Those peaches don’t look real!” I commented, as we passed the ubiquitous fruit stands along the roads around Sattal and Naukuchiatal. Bursting with juice and as plump as apples, they were a strikingly unreal shade of orange. We stopped to take a closer look, for we just couldn’t believe that their colour was natural. “Of course it is,” said the fruit seller, polishing a downy peach, “all we do is clean them up to enhance their lovely colour!” In front of our eyes, he polished a dull fruit until its dullness gave way to vivid shades of orange and red. This, he said, was a different variety of peach; not the small, sweet desi ones we’d always eaten in the hills. I asked whether he had any of those to sell. He smiled ruefully and said, “We hardly grow those any more; most people find these so attractive that their desi cousins suffer in comparison….”
We bought a couple of these new peaches to try, making a mental note to look for their good old desi cousins as well. But we crossed Bhimtal to find its market brimming with the same gaudy upstarts. They were all over the market at Sattal too. Then we went hiking in the hills, traipsing past orchards after orchards. Here too, we found trees laden with the same large peaches, tiny pears, few green apples — but no apricots, plums or cherries.
“A lot of this has to do with the fact that it has become considerably hotter here than ever before,” said Devinder Singh, a Sattal farmer who had some peach trees that yielded a fantastic harvest this year. “I used to grow plums as well, but the summer temperatures here have gone up so high that the trees have stopped fruiting,” said he. Until about a decade ago, he said, it used to snow in Sattal during winter, even though it is on an altitude of about 4,500 feet above sea level, relatively low by Himalayan standards. “The temperatures then were low enough for apples and apricots to flourish here,” he reminisced, “but now, their production has significantly declined here — you’ll have to travel to higher altitudes now to find them!”
In contrast, he said, many farmers like him discovered that the one fruit that did really well in relatively warmer weather was this new variety of peach. “Its showy red-orange skin appeals to passing tourists,” said Singh. Further, its peak fruiting season coincides with the peak tourist season in the hills, i.e., from the end of May until the end of June. “The problem with these summer fruit is that they have a low shelf life. To sell fruit in a wholesale market, we have to take them down to Haldwani, where we get paid a pittance for them (and a lot of them perish en route anyway),” he said. Peaches with their showy skins stand a better chance of selling at about Rs 40-50 per kg in stands just outside the orchards. “That is why you’ll find that most people who own land in these parts are now choosing to plant nectarine trees….”
Walking through Sattal that evening, we noted with relief that the air was finally cooler. Yet we could see ceiling fans whirring from the open windows of local homes. Switching on the fan in my own room that evening, I bit into one of the peaches we’d bought earlier that day. Its juice spurted out on my chin, and I reflected moodily that even though this seemed to be the fruit of climate change, it was quite sweet….
