Rain. The pavement market is deserted. Vendors shelter under awnings and watch their tarped carts wearily. Anybody who rushes out in this deluge to shop for lunch must be either madly improvident or improvidently mad.
I’m not here to shop for lunch. I’m here to confront one of my deepest fears. I’m here to tame a crocodile.
***
Crocodiles glisten, sated and torpid, fusiform torsos humped against the rain. They are a rich swamp green, easily mistaken for vegetation, till a silver lash of tail betrays the inner reptile. The knobbly hide has malevolent glint, it slumbers on the verge of a fanged awakening.
‘‘I”ll take two.”
‘‘Only two?”
He lifts a dark green pair by their tails and pops them into a plastic bag.
I hurry home before I can change my mind and abandon them at the gate.
***
The pith is so bland and trusting, the seeds so tender and guileless, it is almost like eating a baby. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ Istock
They are uncomfortable on the kitchen counter; they are keeping their distance—or I am.
I still have to face up to reality.
I have invited crocodiles into my kitchen.
Malignant bite
Order Crocodylia doesn’t include Momordica charantia, but it should. The ridged dentate skin of the bitter gourd can easily pass for crocodilian armour. Its inelegant torque argues for splayed low-slung limbs and a grimly propulsive tail. Any moment now it might attempt a stealthy belly crawl across the counter, or gambol in a high walk around the stove, or even break into a fevered gallop and invade the fridge. It lacks visible teeth, but its bite is just as malignant as a crocodile’s.
It is bitter. All my life, I have avoided it like poison.
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That cliché has kept the bitter gourd hovering in the periphery of my vision. I was never going to eat it, but it commanded the kind of horrid fascination one reserves for menace and repulsion: snakes, dictators, social media, AI.
One day, inevitably, I would have to engage with it, but not just yet.
“The bitterness of this gourd—call it karela, pavakkai, uchhe, Momordica, or even inexplicably, winter melon—is simply humiliating. It slaps the tongue in gratuitous insult. Is that memory? Or dread?”
***
What told me it would be this morning?
Here was I, in the midst of a deluge, bursting with toast and marmalade and sipping the brew of sapience, with little ahead to deserve it. Definitely, it was a day to take on dragons. I told myself I wouldn’t have to taste a bitter gourd, simply investigate my aversion for it. And so, I set out for battle.
***
Bitterness is the essence of its being, true, but my aversion to this vegetable is nothing so metaphysical. It is instinctive and visceral. Perhaps its appearance is responsible. I once believed in Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden, and my relationship with house lizards is, to put it mildly, fraught with primal fear. But a vegetable, for god’s sake? It is so remote from Homo sapiens, it can’t even move. Why, then, do I avoid it like poison?
Clichés have a nagging way of forcing confrontations. Is the bitter gourd poisonous?
Yes, it is bitter.
Are all poisons bitter?
How many garden variety poisons are there?
The pavement pharmacy provides ricin from castor beans, cyanide from tapioca, atropine-like compoundsnot just from datura but from an entire constellation of edible Solanum berries including our ubiquitous tomato, and that cherished tuber, the staple of stodge, the homely potato.
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Centuries of horticulturists and cooks have coaxed all of them out of malevolence, but they were killers to begin with. Avoiding them was evolutionary cool.
The reviled karela has a pretty flower. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ Istock
‘‘Bitter” taste receptors are situated not only on the widely advertised back of the tongue, but also in outposts ectopic, and frankly, bizarre. Why would we need taste receptors in the nose or intestines? Yet cells that perceive bitterness stipple these organs. Apparently, they double as detectors of noxious chemicals present in the bacteria we inhale or ingest. The ability to detect bitterness seems protective in every possible manner, and the body seems to recognise bitterness as harm.
Oh really?
I consider all the bitter stuff I’ve guzzled this morning: coffee, cocoa, orange peel—and all I feel is appetite.
But the bitterness of this gourd—call it karela, pavakkai, uchhe, Momordica, or even inexplicably, winter melon—is simply humiliating. It slaps the tongue in gratuitous insult. Is that memory? Or dread?
Emboldened, I pick up the knife.
I chop half a croc into a quick brunoise, toss it in salt, and turn my back on it.
I examine the cut surface of the other half to discover where the essence of bitterness lies.
In the puffy white pith? Or in the corky seeds, so carelessly embedded therein?
The pith is so bland and trusting, the seeds so tender and guileless, it is almost like eating a baby.
I spit it out hastily and return to the briny bits.
They float in a puddle of juice, a delicious clear grass green. I drain it carefully into a spoon.
Bracing myself, I taste it.
It is very aromatic. Unlike the perfume of the uncut karela, this is young, brash, racy.
But bitter?
Too saline and too fragrant, and gone before it is tasted, who can tell?
On a lunch date
The peridot glitter of the chopped karela has a rough green scent that calls for company.
A slender dark green chili would be a natural, but not for me.
A toe of ginger, then? A slice of green mango, half an onion?
And because it looks left out, tomato, just a succulent wedge?
Everything chopped to a mirepoix.
A bruised leaf of coriander, just one.
And a wristy, masterful, squeeze of lime.
A few grains of sugar and salt to start the conversation—
And I have a lunch date with a crocodile!
***
The rain has stopped. A stray sunbeam strolls in and lights up the gems in the bowl.
Karela navratan sparkles in the mouth too: crisp, crunchy, sweet, tart, salt, acid.
And bitter?
Not at all.
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right (Roli, 2023).
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