Jackfruit

America suffers from a tragedy of flavors. Lemonlime, strawberry-kiwi, dragonfruit, acai berry, guava, jackfruit. Go into any supermarket and you can find sodas and fruit drinks of every flavor imaginable, made with 2% juice from every fruit on the planet. But how many of those fruits have we eaten? How many of those flavors would we recognize in anything but soft drink form?

The other day I ate a jackfruit. It's strange to say the least, a lumpy oblong thing the size of a watermelon. Its thick but supple peel is covered in tiny round spikes, like the skin of some alien. Inside is a thick cylindrical core surrounded by oddly shaped sections about the size of an egg. My aamaa scoops these out with a large metal ladle and plops them down onto a clean plate--off white and sticky looking.

I go to put one in my mouth, but my host sister Uma squeals for me to wait. I spit it back out onto the spoon, and the whole family laughs. Giggling, Uma squeezes one of the sections open. Each one contains a hard, smooth pit the size of a ping-pong ball. Putting the fruit back in my mouth, I work the pit out with my tongue and teeth and spit it onto the plate. Uma claps her approval.

This edible part is sweet and smooth. My pallet isn't used to its subtle taste, but when I closed my eyes and concentrated I thought (or imagined) that I could detect some of the same flavor from the jackfruit Vitamin Water I used to drink back in New York. Eating the actual fruit, however, is a completely different experience. The texture is strange, gelatinous and stringy. As I slide it around my mouth thoughtfully, I wonder about what other "flavors" are like in their original form. What does a dragonfruit look like? What's an acai?

I enjoy the sorts of sweet, flavorful beverages that we have every day in the states, and, based on the popularity of coca-cola and fanta, I'm pretty sure most Nepalis do too. What concerns me is that these drinks claim association with a fruit they bare little or no resemblance to. Like parks of concrete or astro-turf, our tragedy of flavors makes believe that we are close to nature, that we've experienced the "real thing." I feel unnerved and slightly betrayed at how different a real life jackfruit is to the soda-inspired one of my imagination. But this is the true mixed blessing of travel, and perhaps the most compelling reason to do it. It shatters our illusions and assumptions, and gives us a more accurate, more complete, and, in the end, more meaningful view of the world. I can't pretend that it isn't hard or disappointing sometimes; the India of real life could never be quite as magical as the India of my imagination. Still, eggs and omelets, right? More and more I'm finding my imagination racing further and faster than it has in years, not crushed but fueled by this double edged knowledge.

My adoptive host brother Ganess brought home another jackfruit yesterday. I've been eying it in anticipation as it sits quietly in the corner of the kitchen. My aamaa promises that we'll eat it tomorrow, but I'm not sure if I can wait. The desire to taste it again, to further enrich my understanding of that one tiny aspect of the world, is a difficult one to deny. Knowledge, once tasted, is transformative. It grows in you a second stomach, one that digests experiences for the nutrients of tolerance and better judgment they contain. I feel it rumbling now. I'm hungry.