My daughter asked me if I had checked out her Christmas Wish List on Amazon. We don’t celebrate Christmas, I said. Yes, we do, she said. No we don’t I shouted back. And a few minutes later I was clicking through the list getting stuff she doesn’t need that I know I shouldn’t buy. Poor parenting, at its very worst.
For much of my childhood my father worked in Bombay while I went to school in Pune. Every weekend my father took the Deccan Queen to came back home but not before picking up something for me at the railway station. Usually a comic book, an Indrajal comic, with valiant heroes like the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician and Bahadur, the brave Indian protagonist who single handedly took on the scourge of the dacoits of the Chambal valley. Sometimes he got Commando comics, which retold tales of bravery and courage from the two world wars. Like the young boy who wanted to be a pilot but was not qualified to be one and ended up being a gunner on one of the bombers. During the Battle of Britain his plane gets shot down and with all the flying crew dead and the huge plane hurtling down towards his hometown, the brave lad pushed his way through to the cockpit and steered the plane away from the town center and crashed into an empty field in a ball of fire. And sometimesI got the much lighter Disney comics with Mickey Mouse and Goofy and Donald and Scrooge McDuck.
Often, along with the books there was a thin plastic bag with fruit in it. A kilo of Thompson seedless grapes, or a couple of red apples from Kashmir, or oranges from Nagpur. The fruit in India I remember was not as large or pretty as what we get in the US, but it was so much more flavorful. And what enhanced the favor even more was when my mother combined them all into a fruit salad. Yum. yum. yum.
Find fruits of all kinds, bananas and apples and oranges and grapes, and chop them into bite size pieces. Then make some vanilla custard. I use the Ahmed custard mix that you get at most Indian stores. Inexplicably the instructions are printed on the inside of the box, and I am too lazy to empty the powder into a bottle to read them so I boil some milk and then add some powder and stir till the mixture gets thick, realize its too thick, so add some more milk which it makes really watery so I add some more powder and eventually this trial and error method gets it to a consistency that’s kinda chalta hain. Add heaps of sugar to the mix and then after the custard has cooled down a bit, pour it over the fruit. Serve chilled and enjoy while reading a comic book.