The one where I eat the cursed fruit

My midlife crisis involves fruits

Since I crossed the Tom Cruise-Scientology age line (turned 40), I have been on a quest to grab life, turn it upside down and shake it like an old backpack to see what tumbles out. Contrary to my lofty expectations, only spare change, old receipts, lint, and crumbles of potato chips enjoyed in the past have drifted out, but I remain hopeful.

In the vein of grabbing and shaking life, my most recent endeavour has had me cross paths with a cursed fruit.

Shaped like Panda poop, coloured like day-4 jaundice and smelling like cat’s piss-soaked mouldy, wet wood, it’s a fruit that I have evaded for 40 years of my existence. But no longer! What’s life if you haven’t gorged on the worst fruits brought forth from Earth’s bosom? 

I am, of course, talking about the Durian.

Cue the ominous music….

Since moving to Thailand, it’s been taunting me from the sidelines. Every time I take the longer route through the aisles in the fresh section, I hear the small Durian voice in my head, “I broke you, and I beat you!” 

It turns out that many people love Durian. It’s a delicacy for many in SE Asia. I’ve seen Thais obsess over it the same way Indians obsess over mangoes. And then many hate it, too. Between these two, I must tell you - the haters squeal a lot more. They cannot stop telling you how much they hate, how terrible it is and how my life would be worse once I tasted the cursed fruit. 

So, naturally, I had to try it. 

As I reached 41 in May, I decided that June would be when I tasted my first Durian.

At this point, you may belong to one of two camps. Either you’re cheering me on, saying, “It’s about time!” or you are grabbing your computer and screaming, “Why? Why? Why would you do something like that?” 

The myth; The fruit

Durian came into my consciousness about twelve years ago when I visited Singapore for the first time. On boarding the metro, I saw this intriguing sign. 

As I reviewed the quirky fine system and made the same joke that exists on shot glasses (“Singapore is a fine city”), my eyes caught the mysterious prickly grenade in silhouette. What is this forbidden fruit that qualifies for special mention by a semi-police state? Why was it as dangerous as cancer sticks, junk food and explosives? 

The myth of the ‘Durian smell’ became a constant point of discussion every so often. The fruit started to attain this level of legendary grossness. Many recounted their past trauma of having to deal with the fruit.  

"Among Chinese Singaporeans and Malaysians, many hold the belief that when Admiral Cheng Ho landed in Nanyang, he relieved himself in the jungle, and the steaming puddle of shit and piss evolved into the durian tree. To put it less elegantly, the mounds of flesh inside the durian resemble a row of little turds resting neatly in a boat-shaped husk."

- Wong Yoon Wah, Durians Are Not the Only

It must give you a sense of the midlife crisis I am going through that, despite having had more than a decade of repulsive thoughts about the fruit drip-fed to me, I decided to try eating it. 

My Durian Experience

And so, a few weeks back, I found myself doddering around the Durian aisle in the store, casting side-eyes at other customers while evaluating long and hard the irreversible process I was going to undertake. Then, like most seminal moments in life, it happened in mere moments as I smuggled one shrink-wrapped packet of the yellow malevolence into my shopping basket. I can neither confirm nor deny if I had a prayer on my lips. 

It felt naughty. 

I brought the thing into my home. It was fine. It was a rented home, and we had lived there for 4+ years—a good enough run.  

Durian pulp glares balefully at me

“I’ll taste it after having lunch,” I told myself. As I ate my lunch, I kept glancing at the little package resting on the kitchen counter every few minutes as if fully expecting it to burst into its real form that needed an exorcism. Once I finished the lunch, though, I had no option but to take the plunge. 

I examined the shrink-wrapped pack. I could see the fleshy Durian pulp inside, shaped like a big fat turd. The only thing left was to unwrap the plastic and unleash Durian’s most infamous attribute—the aroma, the smell, the rank, the odour, the funk, and the pungency. 

For ages, people have described the smell of Durian in various florid ways, and I feel the need to assemble some of the highlights. Here are some of the descriptors: 

• “Carrion in custard”

• “Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.” - Anthony Bourdain.

• “Like a bunch of dead cats.”

• “The smell of rotten eggs”

• “Eating ice cream in an outhouse”

• And from a Reddit thread dedicated to describing it, “tropical funk”, “mango mixed with onions”, “old locker room full of yeasty jock straps”, and more. 

Theoretically, I was prepared. Someone on Twitter (three words you should probably never use in a sentence) warned me not to open the fruit in the house lest the evil odour stick around long after I left this mortal life. But here I was. 

“I am born to live wild,” I said as I ripped open the shrink wrap. My hands shook, and my nose tingled in nervous anticipation. 

Durian’s pungency is rather unique. It is one of the few remaining things in the world that can still fully arrest a human's attention and make them think nothing else other than the fact that they are smelling it. In this age of increasing distraction, this is a rather powerful attribute. Want to be mindful? Forget meditation; eat a Durian. 

However, I was also disappointed. The smell didn’t kill me nor make me want to burn my house down. It was a smell I could live with. Sure, it smelt like rotting fruit or perhaps like a mildewed wet cloth used to wipe away old mango pulp. It wasn’t a smell Dior would package and sell anytime soon. While it was an assault, no doubt, it wasn’t bad enough to summon forth any of my previous meals from inside my body. I could easily hold back my gag.

With that out of the way, I examined the fruit. A quick primer on how Durian is constructed. 

What I was staring at (and what came shrink-wrapped) was an Aril, the fleshy pulp. It was pale yellow in colour (precisely like the image above), and since it looked similar in colour to a jackfruit pulp, I assumed it would be of a similar texture. I grabbed the entire pulp in my hand to take a bite out of it, and at that point, it promptly broke off and got squished. 

The texture of Durian’s pulp was creamy, like a slightly more solid custard or maybe (this is completely a fabrication in my head) a very, very soft meat that would disintegrate in your hands. So I scooped a spoonful of this creamy, custardy rank thing and plopped it into my mouth. 

Durian tastes like an overripe mango (on the verge of going bad, but has yet to) with hints of melon. The taste was something quite palatable. As it stands now, it’s not a taste I would actively go back to on my own, but if I find myself in the presence of the alluring yellow flesh of a Durian, I wouldn’t mind taking another little spoonful. 

I finished about three-fourths of the pulp I had bought, and then the remaining pulp remained sealed in a box in the fridge for a week before realising that I had forgotten about it. Opening it a week later and feeling the explosion of the pungent fumes trapped in a little box, I threw the remaining away. 

So what’s the point of it all? 

It would be a crime if I did something like this and did not draw useful lessons for life, work and career. So here you go:   

1. In work and life, you may be avoiding specific issues because they seem to be very prickly and tough, like a full Durian. However, if you take the step to break into it, you will realise that inside is a soft and fleshy fruit that stinks so badly that you wish you had left the issue untouched. 

2. Durian proves the adage, “Everyone has something to offer.” You may have bad body odour, and your work might stink, but you may be someone’s scoop of delicious delicacy. 

3. Try things in life—they give you perspective. Tasting Durian for the first time gave me a whole new perspective and reinforced the idea that even eating the stinkiest fruit isn’t as bad as some two-hour-long meetings you encounter in daily corporate life. 

4. Stop trying so hard. You don’t have to be a Mango - all sweet, fleshy, and tasteful. You don’t have to be over the top, pretty, and overrated like the Strawberry. Accept your inner Durian. 

5. Finally, if you cannot be exceptionally good, try to be exceptionally bad. There are probably dozens of fruits I haven’t tried in life, but I tried Durian. Why? Had it been any average fruit, I wouldn’t have seen signboards banning it, grown adult men crying, remembering the time they ate it, and may never have obsessed over how bad it could be every waking moment. Good enough is not good enough. Either be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad if you want to be noticed.

Having said all that, much like the pulpy fruit inside, I have a very soft spot for the Durian. I am a lifelong rooter of the underdog, and the Durian gets my support purely because of all the hate it receives. I will be bringing it home again sometime soon. 

Could be Worse,

Tyag

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