Food: Lychees

The day we arrive at my mom's oldest sister's (my Masi) home in Chandigarh, it makes us both cry a little, both for my mother and also for the fact that is the first time we are meeting since I was two years old.

Her grand daughter is anxious to show us something, but she doesn't say what. She leads us up a stairwell out onto the roof of their house to see the top of a lychee tree in full bloom with the fruit. The lychees, her mother tells us, only grow for about fifteen days. So we have come to Chandigarh at the perfect time. The four of us stretch over the edge of the roof, pulling the branches full of the best fruit toward us so we can pluck the lychees. At one point, my neice runs down and out to the base of the tree. We poke the canopy with a stick so that lychees fall down to her.

Inside, we wash the lychees and begin eating them. They are larger than a large grape and smaller than an apricot. Their peel is dry, spikey and thin. It peels off easily. The fruit is milky white and the texture of a grape. To me, it tastes like something between a cantelope and a very sweet pink grapefruit. It's juicy and refreshing, and when you've eaten the whole of it, you find a dark hard seed that is like a large olive pit, but it's smooth and looks itself like a brown olive.

My Masi seems in only the first half hour of my visit that I've been able to discover something new and delightful at her home.