The Tamarind

Clouds were moving in.


"Here's what I wanna show you."
"What is that you're doing? I said, as she exhaled.
"What?" she asked, her thin voice made even thinner by the stress of the smoke in her lungs.



A small back-yard flock of bandy-klegged chickens.

If she found me so objectionable, then why did she invite me? Or was it that her attitude had suddenly changed?

She went back inside. I sat down on the top step and continued to watch the young girl shell the tamarinds. Her hands plunged again and again into the basin. She never took her eyes off the tamarinds she was cracking.

Tamarind

She covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She said, "I think I'll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I'll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable," she said.



Pretchy-Anne looked up from her plate. She said, "I always dreamed of having me a peacock. Since I was a girl and found a picture of one in a magazine. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. I cut the picture out and put it over my bed. I kept that picture for the longest time. Then when Bud and I got this place, I saw my chance. I said, 'Bud, I want a peacock.' Bud laughed at the idea."

"Me, too," I said. But I said it to be polite. I'd hated rhubarb pie since I was thirteen years old and had got sick on it, eating it with strawberry ice cream.

Once, when he was coming back to his place in the afternoon, carrying a sack with three bottles of Andre champagne and some lunch meat, he stopped on the landing and looked into his landlady's living room. He saw the old woman lying on her back on the carpet. She seemed to be asleep. Then it occurred to him she might be dead. But the TV was going, so he chose to think she was asleep. He didn't know what to make of it. He moved the sack from one arm to the other. It was then that the woman gave a little cough, brought her hand to her side, and went back to being quiet and still again. Lloyd continued on up the stairs and unlocked his door. Later that day, toward evening, as he looked from his kitchen window, he saw the old woman down in the yard, wearing a straw hat and holding her hand against her side. She was using a little watering can on some pansies.

"Try this," she said and gave me one of the tamarinds. "Like this." She fished another one from the basin, peeled its brittle skin, then brought it up to her mouth.

A dirt alleyway

plunging her hands into the basin, coming up holding brown pods

she broke the brittle shell

the branches gracefully drooping

the pods, bulged and curved

Through a gap in the tree-dense yard

I bit into it and my teeth shuddered

She sat hunched over a white basin

There was something cute, innocent, in the way she appeared so absorbed in one world, while so detached from another.

An electric fan, oscillating with a jittery whir, nudging the stale air from one side of the room to the other

Notice a girl on her haunches, breaking tamarind pods. She's under a mango tree (canopy of fruit laden branches). Her hair, and the leaves above her rustle with the hot afternoon breeze. She's digging the pods from a shallow wicker basket/basin, pinching one tip, stripping the shell, revealing a black, gummy substance which is the flesh of the tamarind.

Around her, bandy-legged chickens cluck past. Children run. The woman I'm with, a bargirl named Nora, asks me what I'm looking at.

"What's she doing?"
"Breaking tamarinds."
"Tamarinds?"
"A fruit. Sour."

The arrangement was simple. I paid eighty pesos to the mamasan and she was free to leave the club for the night.

She said later, still disgusted and outraged, "This is crap."

Showed his teeth in a wide grin.

She turned away, breaking eye contact with me.

A baby asleep in a sling did not look very comfortable
twist the gold cellophane wrapper

She covered her mouth and laughed into her cupped hands.

She returned not long after carrying a bag of tamarind.

She is breaking the pods in half, and eating what looks like poop, but what is actually the tamarind pod. Her face puckering as she sucks the pulp, then spits out the smooth black seeds onto the ground.

I think the woman is eating an odd peanut. She cracks the shell in her fingers

Sampalok, my mother says. The woman is eating sampalok.

Sticky fruit, pulpy with strings running through it.

thick curly pods hanging from the branches

She says, hold it by the pointy end and peel the strings away. They break free from the pulp without much resistence, leaving a little exo-skeleton.

Chew the pulp around the smooth hard seed, then spit the seed out.

sinigang

green, feathery leaves that fold up at night.

fernlike canopy
tart and chewy, little rolled up balls

hard brown, fuzzy shell, lightly fuzzed

a basin brimming with tamarind

in the shade of an enormous tamarind tree

nibbled munched

pods, looking almost like a small potato


Sweeping the leaves off the courtyard

Tamarind soup. Brothy and sour.

Sugar crystals to sweeten, to give it a sweet and sour taste.


tamarind paste. tamarind leaves floating on top.



Sinigang