Kalpavriksha: Celebrate the Banana Republic

With its amazing variety of delicious use, the banana and its tree are a multi-treat for the connoisseur. As summer arrives, it's time for a banana revolution
Ratna Raman Delhi

When we were children, we made the annual hometown trip to Madras and Chidambaram, the residence of both maternal and paternal grandparents, and travelled what seemed interminably long distances by trains, packed in third-class compartments. Five of us, three hungry children and two worn out adults in the undulating heat, sought refuge by reading Enid Blytons bought off the Monday market streetside vendors on Bank Street and devouring vast quantities of homemade food.

First, we demolished quantities of 'poori aloo', which would otherwise go bad, the aloo having even less resistance than any of us to the onslaught of hot weather once it had been cooked. Other meal times were garnished with tamarind rice, curd rice, rice vadaams and sago vadaams that came out of large blue 'Sway' tins that were carted especially for the occasion. When we started our journey, replete with tiffin carrier, real plastic plates and tumblers and drinking water, we also carried a large bunch of bananas.

In fact, we knew our destination by a fruit map. Southward bound journeys were marked by the arrival of loose jacket oranges or guavas at Nagpur, when almost half the journey was over. The arrival of sapotas (which Octavio Paz declares is a Mexican import to India or cheekus, as they are referred to, in North India) on the borders of Andhra Pradesh, brought to us the certain knowledge that we were but a few hours from Madras.

One halt at Andhra Pradesh remains forever etched in my mind. As our train pulled in slowly, on the parallel track was a stationary goods train and from its bogeys men were unloading reed baskets of humongous mangoes. A porter had dropped a basket, the thin woven reeds split and large mangoes rolled out everywhere. As he scrambled to collect them and put them back, he looked up and saw us, three grubby heat-shrunk kids, looking wistfully out of the window. Before any of us knew it, my brother held the fruit in cupped hands and as we looked up to thank the porter, awed and dazed by the unexpected gift, the train had begun to pick up momentum.
At the scheduled stop wiry men and young boys got on to the train with baskets of sapotas and we stocked up on the fruit for all our relatives, storing them in the multipurpose plastic buckets that had assisted us in bathing earlier on in the journey. Armed with fruitful gifts we reached Madras and then sometimes boarded yet another train to Chidambaram, finally concluding our journey at Vilangi Amman Koil Street via bullock cart. 

The rest of the vacations we gorged on mangoes and jackfruit and the sapotas, but the most memorable of all our fruit journeys was in the veritable feast of bananas that the south of India spread out for us.