Food, glorious food - Fruit is far more expensive than vegetables here.  Tomatoes have vacillated somewhat between RS20-RS40 a kg over the last two months, but the Kashmiri pears or apples are about RS85-120 while the Afghani pomegranates are RS220-450 a kg.  Sporadically everything is available.  Melon imported from Japan can be RS500 a piece, while a small punnet of strawberries could fetch RS250.  Dried fruit and nuts and highly esteemed and relatively expensive and there were many baskets of dried fruit and nuts made up for Diwali gifts.  (It isn't strictly accurate, but for rule of thumb I reckon about RS50=$1)  Last week I bought 5kg plum tomatoes: about 10lbs of tomatoes for $2!  That seems incredible to me.

It took me a while to spot the Indian oranges. The earlier ones were a bit larger than tangerines and somewhat irregularly shaped and mainly green skinned.  These were fairly fibrous and full of pips and were just intended as juice oranges.  Delicious, but not drastically juicy.  Now there are larger looser skinned green oranges which seem like giant mandarins, delicious, juicy, sweet, a few seeds, speedy to peel.  

Pomegranates: we've bought some directly from the vegetable distribution market in the north of the city (the best of those we've bought); some that Bert schlepped in his suitcase from Kabul (perhaps not fair to judge these as they inadvertently spent an extra day in his suitcase when the flight back to Delhi was cancelled at the last minute) and plenty from the Khan (high end) market and INA (not quite so high end). I cannot bring myself to pay RS400 for the smaller ones, but a guest of mine for high tea here in the Aman asked whether the pomegranates on the table were just for show, or might they be eaten too. :)  The very well trained waiter didn't hesitate to offer to prepare one in the kitchen for her, although they were clearly part of the decorations.  This was the most tender pomegranate I have ever had.  The seeds were hardly noticeable.  Some of the cheaper ones really feel as though they have wooden chips for seeds.

Breadfruit is a wonderful discovery.  The skin looks a little like something that a dinosaur might have worn and inside is succulent white fruit wrapped around large brown seeds. It is quite a mess to eat, but a per fumy delicacy.  The banana in the photo is only for perspective.

As for those amla/Indian gooseberries. . .gulp!  It is hard to believe that anyone really eats them raw. (Perhaps it is a manly thing to do - like eating steak tartar.) They are so sour - much more so than lemons or rhubard and that mouth drying raw rhubarb sensation is magnified several times in these small plum sized stoned fruit.  They are prized for phenomenally high vitamin C.  I have boiled our exploratory 1/2 kg with plenty of sugar to make chutney. I doubt they will be a repeated buy.

I'm a bit more cautious now about the quantity I buy of an untried product.