On winter afternoons, when my mother had hair reaching up to the end of her aanchal ( pallu ) and my brother’s face had not yet been ploughed by shaving razors, the three of us sat with our back to the sun and ate oranges. This seems so long ago that I’m not always sure it really happened — but what verifies the presence of these afternoons, unaudited everywhere except in our hearts, where things still stick longer than any glue, is the sound of my mother’s nervous precautionary warning: “Don’t eat the seeds”. These oranges came from the hills of Mirik — smaller than the better-known Nagpur oranges, they were sweeter and fresher. Perhaps because they’d only travelled a couple of hours to reach where we lived, instead of the tiring journey inside crates in trucks from western India, their skin was still sharp and young. Sitting on the terrace, hoping for our backs to be magnets that would attract the feeble winter sun, my brother and I learnt to be adults. For, of all fruits I know, it is eating an orange — and, later, cutting a pineapple — that turns us into adults. Pinching out recalcitrant web-like strings from the body of the orange, and then its pips, in the cup of palms demands a kind of sophistication that is not natural to childhood. In spite of the sun on our backs and its taste inside our mouths, that orange light caramelised inside oranges, and the citrusy scent of holidays, there was always the sound of fear — “Don’t swallow the seeds”. At night my brother and I lay confessing and worrying about this. Would we really wake up to find an orange tree emerging from our broken skulls or ruptured stomachs?

We ate many orange seeds, and watermelon seeds too; the latter even more scary for us — the watermelon, heavy as it was, possibly weighed more than us, at least in our imagination. Soon enough, with increasing height and appetite, I grew addicted to eating one kind of seed. This was the jackfruit seed, and it was the only reason I tolerated summer. Whether fried, put in dal or in vegetable preparations, I searched for them and finished eating them before anyone had had a chance. When my grandmother came to live with us, my attention came to be divided — I couldn’t decide whether the pumpkin seeds that she scooped out of its body and then dried and fried for us were tastier than jackfruit seeds. All this was before the West discovered the health benefits of having seeds.

The seeds, when gnashed between teeth or swallowed, never went on to grow into plants. There was great relief in this but also a certain disappointment. It’d have been nice to see a plant grow from inside a human, turning the head into something resembling a flower pot.

In fairy tales about childless kings, sadhus often ask his queens to eat a paste of seeds and roots to bear a child. In the inexplicable pattern of these stories, the first and second wives, in spite of consuming the largest share of the concoction, fail to conceive. The third wife does, and in these tales her human child is often substituted with a dog or monkey. But what I find interesting is the belief that seeds will perform the role of semen, that seeds, also a metaphor, can produce not just their own kind but something different from them. It’s a great leap of the imagination, this evidence of the multi-species instinct thousands of years ago, and I sometimes wonder where this accommodative spirit disappeared with the coming of “progress” and “development”.

All these thoughts returned to me as I read a news report about a fig seed revealing the secret of a man’s death in Cyprus. Ahmet Herguner had gone missing about 40 years ago, and his sister had suspected that he’d died, like many of his countrymen of the time, fighting on behalf of Turkish Cypriots against Greek Cypriots. A few months ago, a researcher working for the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) wondered how a fig tree could grow in these unexpected surroundings in Paraklisa, and began investigating. He discovered to his amazement that the fig tree had grown from a seed inside the dead man’s body, which was found near the tree. Reports later suggested that the body was found several metres away from the roots of the tree, which could not have grown from a seed inside Herguner’s stomach. But his family believes it grew inside the stomach. This news report immediately reminded me of a few agro-based companies now offering to turn human remains to a tree of their choice. It’s one that comes from the same multi-species imagination that created those fairy tales, and it’s interesting to see the trajectory of how it’s moved with the creation of the new sciences. Ever since I read the report about the fig-man, I’ve been eating seeds not with conditioned caution but care — who knows, swallowing a pumpkin or sunflower seed might be the only way to become a tree.

 

BLINKSUMANA
 

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree;

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri

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