Jackfruit and Its Tale

Every Saturday morning I would start the car and wait for my mother to come with basket hung by her shoulder for Saturday used to be the vegetable-market day. It used to be just us most days but sometimes the lady house-owner or sometimes her daughter would wish to go to market with us.

The vegetable market in khuruthang, which otherwise remained deserted would be flooded with buyers and sellers agreeing to a price profitable to the vendors and absolutely cheap to the buyers. Only the upper-hand knows how a price of such equation was solved altogether.  

There in the market I had only a little work to do; walk along with my mother and carry in the basket whatever my mother decides to buy for she thought I had no knowledge or a very little knowledge over the selection of vegetables. How my mom selects goods from a heap is a big mystery that my aunt and I are yet to solve. It was once that we were selecting dried fishes from a heap and she picked one from the heap and said, “Pick one of this kind” and raised it in the air. The one she had picked and the ones in the heap looked all the same. My aunt and I would start fishing from the heap and my mom would say again, “Not those, this kind! This kind!” and it would same again.

It was on a certain Saturday market day that I found a huge jackfruit kept for sale. I haggled with the vendor to a comfortable price and paid him hastily before he could change his mind again. I think that day my mom realized, I could bargain quiet well.

As we reached home I watched my mom separating the blobs of eatable fibers from the fruit and I ate it hungrily that morning. One after another blob, I kept on eating.  I ate until I could barely move and just as I stood up after much struggle, my head felt dizzy and somewhere in a distant memory, a long time back, I heard my father telling me, eating a lot of jackfruit fiber-blobs makes a person sick for days. Needless to say I puked that morning and was sick with headache and nausea, precisely jackfruit-nausea, a semi-medical termed I coined that day.

My father often told me that it’s best to be moderate, “Extreme is dangerous.” He would say. I learned it that day; he had always been right.