shaped by our senses, and surely our senses are shaped like strawberries.

Buying fruit can be a vexing business. Apples make me anxious—why Chinese and New Zealand, I was told apples grow in Simla! Fruit wala looks resigned as I complain that things which grow on trees shouldn’t have stickers. Dragon fruits make me dither and as for kiwis, where’s the koschan? Is it a bird, is it an Australian? No, it’s globalisation! When was it not you may ask, and you’d be right.

But, when it comes to strawberries, all bets are off.

If I could write to this fruit a poem it would be extraordinary, just like a strawberry. I can’t really write poetry but Piet Hien could and he wrote one with fruit, titled What Love Is Like—“My love is like a pineapple/sweet and indefinable”. The way one love can stir the memory or maybe anticipation—of another, the strawberry we commonly eat, is called Frageria x Ananassa because it reminded Duchesne who developed it, of the pineapple. The world is shaped by our senses, and surely our senses are shaped like strawberries.

Developed it—yes. Europeans discovered the sexual reproduction of plants, as they tried to cultivate North American and Chilean strawberry plants—and so, mated them to create the sweet modern strawberry. In poetic reproduction, the strawberry carries its ovaries on its sleeve—the seeds on the outside are actually ovaries, each carrying within a seed, as hearts carry secrets. Think of all those secrets in your mouth. Could a fruit be more sexy? Doubtful. The strawberry is not a berry but an accessory, aggregate fruit—one that develops from the merger of several ovaries that were separated in a single flower. Not a coy mistress, but an insouciant one.

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As a kid, strawberries were exotic and unattainable. Even the artificial flavour signalled specialness, with its air-conditioned fragrance. English people, I knew, ate strawberries with cream. Though I hated (still do) cream, I knew in my heart, strawberries could make me love it. They did. In 1990 I saw a small cafe advertising strawberries in Pune. I was unaware of Mahabaleshwar strawberries, being from the North. Could it be for real? I ate my first sundae glass full of strawberries and cream in a decadent stupor, my senses flooded. The stained glass red-pink, oozed into the fat cream and tinged it a reckless blush colour. My fingers smelled like flowers. I felt so glamorous, could you blame me for feeling amorous? If online matches translated to such meetings, we’d all believe in love. Strawberries and cream were apparently popularised by one Cardinal Wolsey, a successful and pretty canny guy in Henry VIII’s time. Despite his worldly progress, it is this pleasure he is remembered for. Tells you what legacy to focus on building, right?

The British were obsessed with growing strawberries in India and it was prisoners in Thane who first successfully grew them. Today, China is the biggest producer. Odisha is pleased to have grown them recently. Strawberries are common now, but I can never take them for granted. With strawberry smells in the house I feel rich, risque, romantic and hopeful. I make cakes, compote, cocktails and puddings all winter and freeze some, for summer, which for some reason (strawberries? Globalisation?), has come early this year (the mogra plant sent three new flowers as heady as lovers’ text messages to let me know).

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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