The Banana Story

I got a wonderful birthday gift this time. Of course I do know October is still further down in the calendar, but lets just say I got the fruits of my hard work...literally !!
This was somewhere during 2004; my birthday which falls on Naraka Chaturdashi or simply put - Deepavali, bestowed upon me what I thought was a horrible day. With mom not in Bangalore, and dad in no mood of fireworks, I was assigned the task of digging a deep trench to hold a tiny little banana plant. This arduous task was successfully accomplished not to mention the 'n' no. of times I grumbled about how special my friends' birthdays generally are.
Within a year, huge leaves arose, so huge that it could be used as a blanket, the very same idea we had planned on if there were any blanket-shortages during my brother's marriage. This year saw it flowering, and slowly tiny little bananas started opening their eyes. I was often found hugging the tree, like as though I had given birth to young ones (there was no labor pain involved though).
These tiny little bananas started becoming huge, so huge that it looked scary. It was a tissue cultured plant bought in one of the "Krishi Melas", and believe me, I was proud of it. Now who says we biotechnologists are only to mess things up. We weren't really sure when to break off the bananas (later we leant that the moment the flower dries up, its a signal to separate the bananas from the tree). It took 3 of us to get them down; and there were over 150 really huge bananas. The above picture was taken when it was still really small. It was what you call in Kannada as the "Pach Baale", it was pretty much sweet, but we could only eat half of it at a time, and it wouldn't even fit into our mouths. All these bananas now make a presence in most of our neigbourhood houses. The era of this plant is over, the legacy has passed on and a new plant has taken over. But this time, we guess its time for a new fruit. Any guesses what it'll be ???