Jujube again, naturally!

It’s ber season! I have a great fondness for this fruit–– every time I buy some, it feels like a delicious gamble. Will they be sweet or bland? Should I let them ripen for a day or so, watching hourly as they turn from green to orange? Should I nibble or should I wait?

The entire season is spent looking for the ideal ber—not too large, not too round, just the right oblong. The middle-sized ones are the best, but people prefer the really large green ones, thinking that they are getting more value for money. The story of Shabari in the Ramayana makes perfect sense to me—one has to taste each fruit to discover if its sweet or not. There are no guarantees in life or in ber.  Experience is all.

Ber. Jujube. Zizyphus mauritiana or Zizyphus nummularia. We go back a long way. My grandparents in Delhi lived in a lovely house with deep windowsills. They were wide enough to curl up and read for hours or watch the rain tip-tap on the huge ber tree just outside the window. We lived on the first floor, so I was nose to nose with the glossy leaves. I don’t really remember getting much fruit from the tree, as kids from the road managed to bring down most of it with carefully aimed rocks and sticks. I didn’t mind that, as I used to do the same thing as child with the ber and mango trees in our neighbourhood. I just loved to watch the tree, even at night, when the leaves waved gently in the night breeze, or when passing headlights swept across the branches, illuminating them for a brief moment.

There was this time that I remember, when I was about 10 or so. We lived in Bhopal, in a gently undulating neighbourhood dotted with sarkari bungalows, gardens and sundry wild patches. My aunt who lived up the hill had a large and very vocal help called Phulwa. She didn’t speak much Hindi but had made it her mission in life to bring unruly children to heel (in those days, the help had a pretty free hand, and mothers rarely gave their kids the benefit of the doubt). One afternoon, my cousin Arvind and I were happily engaged in throwing rocks at the ber tree in the back garden. To this day, I have no idea why that was such a crime. Phulwa appeared out of nowhere, let out an ear-splitting roar, picked up a long broom and charged. It didn’t seem like the time to argue about right and wrong, and we shot off at full speed around the corner of the house, through a hedge and out of the gate.

“Chintu’s house!...shortcut!” yelled my cousin, pounding barefoot ahead of me.

“Yes”, I panted, following him off the road down a path cutting through dry grass, lantana and other thorny shrubs.

This was the famous shortcut to our friend’s home, a popular safe sanctuary with no repatriation laws. Phulwa proved surprisingly nimble, and we could hear her crashing behind us. My nose was filled with the spicy scent of lantana flowers, and my ears with my cousin’s yelps as he stepped on pebbles and thorns.  We stumbled into Chintu’s house and Phulwa gave up the pursuit at the gate, but just to be safe, we hung around until dinnertime, fortified by dosas and homemade murukku. It’s a happy memory, and one that makes me smile every time it pops into my head.

When I began painting plants, I was determined to paint the ber. I found the perfect shape, size and taste in the semi-arid region of western Rajasthan. This time, I looked carefully at the flowers, the leaves, the stems and the trunk. It wasn’t that easy to get it onto paper, but a mix of watercolour and pencil did the job reasonably well.

A Zizyphus variety in Morocco. spina-christi?

Recently, I came across a variety of ber on a dry riverbed in Morocco. It was the Ziziphus spina- christi, so named as it was believed to be the source of Christ’s crown of thorns. It had small leaves, tiny fruit and very long thorns. Standing in the baking sunlight, I did my best to photograph the twisted trunk and branches spreading across the rocks and gravel. Was this the same as the Lote tree in Islam, also called the sidr in the Quran? A folio in the Baburnama at the Met has an illustration of the Lote tree, with ber-like fruit. But there is confusion over whether it is spina-christi or Zizyphus lotus, another variety seen in the near east.

Folio from the Baburnama dated 1598 CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Closer to home, there are 58 historical sites of the Sikhs are named for trees. The Gurudwara Ber Sahib in Sultanpur Lodhi (Kapurthala) is named after a ber tree planted by Guru Nanak. There are of course the two ber trees at Harminder Sahib in Amritsar: The Beri Dukh Bhanjaran and the Beri Baba Budha Sahib.

The more one digs, the more one finds. For the moment though, I need to scout my neighbourhood for ber trees dotted with orange and red!