Seed of Sita

The monsoon is winding down now in Bombay, though you’d never know it from the torrents of water that rush through the streets faster than the drains can carry them away. On the fruit stands of Warden Road, Alphonso mangoes are a distant memory, jackfruit have long since disappeared and jamun too have faded away, replaced by mounds of papaya and guava. Apples are trickling into the city from the cooler climes of northern states, joining the standard array of tiny bananas the size of two hooked fingers and sweet limes the size of baseballs. These are delicious treats for the fruit inclined, but there is another fruit stacked high in the stands - the belle of the ball, loaded by the dozen into the bags of customers: during the later half of the monsoon in Bombay, it is the season of the Sitiphal, a deeply weird, delicious and racy fruit.

One of any number of migrant edibles that thrive in India, Sitiphal most likely came from the West Indies some time in the mid- to late-17th century. The name Sitiphal translates as the seed of Sitta, consort of Shiva the Destroyer. Shiva needs no introduction other than to say it’s his world: we are only living in it. And apparently, we are also eating his consort’s seed. Also called Sharifa (noble fruit) by some in India and called Annona Squamosa by nobody in Latin, I think Sitiphal is an excellent name, far better than that fig leaf of an English handle, the Custard Apple. Calling Sitiphal any kind of apple is like calling cunnalingus “holding hands”. Apple is PG, custard apples maybe pg-13, but Sitiphal is definitely rated X.

The true blue nature of Sitiphal is not immediately evident upon viewing. To the uninitiated eye the fruit might look a little gross: its thick greenish grey skin - the color palette of nausea - covered in small, sometimes moldy knobs like blunt diamonds that mimic the symmetry of leaves. Its size and shape is a dead ringer for the body of an artichoke, but upon closer inspection, the skin is whole and gnarled, lending the fruit the look of a prehistoric, even alien pod that will devour you. As such, it is not immediately clear how you would eat Sitiphal, except you know you don’t want that skin in your mouth. This is enough to turn many newcomers off completely, but it held my attention with a kind of gruesome fascination born of astonishment: people eat that? And live?

Awesome.

I stopped a fellow shopper one day to ask how she ate them. This was in part because my mind had turned Sitiphal into the fugu of fruit and in part because I had previously bought some guava from a flatbed cart in the Fort district, and the guavawalla wanted to slice it up and dust it in salt, so I figured maybe there was something I needed to know about the Sitiphal. But there wasn’t. You cut it open and eat what’s inside, other than the seeds.

So when the Sitiphal grows soft and malleable, rippling in your hand, and the skin looks like it is beginning to rot, with flecks of what seem to be mold in the creases of the knobs, well, then it is time to dine. I ate my first one with my friend Carol Alter, who instructed me to use my hand to open the fruit. When ripe, the skin is soft and yielding, and opened easily as the fruit tore in my hand. There is an oval slit running down the middle of each half of the exposed fruit, framed by rows of curved candy corn shaped nubs of very moist flesh attached at the base of the skin, nestled together like couples spooning. The sticky flesh is whitish with a slick sap near the skin, and you can see a hint of the hard, shiny seeds like teardrops buffed black by polish that are hidden within each one. The inside of each half of a Sitiphal looks alive, pulsing from the vibrations of your hand, wet and succulent, with a sweet and heavy floral perfume. It hits you primally, viscerally and you cannot help but think of sex. To some it is gross, to some it can be tolerated or enjoyed in moderation, but there are some who can never get enough

From here you can take it wherever you might take a great fruit. In Bombay, folks scoop out the insides and sort out the seeds and then cover the flesh in sweet cream, or make Sitiphal kulfi or Sitiphal milk shakes. You could also just grab half a torn Sitiphal and spoon the flesh into your mouth, spitting out the seeds as if eating a watermelon. Or don’t even use a spoon at all and just dive in and enjoy the slippery flesh directly, without anything coming between you and the seed of Sitta.