Dear Reader,
Social media platforms have decided that I am partial to the pineapple. I get bombarded with pineapple-related posts whenever I wander into the wonderland of Instagram or X. The latest is a reel on how lonely hearts in Spain are reportedly using the fruit to find their match while grocery-shopping in a supermarket chain—they keep the fruit upside down in their shopping cart as a hint that they are on the lookout for potential partners. When the cue is picked up, the carts clash and love happens. Curiouser and curiouser, I would say.
But the pineapple does have something that stokes our imagination—the obsession with it goes back a long way, to the time when it was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in Brazil in 1493. In Europe, it became a symbol of affluence, luxury, and prestige because only the super-rich could afford it: kings posed for portraits with the pineapple.
The fruit came to India via Portuguese colonisers in the 16th century, impressing Mughal and Deccani aristocrats, who made it into a motif in architecture and textile. We learn from a text from Emperor Jahangir’s times that one pineapple equalled 10 mangoes—and that’s saying something, considering that the mango is considered the king of fruits.
My favourite anecdote about the pineapple is a palimpsest of stories anchored to Kolkata, my home city. The South Park Street Cemetery—a regular tourist draw with its lichen-inscribed monuments and graves of colonial officials, soldiers, and civilians—has a memorial to a young woman called Rose Whitworth Aylmer that is shaped like an inverted ice-cream cone. Local lore says that Rose died of eating too many pineapples.
Rose was the only daughter of Lord Alymer and Catherine Whitworth, and had fallen in love with the middlebrow English poet, Walter Savage Landor, with whom she took long walks in the wind-beaten hills of Wales. Rose was packed off to India reportedly because her family disapproved of the match. Upon her untimely death, Landor immortalised her in a rather stilted poem that is inscribed on the gravestone in the cemetery.
Their aborted love story has all the makings of a tragic romance but for the fact that after landing in exotic India, Rose probably started caring more for pineapples than for her lost Walter. But if we insist on finding a doomed romance here, we can perhaps attribute her fatal pineapple binge to the heartbreak she was going through.
Vikram Seth gives a piquant description of the Park Street Cemetery in A Suitable Boy. As Lata and Amit stroll inside its premises: “A few soggy palm trees stood here and there in clumps, and the cawing of crows interspersed with thunder and the noise of rain. It was a melancholy place. Founded in 1767, it had filled up quickly with European dead. Young and old alike—mostly victims of the feverish climate—lay buried here, compacted under great slabs and pyramids, mausolea and cenotaphs, urns and columns, all decayed and greyed now by ten generations of Calcutta heat and rain.”
The conversation between the potential couple, Lata and Amit, is as anticlimactic as Rose’s story, although the atmospherics for a heady romance—rolling clouds, claps of thunder—are present. Lata keeps correcting Amit’s recitation of Landor’s poem for Rose, and sounds disappointed in him. “[He] has a comfortable sort of face” is the only compliment she can bring herself to give to Amit, who is evidently too full of himself to excite her imagination.
The pineapple’s local competitor, the mango, has also inspired literature, poetry, architectural design, textile motifs, even directed international diplomacy. Sopan Joshi lists the lores of the mango in his much-acclaimed book, Mangifera indica: A Biography of the Mango, reviewed enthusiastically here by Nandini Bhatia. “Joshi’s passion for mangoes is contagious, but so is his journalistic instinct,” she says. Don’t miss the review in the latest issue of Frontline.
Another review worth checking out is Aditya Mani Jha’s analysis of Prayaag Akbar’s novel, Mother India. Akbar, also a journalist, is clear-eyed about the insidiousness of social media and Mother India is an instructive novel for the generation that swears by WhatsApp and Instagram.
I was googling the pineapple (causing the algorithm to infer that I am biased towards the fruit) because I suddenly recalled that my grandmother had a pineapple-shaped hairpin that she would tuck into her voluminous bun after the mandatory evening bath, signalling the end of chores for the day and the start of a phase of leisure. As part of the dinner dressing-up, she would also daub Afghan Snow on her face. Even today, dusks smell of Afghan Snow for me.
I will be back soon with more tales of fruits and face creams. Until then,
Anusua Mukherjee
