Produce:
Vegetables and fruit here are immensely cheap and abundantly sundry, thus lending themselves to a lot of experimentation on my behalf. While eating a vegetable without quite knowing its name or purpose is always a bit problematic, as improperly prepared it might adhere to all the surfaces of one's mouth in a sticky-sandpapery kind of way, or just taste like chlorophyll-y poo, the purchase and consumption of mysterious fruit has become a bit of a hobby of mine. All you need to is buy a kilo of whatever “for today” rather than “for tomorrow” to ensure ripeness, haggle the guy down 25-50% of his original price (the longer the pause and distracted gaze away from your direction upon asking the price, the more it's being jacked up, an observation that has become a fine component of my haggling methodology), maybe get it's name in at least Bengali and Hindi, and a new fruity adventure is yours! While guavas, ripe to the point of becoming like an odd custard with seeds, have become a larger component of my diet than I had ever expected them to, lots of strange fruits with names I may or may not know abound, and while I'm coming at this a bit late, having already not photographed the yields of the short seasons of some of the more obscure fruits, I'll begin my fruit-phlog now with the Sitaphal (Hindi) or A(t/d?)aphal (Bengali?):
This odd fruit has been deemed the 'custard apple' by the British, a proper name to express its rather giving texture. When ripe the fruit can be simply broken apart along the seams of its scales, each scale on the outside reflecting a big black seed on the inside surrounded by a layer of fruit a bit like lychee's but more giving, and tasting more of pear and apple, mild and kind of funny. While maybe not mind-bogglingly delicious, falling short of such delicacies as fine blushed mangoes, the sitaphal is good fun, I must say, and the sound of seed after seed hitting my plate is oddly reassuring of good things to come, that perhaps life will go on improving with every fulfilling plink. (This may be quite an exaggeration, and I don't think I actually gain personal restitution through eating this fruit, but I like the idea of being able to do so.)
The Mish Mash:
One of the neat parts of having been here for a while, especially in a city that really is relatively metropolitan and cosmopolitan, is starting to see the parts for the whole, no longer just experiencing this place as “India” but rather as a rather special condition within a larger Indian culture, and made up of a huge number of influences, but local and from abroad. Especially comparing this place to my experience in Chandigarh, a city of a very strong Panjabi and Sikh culture with many fewer complexities and aberrations thrown into the mix, I've definitely come to appreciate what a neat mixed up place this is. I also feel like I'm a part of it all, an Amerikan Bideshi here for long enough to pick up a number of local customs, habits, and cultural tid-bits, while decidedly preserving and projecting huge bits of my own cultural perspective and exuding it through my thoughts and actions. There's a certain giddy thrill that comes from recollecting a particular night or day, realizing what a funny mixture of things have all cooperated or contested to form whatever experience might have just occurred. For instance, last night I had a couple of other Amerikans over for dinner, a celebration of raw foods over the generally over-cooked squishiness of Indian food, but tinged yellow with turmeric and eaten with lemons and onions in big hunks, a very Indian culinary habit. After, we went to the house of a Bengali friend they had made at a Baul concert, a rather spaced-out man nearing 50 with a son in his low teens, and a French live-in (lover?) of 29 years who's been here for a few months, bearing stories of Europe and acidic fly-bites from the Sudan. The concept of the 'third culture' came up in conversation, the idea of identities and cultures emerging out of mixed contexts and contributions which got me wondering if in fact I'm slowly becoming part of this third culture. Do you have to be born into it, its ambiguity developing from a geographically contorted childhood and a confused sense of nationality, or can the third culture be developed and appropriated through a mix of preserving one's own culture while adapting and settling into a new one, neither remaining fully separate or really assimilating, but straddling the line, contributing while simultaneously absorbing and filtering? At least I have been developing this pleasing ambiguous feeling that surges up whenever (usually grammatically poor) Bengali dribbles out of my mouth without me noticing, or I understand bits of Hindi being shouted across the street mixed up with popular English – all of these linguistic aspects tied up into cultural and geographical activities and identities of those speaking them. But I'm digressing...
The rickshaw ride over was complicated by the late hour and the fact that our directions were given in terms of a sweet shop (Bengali: Mishti Dokan) by the name of Mithai, which literally means sweet in Hindi, leading to the rickshaw-wallah thinking we were looking for any ol' sweet shop at 11 at night, when of course they were all closed. The situation was rectified with a little bit of Bengali that the guy understood, though I think the lesson from this and many other experiences I've had these past few weeks is that I really need to reinforce what little Hindi I know from last year and build upon it over this next year, because nobody is ever really speaking only Bengali or Hindi or English, but rather a mash of all of them, and it's come in handy when I've known both the Bengali and the Hindi of certain words, and always a bit embarrassing when I only know the Bengali, or detrimental and problematic when I only know the English. So, in addition to my goal of getting good at the harmonica, I now have the goal of learning Hindi. See, it's a cultural mish-mash! It's great!
A pleasing cap to the evening took the form of strange late night religiosity. While walking through my neighborhood on my way home, aside from rickshaw-wallahs sleeping beside their carriages and the packs of dogs dozing nearby, the only other people out at that hour were small packs of young men and the occasional woman, jingling away with some kind of religious accoutrement for whatever holiday it apparently is. They were mostly dressed in a strong orange-saffron, strips tied around their heads and wider strips forming lungis for down below. Slightly flexible sticks with weights and bells on each end sat upon their shoulders, so that the bells would chime and clang with each step. Chants of unfamiliar words reverberated against the barren canyon-walls and a light tinkling silence was left in their wake. I could still hear them in the shower.
