lemon prices: View: The lemon is dead. Long live the lemon

In 1983, at the age of eight, I stole my first (and only) lemon. I went to my mother and proudly displayed the harvest. Alarm bells started ringing in her head. She could see the slippery slope: a lemon today, murder tomorrow. The two of us chased the pushcart together and she made me give the veggie seller chaar ana – my KL Saigal way of saying 25 paise – the price of a nimbu in those days. I’d learnt my lesson. Looking back, I was only preparing for my future. Which is today.

We all felt it this year. Too much rain. Too much sun. The weather playing tricks. Looks like the lemons felt it too. Unlike humans who have to soldier on come heat, rain, snow or Covid, the lemon has it lucky. The lemon crop pretty much yawned, shrivelled up and died, leaving a one-line note for its human bosses: ‘Tata, bye bye. See you next October.’

With lemons selling at up to ₹400 a kilo, the nimbu chor has emerged as the newest thief on the block. Thefts have been reported from orchards and warehouses, in Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan. Meatloaf sang, ‘Life is a lemon and I want my money back.’ In India, it looks like, when life gives you lemons, you steal lemons.

There’s money not only in lemons but also in the new ancillary jobs it has created: ₹500 a day as an orchard guard. Politicians need to be wary. In the past, the spike and fall in the price of onions has led to governments collapsing.

Growing up in Dehradun, one had guards to protect the litchi and mango orchards… from parrots and fruit bats. The tussle between schoolchildren looking for amiya (green mango) and the baaghwalas was considered a rite of passage. The baaghwala would sleep in the orchard on a string cot and hoot with the owls all night. He’d pull on a rope tied to a tin box to scare away the birds.

In the hierarchy of prison life, art criminals are top of the pile, while paedophiles are bottom of the heap, getting the worst treatment from fellow convicts. Lemon banditry surely is a gentleman’s crime on a par with stealing Picassos. Meanwhile, the government has taken note. An edible smart chip will be installed inside every lemon. Stolen lemons then can be easily detected using one of Isro’s satellites. The chip, once ingested, will harvest the eater’s data – dietary, political and religious.

There are already reports that IPL franchises are paying cricketers in lemons, while pizza companies have scrapped their ‘buy one, get one free’ offers for ‘buy one get 10 lemons free deals. At the height of the wedding season, grooms’ families are demanding sacks of lemons in dowry. Instagram is filled with images of boyfriends proposing to their girlfriends with lemon rings – for lemons are a girl’s best friend.

Not to be left behind, music streaming services are releasing altered remixes of Beatles’ anthems to keep public morale high. The top three lemon-positive songs in India at the moment are ‘Lemon fields forever’ ‘Lemon submarine’ and ‘Lemon in the sky with diamonds’. While secular parties have demanded an embargo on lemons being hung in cars, the incumbent government has responded by classifying the lemon as a cultural essential. A Lemon for Mr Biswas, an adaptation of a VS Naipaul novel is the sleeper hit of the season.

I’d like to think we are missing having buckets of nimbu paani, except that we stopped having homemade nimbu paani a while back. In the 1980s, Rasna pretty much wiped it out. For now, we’ll have to rely on nimbus supplied by the friendly neighbourhood lime’n’lemoni gangsta. As the saying goes, the lemon is dead, long live the lemon.