Buying fruit back home in India is a weekly ritual. Shopping for fruit in Abu Dhabi takes me back to my childhood and to my homeland – and yet a little further around the globe too with each new taste, smell and colour.

In India, people make their way to their favourite grocer while brushing off calls from others trying to win your custom. Mangoes, apples, bananas, melons, oranges and grapes are heaped in straw baskets; jostling with other shoppers, haggling, touching the fruit for firmness, breathing in the scent and sampling despite the swarming flies, is all part of the process – and the fun.

Stealing mangoes and cashews was my favourite pastime as a child in my aunt’s village in Karnataka, though my nefarious activities were brought to a sudden stop. I had climbed up the tree to pluck a mango but the twig snapped too close for comfort and the acidic twig sap drizzled in a horizontal line right across my face; I walked around with blisters for days.

At school, we used to play a game called Names, Places, Animals and Things; we would take turns reciting the alphabet until somebody yelled stop. If I were stopped at “M” I could say “Maggie”, the girl next to me “Montreal”, her friend would say “mole” and so on. Playing this game to list fruits alphabetically I invariably got stuck at E, I, Q V, Y, and Z.
Years later, shopping here in Abu Dhabi for fruit involves none of the jostling, no haggling and no flies; only heaps of fruits from all over the world – nectarines, persimmons, kiwi, durian, snake fruit, dragon fruit, mandarins and more. Unlike my incomplete alphabetical fruit list as a child, these days my task has become to try and taste every kind of edible fruit available. The exploration of these fruits makes me feel like I have travelled to every corner of the globe without living the city.

My fruit travels began as a child with apples from Shimla, oranges from Nagpur, avocados and plums from Ooty, plantains from Kerala, mangoes from Ratnagiri and grapes from Bangalore. These days my journey continues in Abu Dhabi with British blackberries, Pakistani mangoes, Egyptian watermelon and Malaysian durian. On my most recent return to India, I chanced upon kiwis and American pears and felt as if I was back in Abu Dhabi – just with the added, old familiarity of haggling and flies.

Preethi Vittalnath