Kunal
Mukherjee

I wonder about that. Perhaps because I love to read so much and spent an entire childhood voraciously devouring books. Or perhaps because both my grandmothers were accomplished writers and had a passion for language and literature. My great-grandmother wrote her last poem at the age of 99 in Bengali. Or perhaps because I grew up encouraged to read anything I wanted, though I seldom saw my parents anything but The Deccan Chronicle newspaper.

Papita or Papaya, is one of the ubiquitous treasures of the tropics, but nowhere so revered and exalted as in India. Its medicinal qualities and benefits to health and digestion are legendary. It was also the reason for my first sex education talk at the age of eight.

All through summer, my father bought raw papayas from the market. I loved papaya chutney made in the Bengali style in the early summer months. Thin slices of raw papaya were cooked in light sugar syrup with a little fresh lime juice. It is a very simple dish, and is delicious when eaten with the curries of the summer season when the weather is very warm.

When folks in San Francisco ask me about my trip to India, I tell them about the friends and family I met, the incredible food and restaurants and the incredibly modern and well designed buildings, I skip the part about the near disastrous start or my attack of food poisoning or the cancelled flights. Because while I could have easily done without those challenges, my trip was still just fantastic. Still, here is an account of the very avoidable and near disastrous beginning of the trip.

I started going to the library when I was six, insisting on taking home books about little boys like Sambo who was chased by the tigers and fairy tale girls like Thumbelina who slept in an impossibly small walnut shell. I still remember going with my mother to the library and triumphantly bearing the books home, filled with delicious anticipation at the promise of a world of magic, about to unfold. To me, books were not just bound and printed papers that built an entire universe of characters the moment I started reading the first page.

That is what it feels like, to go to India. A psychic friend once told me that fish always prefer to go back to the temperature of the water they were born in and that we humans tend to do the same, on a metaphysical level. Not sure how scientific that observation was, but I will admit that it takes just a day or two of being back in India before I settle down comfortably in an environment that could not be more different than the one I live in. Pleasantly tolerant of non-stop honking of cars and noisy traffic, breathing nonchalantly the fumes of pollution, looking at strangers in the eye for no reason at all and feeling unaccountably connected to them—my old habits come back to me so quickly. Jay walking? No problem.