When I was a kid, every year around October we would get a toy magazine delivered to our house that had the coolest things inside. Color-your-own-stickers, a cash register with a solar calculator and working change drawer, planet mobiles, etc… you know, nerd stuff. I poured over that magazine for a solid 2 months; circling and highlighting, crossing things out and placing arrows everywhere. That booklet would be so dogeared and worn out by December that you would’ve thought it was a vital scholarly text, repeatedly used and loved for decades by thousands of dedicated students.
Year after year I would scour each page’s inventory and dream of receiving any one of these coveted toys. One of the big ticket items I drooled over was an excavate-your-own gemstones kit. There is something so fun about going in search of buried treasure. As adults, we do a more “sophisticated” version of this in various ways: we pan for gold, we hit the “Clearance” rack at Nordstrom, we fish and hunt, and we forage.

Ravi and I are Level 1 foragers right now. Safe and basic. We aren’t collecting ancestral medicinal herbs for salves or plucking exotic mushrooms from mossy trees for pilaf, we are simply picking passion fruits from vines or finding them on the ground. But guess what? It’s still super fun! Passion fruit in Hawai’i is called lilikoi, and it grows like a weed everywhere it can catch a footing. Passion fruit in Tamil is called cher palam, and it looks and tastes different from the variety most commonly found in Hawai’i.
The Ganga campus here in Kodaikanal is perfect for nature walks. The foliage is thick and lush, and the smell of eucalyptus perfumes the air you breathe. Indigo colored morning glories blanket the trees and shrubs in their path like an evening fog rolls down a mountainside. Nothing goes untouched by this invasive and gorgeous plant so naturally every vine I saw looked like the morning glory, and I didn’t pay special or close attention to any details.
One day Ravi saw a dull, purple orb on the ground next to a pile of fallen tree branches. “Look! I think it’s a lilikoi!” he said as he snatched it off the forest floor like a kid finding a $5 bill on the street. I was very skeptical. It was smaller and a completely different color from the yellow and orange ones I was used to seeing in the islands, but it was one of my most favorite fruits, so we took it home and opened it up. He was right.
At 43 years old I felt the same excitement as I did at 10. Now each walk we take, and we take 3-4 walks each day, has become a scavenger hunt for these delicious little purple gems. Some days we come home with only 1 or 2 and other times it’s 4 or 5. The birds knock them down, the maintenance crew cuts them down, and the monkeys throw them down. Regardless of how we find them and how they got there, the same thrill accompanies the bounty of the hunt.

Growing up can come with a lot of benefits such as independence from your parents, an impressive resume, and boobs (allegedly) but it also comes with its downsides. No more running at full speed for no reason without your copper knee band snugly in place. No more demolishing of ice cream sundaes without wicked reflux and a feeling of regret. And, no more bunny hops in the driveway without busted handlebars and a trip to Urgent Care. Like water pouring through an open hand, our childlike qualities slip away with age, and no amount of adult skateboarding lessons will bring them back, but a foraged passion fruit certainly comes close.