Spice of Life | Child’s play: Forgotten fruit of climbing trees

The other day, while picking up my son from school, an ordinary afternoon took a nostalgic turn.

A group of men sitting on the roadside near Rakh Bagh on Ludhiana’s Club Road with large cane baskets piqued my son’s curiosity — and mine. We stopped to take a look. The baskets were full of vibrant red and yellow mulberries, their wriggly appearance amusing and fascinating to my little one. I bought him a handful and we resumed our journey home.

As he popped the sweet and tangy berries into his mouth, I found myself drifting down memory lane. I told him how, in my childhood, we never had to buy mulberries or even guavas, for that matter. Back then, these fruits were not meant to be bought, rather they hung freely from trees that lined our neighbourhoods and schoolyards.

My son listened to my childhood tales with keen interest, wide-eyed at the thought of us swinging from tree branches and racing up trunks. I told him how we learned to climb trees from trial and error — and how those lessons came with scratches on our arms and legs as we scrambled to fetch the ripest, most tempting fruits. We always made sure to collect some for our siblings, carefully tucking the best ones into our pockets like little treasures.

I remember how we would spend the afternoons — never cooped up inside for a siesta, but out on bicycles, or better yet, up in the branches of fruit-laden trees in the nearby military ground, a government school behind our house or at a railway institute, where we as children had free access. Our version of a treat wasn’t a chocolate or a candy but a guava or a mulberry plucked from a branch, often unwashed and shared among friends. We would laugh at the rare vendor who dared to sell guavas — why pay for something we could get in abundance for free?

Monkeys and birds were our co-conspirators, often competing with us for the ripest fruit. Mangoes, jujube (ber) and jamun were fair game too — we’d throw stones or shake the branches just right to make them fall. The act of gathering the fruit was just as joyful as eating it.

Today, urbanisation has claimed those trees. The fruit-bearing giants of our childhood have vanished, replaced by concrete and neatly trimmed ornamental plants. Children now learn about mulberries from textbooks or see them in online images. Their adventures are confined to screens, their afternoons filled with classes and gadgets instead of the rustling leaves and sticky fingers of outdoor play.

I sometimes wonder if today’s children will ever know the magic of getting their shirts stained with jamun juice or the thrill of balancing on a high branch to reach that perfect mango. As I shared these stories with my son, I realised I wasn’t just telling him about my childhood — I was passing on a piece of a world that’s slowly disappearing. Maybe one day, mulberries won’t just be something to buy. Maybe, if we try hard enough, our children will find their own trees to climb — and their own memories to make.

tarsem.deogan@htlive.com

The writer is the Ludhiana bureau head of Hindustan Times