Papaya was called “The Fruit of the Angels” by Christopher Columbus…This tropical fruit is abundantly found in Kerala, India. There are couple of papaya trees in the backyard of my Kerala house. Due to the tropical weather in Kerala, it grows almost everywhere and the they don’t need any special pampering or care for its growth. It just grows like a weed. I am quite embarrassed to say that I had ignored this fruit while growing up. For some reason, I couldn’t stand the smell of ripe papaya. We never had to buy papaya from any stores, we just had to pluck it from the trees standing in the backyard. May be this could be the reason why I didn’t give much importance to this fruit; the more I had it, the more I ignored it. But, things got changed when I started living in a country where finding papaya is once in a blue moon thing and frequent buying of papayas will put a hole in the wallet 😛 Apparently, papaya is one of the expensive fruits here and it never tasted any closer to those papaya plucked from the backyard of my kerala house. In the US, you could see papaya trees in Hawaii and Florida. When I had visited Hawaii, this was the one fruit that I had gobbled from the fruit bars of all the restaurants I had dined.
