I was waiting imptiently for the weather to warm up a bit to make a garden shop run. A deadline for paper submission behind me in the first week of March I decided to go to Barafkhana to get some seeds and seedlings to start the season.
Not good pickings but we decided to get some anyways in case the Corona threat resulted in a lockdown. One of the wiser decisions in early March. The tomatoes, chillies, eggplants were all easy to pick but the gourds were a problem. Really small saplings with only one or two true leaves meant I wasn’t sure what I was buying. The seller had musk melons and some gourd variety vegetable.
I wanted a ridge gourd. Tori in Hindi. But we have seen some smooth varieties in Delhi that we don’t like. So we proceeded to explain what we really wanted. The ridged variety. A lot of confusion ensued as both the seller and us reached the far end of our vocabulary in each other’s languages. We looked for photos of a ridge gourd on our mobile to show what we mean by the ridged variety. After a lot of mumbling on his part we got a sapling. Me promising myself to come back after a week or so if needed.
Saplings all in their respective new homes that evening, I forgot all about the confusion and the doubt in my mind as we got busy preparing for the lock down. The vine grew beautifully and started flowering. Then there was a female flower. If you are a gardener you will know that gourds have a little version of themselves on the female flower. If you can’t identify a plant, looking at the female flower is a sure-shot way to know what the vine is proposing.
A beautiful round fruit to be. Surely not the ridge gourd I thought I planted. Parag and I thought back to our conversations with the seller trying to remember the names he was throwing at us. Parag thought he said Kakari. A cucumber? That didn’t make sense with the perfect sphere we had. Somebody on the gardening group suggested Kachri. With similar pronounciation to Kakari we thought that was a good candidate. Kachri is a wild melon that looks like a mini water melon, bitter when green and sour as it ripens. Used as a meat tenderizer. None of these things were super exciting or useful for us.
Somebody suggested it might be a Muskmelon but we were sure it had to be something different, a vegetable not a fruit, as the confusion was about the gourd sapling and not the Kharbuja, the musk melon. But we hoped and wondered as the fruit grew. The vine was trained on a vertical mesh assuming it was going to be a ridge gourd. Just in case it was a musk melon, I built a hamoc to support the weight of the fruit.
As the fruit grew in the hamoc, it started becoming stouter in a pumpkin kind of way rather than growing a bit oblong like a kachari. Was the hamoc shaping it differently or was it the natural shape? More discussions among my various gardening groups ensued. It is a musk melon I thought. In the meanwhile Parag tried to taste a fruit that had dropped due to heat. His contorted face said bitter as hell. Kachri it is then.
The color started changing and we waited with bated breath. Smelling it once in a while. Musk melon smell is unmistakable and the aroma catches attention when it is ready, I was told. No aroma. Kachari it is. And then like magic, one evening we found the fruit sitting in the hamoc, unattached from the vine, exuding its signature smell.
Looks like the seller gave us a sapling from the wrong tray. I have never grown a musk melon before so this whole process was utterly fascinating, especially the back and forth every few days wondering if it was Kachri or a musk melon. The aroma was so intoxicating (may be more so after all the drama) that I kept walking to the kitchen to smell it every half an hour. We compared it to the musk melon we had bought the previous day. The size isn’t too small in spite of the limited resources. I am not a fan of musk melon but this one was the most wonderous fruit I have had in my lifetime. Definitely a keeper in the list of plants to grow next spring.
devayani tirthali 
Great post!