‘What a stink!’
‘It smells like sewage.’
‘It smells like dead rats.’
What opinions these people have of the fruit that I worship!
I never thought that I would feel personally attacked because of a fruit. A fruit that doesn’t look attractive. A fruit that is not juicy. A fruit that is the size of a football, brown and grey and has angry spikes. A fruit that lets out a scent that can fill a whole O2 Stadium, so that some people have branded it as stinky. I am of course talking about the Durian.
It seems the Durian has divided the world into two groups: absolute lovers and ardent haters. The lovers love the taste, the texture and the smell. The haters shake their heads in disgust and can’t understand how some people would eat something that looks ugly and ‘reeks of rotten flesh’. They never get around to eating it because they can’t bring themselves to even come near it because of the ‘stink’.
To the second group, I put my hands on my hips and declare that I heartily thank Mother Nature for creating such a taste and smell. I stand behind my statement and make a point of eating a durian every time I go back to Yangon. I bite into the soft creamy yellow flesh of the durian and savour the buttery sweet taste and the intense aroma. Blissed out by the scent, slowly enjoying every mouthful of the silky savoury flesh is an experience you can only come across with a durian. It is incomparable to any taste you will find. Saying that it’s like biting into an oval shaped lump of extra thick custard is not doing it justice. Smacking my lips in defiance of the naysayers, I close my eyes and thank my lucky stars for this divine food.
As a child, I would get to eat durians as a treat as the fruit is one of the most expensive. My parents would buy a whole fruit from a roadside vendor. They would inspect the fruit by sniffing at it and weighing it in their hands. Then they would bring it home and leave it on the kitchen worktop for a few days. After a couple of days, the spiky husk of the fruit starts to crack. The fragrance starts filling the room. It continues to crack over the next couple of days until the yellowy flesh within becomes visible. The more cracked it becomes, the riper it is and the more intense the aroma is. Once we see the flesh, it’s ready to eat.
All we have to do then is to prise open the cracks and scoop out the creamy almond-shaped fruit within with a spoon. The fruits are located in segments within the shell and each segment is about the size of an extra-large banana. Each fruit has a stone the size of a date within the flesh. Scooping out the rich velvety flesh and plopping it into my mouth was the moment I had been eagerly awaiting for the last three to four days, willing the fruit to crack open as it sat on the kitchen worktop proudly taunting me with its fragrance.
So, Durian, no matter what others say, I have always loved you. I will worship you the rest of my life. I will always seek you out and spend my hard earned money to acquire you whenever I set foot in Yangon or anywhere else in South East Asia.