Miguel Braganza
There is an old English saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. It is also the fruit that separated humankind from the Garden of Eden. The issue is only about which ‘apple’ we are talking about. Is it about the custard apple locally known as the ‘sitaphal’ or Sita’s fruit or the apple that Eve is supposed to have given Adam and introduced death as a visa to immortal life herein after? Is it the ‘mamphal’ or ‘Kantte Ponos’ that is the sour cousin of the custard apple that is supposed to control cancer? It is also known as the graviola, soursop and ‘hanumanphal’. One can see almost all of these at the Konkan Fruit Fest in Margao from April 20 to April 22 this year.
Perhaps, it was the cashew apple which yields the elixir of life we call feni and is now marketed as the ‘spirit of Goa’, bottled. It could be the love apple, since love is known to make life worth living. The confusion is whether the term ‘love apple’ refers to the watery rose apple, Syzygium aquem that we call ‘zaam’ or to the ubiquitous lovely red tomato that prevents heart attack. It is not the fruit of the baobab that it is called the ‘Tree of Life’ because it is not called an apple in any language.
If the rose apple is the forbidden fruit, then most likely it would be the Syzygium malaccensis, more commonly known as the Malay rose apple or simply Malay apple. The fruit is pink to red on the outside and the flesh is white enclosing a single seed. The flowers are a vivid crimson-pink with many long stamens. When the stamens shed, the floor beneath resembles the roads of Zambaulim village on the day of the ‘gulal’ at Shigmo.
The books warn us not to confuse the Java rose apple Syzygium samarangense with the Malay apple but the two look so similar that one can be easily confused. If one has access to the tree when it flowers than it is a little easier. Its flowers are white like that of the common rose apple and there is nothing in them to remind one of gulal. The fruit is reddish pink outside and white inside with a single seed. It can bear fruits anywhere on the trunk like the jackfruit in addition to bearing in the leaf axils at the tip of the shoots.
The Java plum or Jamun syzygium jambos is also known as the rose apple and cultivated throughout the Indo-Malayan region though it bears the name of one of the major island of Indonesia. It is as different form the other rose apples as apples and plums! Some botanists imagined that the Jamun fruits smell like rose water and hence the name. The fruits are purple and not pink. It makes a good table fruit and can also be made into wine. The dried seed powder is considered good for control of diabetes, but that was not a lifestyle disease of Adam’s period. He might have choked on its large and bitter seed.