It was a scorching Saturday afternoon during the dry season and I was barely five years old. I remember sitting in the veranda of my grandparents’ house in Mysore, enjoying the cool of the ceiling fans as my parents, grandparents, and I sipped on cups of homemade chai tea and listened to my grandmother over the revving of engines and constant honking of the streets. My grandmother was recounting the story of how she and my grandfather had settled in the house, which they named Ayodhya after a famous city in the Ramayana. “It was our family home, passed down from your grandfather’s grandfather,” she said to me in Kannada. “The little blue shacks behind the house were where your grandfather’s family used to live—parents, grandparents, and all eight children!”

My parents and I had arrived shortly before, having spent the past three hours on a nauseatingly overcrowded train. Fortunately, I had a habit of allowing the train to rock me to sleep in my mother’s lap. Every Saturday, my parents and I would make the trip from Bangalore to visit. My mother’s parents had themselves moved back to Mysore to retire from the bustle of Bangalore, but in the many years that passed, Mysore, too, had become a victim of urban sprawl. It just so happened that my grandparents’ house now sat in one of the busiest districts in the city surrounded by noisy roads and sprouting businesses. The house was renowned in Mysore for a number of reasons, but among the top three were the steep property valuation, the Saturday night pop-up restaurant called Chaat Spot that my grandmother (a former restaurateur) used to run in the yard with the help of my parents, and the giant jackfruit tree whose heavy branches and dense foliage towered over the busy main road from inside the gated cement yard of the property.

“I planted the jackfruit seeds when I was just about your age,” added my grandfather in our native tongue. “Even I cannot believe how much it has grown.” Unlike my grandmother who was short and stout, my grandfather was very tall and extremely slim. He had always been exceptionally fit from his career in welding and working at a Bangalore steel factory, but just recently he had begun experiencing trouble walking due to a neurodegenerative disease called ataxia that would later take his life. At that moment, though, my grandparents were a carefree and happy couple who even in retirement sought to enjoy life and keep busy. They took long walks at the local park early each morning and were close friends with all of Mysore’s old timers, often hosting Rummy nights at home.

 

I remember staring at the massive jackfruit tree in the yard as it cast its giant shadow over the house. The leaves of the tree were too high to see from where I was, but hidden among them were dozens of jackfruits, giant succulent fruits whose sweet flesh was guarded by spiny skin and sticky sap. I think a single jackfruit must have weighed almost as much as I did at the time. After we finished drinking tea my mother and grandmother took our cups to the kitchen, leaving my father and grandfather conversing in the veranda as I sat on the floor, legs spread wide, playing with a few select toy cars that I had brought to Mysore. My favorite of the set was the auto rickshaw, a miniature model of the yellow-and-black three-wheeled taxis that buzz through streets in every part of India. At that age, I wanted to grow up to be an auto driver mainly because I admired how the drivers wore their uniforms: most would unbutton their shirts all the way down due to the heat.

“So are you all set for America?” I overheard my grandfather ask my father. I remember my heart sinking into my gut. It all started coming back to me: the suddenness of learning that I would be leaving India, the fear of having to move to a new world, and the heavy thought of maybe not seeing my family for a long time. My father had sat me down not more than a month before at our home in Bangalore and explained to me that he was taking a new job in America, and he was going to take my mother and me with him. He told me we’d keep visiting often, but I knew deep down that things were going to be very different.

I remember retreating to my bed after listening to my father discuss moving plans with my grandfather. I curled up in a thin sheet and stared at the slowly spinning ceiling fan, trying to imagine what America must be like. I had just started going to school in Bangalore, held at my teacher’s home just a walking distance from my own house. Although I hated school and was afraid of my teacher who used to hit my hand with a ruler, I imagined school in America being scarier. Influenced by my older cousins who watched American TV shows, I feared being bullied in America and getting picked on for being the foreign kid. I was afraid that I might become friendless.

My entire family from my mother’s side to my father’s side was concentrated in the state of Karnataka; all were in Bangalore with the exception of my grandparents and some distant aunts and uncles. Our family’s friend circle was our family. Weekends were spent going to a cousin’s house and playing with the dozens of children my age while their parents (my aunts and uncles) chased us around with bowls in hand trying to spoon some rice into our mouths. I was scared of leaving the people I knew and loved. My parents in the past several weeks had been encouraging me to speak English with them instead of Kannada. They wanted me to become comfortable with English so I would get along with the other children at American school, but I hated it. I had always spoken Kannada, even though I watched English television and understood it well. I refused to speak English unless I was forced to (often by Western visitors to Mysore who dined at Chaat Spot).

“Look what your Pati prepared for you!” I heard my mom say excitedly as she pulled the sheets off me. My grandmother handed me a bowl of fresh jackfruit; the yellow slices were slimy to the touch but tasted sweeter than sugarcane juice. You would never guess based on its appearance but jackfruit is extremely fibrous on the inside, and its chewiness makes it almost like flavorful edible gum. It has always been my favorite thing to eat. My apprehension melted away with each bite, but my mother could see through my stuffed face. “I know you are nervous about America,” she said, “but home is where your family is, and your father and I will always be with you. Wherever we go, you go.” She said with a warm smile, “It will be fun!” My mother held me in her arms and told me that she had been reading a lot about America, planning out all the adventurous things we would do. We were moving to Pittsburgh, which was relatively close to New York City. “We’ll go see the tallest buildings in the world.”

The rest of the afternoon and early evening was spent transforming the quiet Mysore home into a pop-up restaurant as rehearsed countless times before. From the blue-colored sheds behind the house my father carried stacks of multicolored plastic chairs and foldable tables through the house and into the cement yard. My mother and grandmother spent hours in the kitchen prepping for the fifty or so customers who had reserved a table at Chaat Spot for the night, almost all repeats. My grandfather, moving about using his cane, affixed a chalkboard reading “CHAAT SPOT” twice, in English and Kannada, by string to a nail in the jackfruit tree. I excitedly joined my father in the yard, playing with my favorite plastic cricket bat as I waited for our first guests to arrive. “Why aren’t they here yet?” I kept asking. Chaat Spot customers were often old retirees, and it was not a rare thing for them to bring me a small toy or chocolate from time to time. I used to consider it my tip for helping wait the tables. From the yard, I could smell the tempting aroma of all the spices that were simmering in a large wok with chickpeas, potatoes, and onions on the kitchen stove. The night went well, and our guests left satiated and happy. While Chaat Spot had many options for main courses, there was always only one option for dessert: a refreshing fruit salad comprised of sliced bananas, papaya, mint leaves, and of course jackfruit plucked fresh from the tree.

The next morning after breakfast as my mother and I were in our room preparing to head back to Bangalore, I saw my grandmother reappear in the room holding a plastic bag. “I packed some of the jackfruit seeds for you to take back with you,” she said softly to my mother. “They taste great if you roast them.” She handed my mother a small plastic bag full of flat brown jackfruit seeds. I wondered if maybe I saved some of the seeds, perhaps I could take some to America with me and eventually have my own jackfruit tree. I remember feeling hopeful.

* * *

It was four years later the next time I found myself back at the Mysore house. The jackfruit tree was no longer in the cement yard; all that was left was a waist-high stump next to the gate. A year earlier, my mother had explained to me in English over dinner that the jackfruit tree had to be cut down because the roots were encroaching into the house’s foundation and threatening its stability. “It was either the tree or the house,” she put it. “The tree was being too stubborn.” I was disappointed to find the tree gone and my mother’s words confirmed. Not much else had changed, though, except that shortly after we left India my grandmother stopped running Chaat Spot because it proved too difficult to manage without the help of my parents.

This was my first time back in India since I had left years before, but my father used to travel back rather frequently for work (once every four months or so) as an IT consultant for a company that outsourced a bulk of its technical work to India. From the first few trips he brought back photographs and letters written by my relatives asking about our new lives. My parents and I would reply to them and send our own photographs back with my father to show them. There was a picture of me in a swimming pool learning how to blow bubbles in the water, another of me with my kindergarten teacher holding a paper-plate pizza I had drawn, and one of my family in our furnished living room taken by a neighbor, who had also immigrated from India. Once my father even brought back a wooden cricket bat, but to his disappointment I barely touched it as my neighborhood friends and I preferred to play soccer and video games.

I had acclimatized to America well and rather quickly. Shortly after arriving I started school, and I went from resisting English to choosing to speak it even at home. My parents and I moved twice more, first to Tampa and then to Dallas, where my baby sister Divya was born. “Remember you asked Santa for a baby sister?” I recall my father asking me during our first family Christmas. Apart from a drawing kit, my present was finding out that Divya was on her way. A few months after she was born, my father found a new job that allowed him to travel less frequently and spend more time with his now-larger family, while my mother stayed home in our apartment to take care of my sister and me. About a year later, we bought a small one-story suburban house with two small freshly planted oak trees in the yard. Unfortunately, I never did get around to growing my own jackfruit tree.

So, after four years in a new world, I was back at last for summer vacation. I remember standing in the cement yard of the Mysore house thinking to myself how much smaller everything in India seemed compared to back home in Texas: the tightly placed houses, the narrow roads, the size of stores, even the people. I heard my grandmother call for me from the kitchen. I passed my grandfather who was reading in the veranda; his disease had progressed, and he was now using a walker. “Look what I prepared for you!” my grandmother said excitedly in Kannada. It took me a second to process what she said; I had forgotten some words. On top of the kitchen counter was a freshly butchered jackfruit, the seeds kept aside in a ceramic bowl and slices of meat piled up on the cutting board. “For the first time I had to buy jackfruit from the market,” she said with nostalgia as she used her knife to slide the jackfruit pieces into a clean bowl.

Upon taking a piece into my mouth, my first reaction was that it felt different. It still tasted good, but it was different. This was much less sweet than I anticipated. I remember wondering if this was what jackfruit was supposed to taste like. In Dallas, there are a handful of Indian grocery stores that sell canned jackfruit in a cloyingly sweet sugar syrup, which my mother used to buy for me each time she went to the store remembering how much I loved it in Mysore. I suppose my taste buds could only remember the canned jackfruit with artificially sweetened syrup. Surprisingly, this just felt foreign; it all felt foreign.