My mulberry days

SPS Verma

During my morning walk in the park near my house in  Chandigarh I spotted two poor children, a boy and a girl, joyously collecting and eating some fruit.  Reaching  there I  found two big mulberry trees loaded with multi-coloured berries as  with the onset of summer  mulberry trees start bearing fruit.  Morning walkers generally fail to notice the berries and those who noticed never bothered to eat these. 
I was reminded of my childhood days in my ancestral house in Himachal where in the courtyard were two mulberry trees which used to bear white and black fruit. I remembered my grandmother, who is no more, used to climb the trees and shake the branches and we all children held old bed sheets to collect the berries and then sat together to eat the fruit, also sharing it with other village children. My grandmother told us that our grandpa had maintained a large variety of fruit trees in front of our house and the trees were cut for the construction of a highway by the PWD without paying us any compensation. The two mulberry trees were also axed later to build an additional room in the house.
Although I worked as an IPS officer in my home state but had never got an opportunity to relish the kind of berries we enjoyed in our childhood days. The mulberry trees are also widely used for silk farming. The botanical name of the mulberry tree is Morus Nigra belonging to the Moraceae family. More than 100 species of Morus exist and the species are identified not by the colour of the fruit but by the colour of the flower buds. A Morus plant can exhibit different berries — black, purple, red, white etc.. Botanically, the mulberry fruit is an aggregation of small fruits arranged concentrically around the axis as in blackberries and loganberries.
There are numerous health benefits of mulberries. Delicious, fleshy, succulent mulberries are low in calories and contain phyto-nutrient compounds like polyphenol, antioxidants, minerals and vitamins. Mulberry has anthocyanins having potential health benefits against cancer, aging, diabetes and neurological diseases. The berries also contain resveratrol another polyphenol flavonoid antioxidant which protects against stroke risk. The berries are excellent source of iron, potassium, manganese and magnesium.
But in those days we enjoyed these fruit unaware of it health benefits. Our cities and towns are flooded with a large variety of indigenous and imported fruits these days which have overshadowed  this humble but useful  fruit which is rarely available in markets. Children of the new generation are so preoccupied with burgars and pizzas that they do not bother to eat fruits like this,  getting prone to diseases at a young age. I remember a few lines from James Riley's poem on the mulberry tree:
“Today as I dream with both eyes wide-awake/ I can see the old tree and its limbs as they shake/ And the long purple berries that rained on the ground.”