Fruit from home
About a year ago, before I started my PhD, one day, my supervisor asked if I had fifteen minutes to talk. I did. I was just an intern back then, so it's not like I was doing some ground-breaking work. That's when he broke the news to me, he told me that he would start a post in a different institute, in the north end of Marseille. And immediately, I got anxious. I was, at the time, living in the southern tip, far away from any civilisation, closer to the boars and the dry flora of the Mediterranean than the hubbub of the city. I did not want to go to the north, but I really wanted to do this PhD.
“It will be fun! You can rent an apartment for quite cheap in downtown Marseille. Right?”
“Right”.
Wrong! I absolutely did not want to move downtown. I loved the fact that I could just go out and be in nature. Sure, it was isolating and going back home after a late night trip from the city was a pain in the rear, but I liked it. It was so different from the way I grew up. There would always be people, there would always be noise, there would always be some sort of distraction.
Later that day, I messaged him saying that it was very important for me to stay in the south. I was scared that I was being capricious but he took it in good sport.
Fast forward to a year later, and I did end up having to go to the north, but only twice a week. A good compromise, I would say. Thanks to my diva-dom, I guess, I was able to stay for the majority of the week in the south. I ended up moving out of the southern tip to a less isolated place but that was still in the south.
I started going to the northern campus as a visiting student in the beginning of November. It was starting to get a bit foggy and cloudy here. (I’ve said before that gloomy weather in a city like Marseille is especially painful to the heart because it is supposed to be sunny.) As it turns out, every time I would go to the northern campus, it ended up being gloomy in the city. It would be gloomy on the other days as well, but I didn’t seem to mind that much. It was the gloomy-north correlation that I seemed to be fixated upon, perhaps as a way to subconsciously justify that I was right from the beginning in my hunch of not wanting to go there. It was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Every time I come here, it's grey and ugly”, I remarked once to my supervisor.
“Well, you’re saying that for the third time now”, he laughed it off.
It's springtime, and I have been enjoying going to the north now, more than ever. Sure, I could perhaps do away with the 2 hour commute and the fatigue that it accompanies, but things could be worse—I could be living downtown!
One of the main reasons why I have been enjoying the north is because of the mustard blooms—there is a field of vibrant yellow mustard flowers blooming wildly on the northern campus. They remind me of the vibrant marigolds that adorned the puja room back home, each flower a symbol of positivity and hope. Maybe it's the inherent cheerfulness of the yellow hue, or perhaps it's the way these unexpected blooms burst forth. Do others have the same connection with these flowers?
I find myself on phone calls with my mother back home showing her these blooms and keeping her updated on their growth. Back in the concrete jungle that is Delhi, I never saw these things. I actually didn’t even know what a mustard plant looked like before my mother pointed it out.
And today, there was another revelation. On one of my many breaks from work where I wandered off to explore new patches of land near the campus, I was on another one of those phone calls with my mother, showing her all the greenery that I could see.
“Turn around!”, she said with firmness. The usual lilt in her voice on our calls vanished. There was a sudden urgency in it.
“What's that purple flower that you just passed?”
I turned around.
“Is that…”
A jolt of surprise crackled down the phone line.
“Ambili bhendi!” I didn’t know what she just said.
“Stop moving. Put the flowers in frame”, she demanded, her voice even sharper.
After a brief pause, she exclaimed, “Yes! This is ambili bhendi! We used to eat these raw when we were little. Sooo sour.”
“So is that the fruit of this plant or…”
“Yeah, come back after 15 days and call me then. I’ll show you how to get the fruit. You don’t have to eat it raw like we did. You can make khatta out of it! Just replace the tomatoes with this fruit.”
I can’t help but chuckle at how naïve I was a year ago to think that going to the north would be devastating.
'Back in the concrete jungle that is Delhi, I never saw these things. I actually didn’t even know what a mustard plant looked like before my mother pointed it out.'
As a child, my cousins would come up to the hills to meet the family, and the joy and awe in their eyes just walking around Nainital used to confuse me a lot. 'Why do they act like they don't have these things back in Delhi', I used to think. I realized years later what a rough deal they had. No cool, glistening rocks after a rainstorm, no casually collecting ferns and creepers, no sights of weeping willows dipping into lakes: just lengths and lengths of highways winding around depressing high-rises. No kid should be deprived of the wonders of nature. It's terrible we haven't come up with a solution to have nature and progress march hand in hand. I'm happy you now have the opportunity of surrounding yourself with nature's peace and quiet. It's spiritual nourishment like no other.