Strawberries in Visakhapatnam

Two weeks ago I nearly fell out of the auto rickshaw I was travelling in when I spotted strawberries for sale on the pavement of Visakhapatnam main road. These exotic fruits are not usually seen even in the regular fruit market and the only shops to stock it used to be the uptown departmental store Karachiwala at really high prices and here was this vendor selling it so casually along with guava, apples and grapes. I could not resist asking the price because I had never ever tasted them earlier though my imagination and English reading experience had led me to have an exquisite expectation of the taste of this exotic fruit much celebrated by the characters of Enid Blyton and all the novels published by Mills & Boon. I did not bat an eyelid when he quoted one hundred rupees for ten tiny strawberries hardly larger than the zizypus or ber that we are used to buying for a few paisas. I decided to get it though the same amount would have fetched me one and half a Kg of seedless black grapes, at least a dozen red luscious apples, two dozens of bananas, twenty green guavas....Oh the list is endless - butI stuck to my resolve and decided that strawberries were worth their weight and not to be compared with these lowly fruits.
My husband raised his eyebrow at the cost and the fruit but decided to humour me. I washed each of those strawberries very carefully in water and discovered two damaged ones to my dismay. I arranged them on an elegant white china plate - no a saucer was enough - with a golden rim. I offered my husband one and took one and very elegantly bit into it. Eeeeek! It was sour ! My husband very gently inquired "Is it supposed to taste like this?"
I did not know how to answer him so I just pretended no to hear the question. Two days later an old friend a Cosmopolitan who had travelled extensively in the West came home. I offered her the strawberry and asked her to taste it tell me whether it tasted like the ones she had tasted abroad.
That is when I realized that native fruits are best eaten in their natural habitat. May be these strawberries would taste exotic and exquisite in their home land. There is no doubt that in Visakhapatnam they cannot compete with the taste of Jamun, Mango, guava and and other local fruits like rose apple, palmyra fruit to name a few. So I am sorry to say, "Good bye Scarlet Strawberries! You will never again tempt me!"