When I went to school, my mother used to pack me a lunch. Two rotis and some vegetable curry packed into a steel tiffin box with 2 compartments to prevent the curry from making the rotis soggy. Although Anjum and my kids will find it hard to believe, at that time I wasn’t much of an eater. Most of my rotis got flung in the air so that I could watch the kites hovering in the sky, swoop down and grab them in mid flight. Such a spectacular sight. After lunch, I’d walk out to the vendors right outside our school gate to see what I could buy with the twenty five or fifty paise I had in my pocket. Sometimes I bought a few marbles to play with. Sometimes that squiggly wire through which you pushed a small tin blade fan and sent it a few feet up in the sky and then watched it twirl back down to the ground. The helicopter. Simple pleasures. There was also fruit for sale. Like ber, which Google tells me is called the jujube fruit in English. There were a few kinds of bers we could buy. The small red ones which we called chanya-manya were tart and occasionally and delectably popped in your mouth. The bigger golden yellow ones, the size of an egg, were meatier and sweeter, but more expensive. And the more common ones, the size of cherries, some of which were raw and bitter, some just right, some over rip and mushy and some just plain rotten. Kinda like a box of chocolates, which at that age I didn’t even know existed. However my favorite fruit to buy was the guava, or the peru, as we called it in Marathi, apparently as a reference to the country Peru, where the fruit may have first been cultivated. Depending on the size of the fruit, the price varied. Twenty five paise for the one the size of a lemon and fifty for the apple sized one. Now I pay four dollars at the Mexican store to buy the ones that come from Thailand. That’s well over three hundred rupees. It’s ridiculous. But, oh well. Buying the right quava can be tricky. Too green and they are hard to bite and lacking flavor. Too yellow and they are mushy and slightly pungent. The fruit must be firm and should have a light green color, just this side of yellow. My favorite way to eat them is by cutting it into bite sized pieces, sprinkling it with a bit of salt and chilli powder, a pinch of sugar and some lemon juice. I”ve grown up calling this peru ka raita. Sure, the purists reading this will be like, yo, raita is prepared with yoghurt, and what you have with biryani. Whatever. Biryani and yoghurt raita may be the food of kings, but this simple dish, full of flavors and memories, is worthy of any Michelin star restaurant.