Sour Fruits Are Forbidden for Boys
Confessions of a boy who ate too many Chili Mili™
Cake friends,
We’re excited to meet some of you IRL at Pioneer Works’ Press Play this weekend. We’ll be there both days selling maple pecan oat scones by Tanya and copies of our five most recent magazines, including Daily Bread, which is sold-out online. Come say hi!
Today in the newsletter, we’re sharing an essay from our newest issue, Forbidden Fruit: a roving exploration of Osama Shezad’s childhood obsession with the sour candy Chili Mili, and the baffling warning he encountered that they were “forbidden for boys.” Plus, some ideas on what to bake, buy, read, and write this holiday season in the links at the bottom.
Sour Fruits are Forbidden For Boys
Essay by Osama Shehzad
The fruit stands lining Karachi’s traffic-jammed roads have, as my father often boasts, “the best fruit in the world”: pomegranates from Kandahar, apricots from Ziarat, apples from the orchards of Swat. The acceptable, masculine way to savor them is to bite straight in—just how God intended man to enjoy them—but I’ve always preferred to dust mine with chaat masala, a fiery, tangy spice blend that makes every spoonful sing.
As a child, I loved eating spicy fruits and candies. My favorite place to buy them was at a pushcart outside our school, crammed between overflowing vans and aggressively honking cars, where an elderly man with a sprawling gray beard calmly batted flies away from the season’s sourest offerings: carries, unripe mangoes with spices in spring; falsay in newspaper cones in summer; guavas dusted with masala in autumn. Inside the school walls, I’d spend my lunch money on a bottle of Pepsi, a bag of atomically spicy Slims chips, and Chili Mili—a popular brand of red-green sour gummies in iconic purple packets. I was obsessed, always ready to party with the cartoon red chili and fedora-wearing tamarind dancing on the package. Whenever I would go to the market in our neighborhood to get milk, bread, or eggs, any leftover change was used to acquire more Chili Milis, which I’d bring home to share with Dado, my grandmother. This behavior was observed with disapproval by my father, who always shook his head and warned, “Boys should not eat sour things.”
At the time, I was in fifth grade and brought to school by an overly entrepreneurial van owner very early, sometimes even before the school gate was open. The only other person at the school at that time was Faris Sarwar, a sweet, chubby boy prone to wild exaggerations. He was the least athletic person in our class, the last one to be reluctantly picked for the cricket, football, or even kho-kho team, but still proudly claimed that he was known as Totti in his apartment complex, the superstar Roma midfielder. We teased him that they were calling him Potti instead. Faris Sarwar and his stories always entertained me, and even when I called him out, he took it in an unbothered stride. We both shared a love for imli, and every morning he would collect the ripe tamarind pods shed by the massive old tree in the schoolyard before the cleaning staff could swipe them away. He claimed he had mastered the art of picking the perfect imlis from the ground, ones that were not bitter, but pristinely sour. On this point, I agreed with him. Soon it became our daily ritual: savoring imlis every morning while Faris Sarwar spun unbelievable stories.
Always, while cracking open the brown suede shell of the imlis and polishing the dark pulp off the shiny garnet-like seed, my father’s stern warning rang as a low-level anxiety in the background. Pakistani society has clear segmentation for men and women. I was entering the age where I was eager to prove that I was ready to be a man. When we attended a segregated wedding—preferred by more conservative relatives—where a tent divided the shadi hall, kids could easily trespass, running from one side to the other, usually staying on the more fun women’s side. I had started to stick to the men’s side.
One time, a kind uncle, noticing that I was incredibly bored by the talk of mutton and the military establishment and suffocating in cigarette smoke, suggested I go to the women’s section to play with the other kids. I suddenly sat erect, like an army cadet found slacking, and replied that I belonged on this side because I was a man. He was taken aback at being challenged to a dick-measuring contest by a ten-year-old but shot an impressed look at my father, who gave a proud nod of acknowledgement.
My preference for sour, however, remained a liability, and from time to time, my father would remind me that this was not allowed for boys. When I asked why, he never offered an explanation, so I conveniently disregarded it with a blissfully idyllic shrug. It was just another item on an unending list of corrections that made no sense at all: “don’t hunch, sit up straight!”; “stop dragging your feet!”; “please just stay quiet for five minutes.” But while my mother echoed most of his lectures, the prohibition of sour items was imposed by him alone. It was, as if there was—before I knew of the term—an unspoken “bro code” between us.
One day, my father caught me eating Chili Milis with my grandmother and scoffed at both of us. Dado wasn’t allowed to eat them because of her diabetes, and I was not supposed to eat them because I was a boy.
After the interjection, as we walked upstairs, I asked my father again why it was that boys could not eat sour things.
“If you keep eating sour things,” he said looking at me with the earnestness and desperation of a failed diplomat, reluctantly deploying the nuclear option: “You’ll grow boobs.”
After dropping this bomb, my father continued climbing the stairs, but I stood there stunned. I felt cheated and betrayed. If my father had known the gravity of the situation, why had he withheld the reasoning? Suddenly a massive panic overwhelmed me. Looking down, I questioned if the damage was already done.
The next day when I went to school, I found Faris Sarwar parked on the bench next to a pile of lustrous fruit. He looked so happy feasting on the imlis in our navy-white uniform. He waved at me, motioning me to come over. I went and sat next to him. But then I spotted them: in between the straining buttons of his shirt, bouncing with every tangy quiver in his taste buds, his bodacious, glorious tits. Faris Sarwar had proper boobs.
“Faris yaar,” I told him, full of regret, “I can’t eat imlis anymore.”
He looked confused, then devastated, as if I said we could no longer be friends.
When he asked me why, I simply told him that boys don’t eat imlis. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the real reason. He had obviously overindulged. But I was going to correct myself. I did not want to turn out like him.
“I’ve heard that too,” Faris Sarwar said. “But I’ve never understood why.”
I was determined to rid myself of the urge to eat sour fruits and candies. Pakistani men are a curious breed—they will ogle unashamedly at women in the markets but are terrified of breasts. Even the word causes them to shrink in shame. When you order a chicken tikka at Shaheen Shinwari, the person taking the order will ask for your preference of dark or white meat with: “Leg piece or chest?” If you reply with an adamant “breast piece,” the collective embarrassment crumbles the whole establishment and no one makes eye contact ever again.
A few weeks later, my resolve weakened. Our relationship had been cut off so abruptly that whenever I would see a girl at school eating Chili Mili, I would look away to avoid eye contact with the sad cartoon red chili and the fedora-clad tamarind whom I had ghosted. I decided to eat Chili Mili one final time; all three of us needed proper closure.
My last Chili Mili, because it was the last one, tasted like an embrace of khattas and spice, like the familiar touch of an old lover, a tender clutch before a final parting.
It was the best I had ever had.
Soon, my life entered a cycle of every Chili Mili being the last Chili Mili. The experience was heightened by the guarantee of an imminent rock-hard chest, adding an umami that was missing otherwise. But then when I had the next last one, as I tore open the purple packet, I was proclaiming my freedom.
Throughout this time, I tried to observe how other men were dealing with this crisis. It seemed like they were all built differently from me. None of them seemed to be facing this dilemma. They didn’t have a fondness for anything sour or chatpatta. I only noticed one man who liked sour as much as I did. It was my father.
At the dinner table, I closely observed when Papa dropped a dollop of achaar on his plate of daal chawal. At the beginning of summer, just like me, he would get excited about the new “in-season” achaar. Papa would eat a few forkfuls of achaar, and as he licked his fingers after cleaning his plate, he would say out loud to himself that even though he wanted to eat more achaar he was going to stop.
After our conversation on the staircase that day, we never talked about eating sour foods again. It was as if he had told me what he had to and it was now my decision on how to proceed. And watching him, I found a blueprint for life: indulging but not overindulging.
** ** ** **
The word for sour in Urdu is khatta. When you say it, the tongue tickles the roof of your mouth, replicating the same sensation that you get from eating something tangy. Just saying the word makes you desire the taste.
When I moved to the United States for college, I realized sour here is different from khatta there. The word “sour” does not do justice to the taste—it is a failing of the English language. Sour is better suited to a mood than a fruit. Maybe it is because the taste—a fantastic rainbow of tart, tangy, zest, and spicy all at once, rarely exists in the States. Here, “sour” Haribo gummy bears, laced with white sugar, are more sweet than sour. Warheads are a quick slap of sour, a masochist’s offering, when what I longed for were the slowly dissolving, lingering caresses of a Chili Mili as it tangoed with my tongue. I’ve tried to figure out where to buy unripe mangoes in New York, but my attempts to google “carrie” or “karry” or “karrie” turn up nothing but listicles about Carrie Bradshaw. As I failed to find the English word to describe what flavor I was craving, I realized that the khatta chatpatta world had been left behind at home in Pakistan along with my parents and my grandmother.
Over the years, as I mentally balanced the effects of eating khatta and how much I enjoyed it, this story has become a reliable anecdote that I tell friends over drinks for laughs and gasps. However, if a South Asian man is present, they always jump in and exclaim: “Yes, I was told the same growing up!” I have tried to understand why the gender myth persists. Online searches, again, reveal little. On Quora, a website where over-eager South Asian men have left no trite and useless question unanswered, this one has surprisingly few responses. No one knows why eating and enjoying sour foods threatens South Asian masculinity so much. An Indian uncle on Reddit has speculated that it is an exclusively feminine flavor because when women are pregnant, they crave sour things. This explanation was corroborated by a sour-loving friend raised in Hong Kong, whose mother would often comment that he was eating sour things like a pregnant woman. There is something in our culture—maybe global, across national boundaries—that treats sour and spicy flavors as incompatible with manliness. When we picture a group of middle aged men in a hotel lobby for a WiFi router sales conference in the great American midwest, we imagine them discussing their quarterly targets and wireless protocols over dark stouts or whisky old fashioneds, not micheladas and kombucha.
I recently told Papa that I was going to write about his admonishments against khatta, and his reaction surprised me. I thought he would double down on his earlier claims, but he started laughing instead.
We often discuss my writing, and he tells me I should write about the latest engineering developments rather than the broken American immigration system. Whenever he visits me in New York, I ask him to read aloud Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi’s hilarious memoirs in Urdu, a combination of wit and sarcasm that leaves our whole family in fits. And after asking for many years how my novel is coming along, he has now started murmuring a soft, hopeful Inshallah whenever it is mentioned. What it means to be a man often comes up, albeit unintentionally, whenever I or my father say something ignorant that is challenged on our family FaceTime call by my sister or mother, who quickly point out that we are both “typical Pakistani men.” They were both sitting with us when I told my father about this essay—it was the first time they had heard the story. I realized, even though I had shared it with friends many times, I had never dared to tell it at home. Both my mother and sister burst out laughing until they nearly cried, shaking their heads in utter disbelief. Both me and my father laughed too, but sheepishly, avoiding eye contact, flushed with embarrassment.
“Humey bhi yehi bataya gaya tha,” Papa said with a sigh. He was just passing on what he had been told in his childhood. Then Papa got lost in a thought, like he often does nowadays, and smiling contemplatively, he said that both of us got our preference for khattas and chatpatta from my late grandmother.
This took me back to a memory of Dado. A few weeks after I learned of the detrimental effects of Chili Milis, Dado spotted me leaving the house for the market.
“You haven’t brought Chili Milis in a while,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “Get one for you and one for me.”
I did not know how to explain to her how irresponsible her suggestion was. I told her that Papa had told me that if I ate too many Chili Millis, I would turn into a girl.
She laughed and told me not to take my father so seriously.
“If anything,” she said, pinching my cheek, “enjoying a sour candy with your grandmother will only turn you into a sweeter boy.”
Osama Shehzad is a writer who still buys, after a moment of brief hesitation, a Chili Mili whenever he sees it.
Want to support Cake Zine’s independent work? Subscribe to this newsletter and order a copy of our latest issue: Forbidden Fruit.
Pitch: Aliza is editing the new volume of Leaves, a quarterly zine produced by the Brooklyn-based tea brand Raazi. The thematic pitch call is open through 12/23—get all the details for submission here.
Bake: Tanya shared a recipe for “fancy reindeer chow,” for Nicola Lamb’s Substack. Toasted coconut! Orange infused white chocolate! Cornflakes!
Read: Our friends at The Drift launched Issue 16 which features great dispatches on food and power.
Apply: Applications for the Tables of Contents residency for mid-career writers are open until December 12th. Three weeks at Glynwood Center in Cold Spring…dreamy.
Scroll: Passerby Magazine has a great guide this year, including Forbidden Fruit and a covetable box of California citrus from Pearson Ranch.
Buy: All Our Kitchens, a new digital cookbook with recipes from 29 great chefs from the UK, Ireland and Palestine, with all the proceeds supporting two charities working on the ground in Gaza. Contributors include Nicola Lamb, Noor Murad, and Nisreen Shehada, who contributed a great za’atar focaccia recipe to our sixth issue, Daily Bread.