The Taste of a Banana

The Taste of a Banana

I didn’t know it then, but some things never leave you.

I can smell a banana before anyone else does. When someone peels one somewhere, I know it without seeing it. The scent slips in through a narrow place, touches a door inside me. As if it has been waiting there for years. The door opens; I am a child again. I stand in the same place. I hide the same thing.

My childhood passed in a crowded house. More than one family lived under the same roof. Voices overlapped; no one could quite hear one another. But no one was ever alone either. If you tried to count, there would be eighteen of us, but no one ever did. Being crowded was just a part of life. There was lack, both in the house and in the village, but no one called it that. We called it life. What was missing was never spoken of; we simply lived with it.

For children, nothing seemed to matter. In the evenings, everyone found a place somehow—on the floor, on a divan, by the doorway… wherever they could fit. If someone had a thicker blanket, another would press close to them. The cold did not belong to anyone alone. Hunger didn’t either. We believed it grew lighter when shared.

My father came once a week. He would appear at the door on Saturday afternoon and leave at nearly the same hour the next day. Before I could feel joy at his arrival, his leaving would already be near. His coming brought a kind of restlessness into the house; his going left behind a space. That space stayed with us until the following week, carried without a name.

I never quite knew when to be happy anyway. Perhaps it felt unnecessary—too difficult—to be glad while knowing how soon it would end.

One day, my father gathered what little we had and took us to the city. My older brother was going to study. We rented a house near the river. It was small, but the silence and the emptiness inside it felt large.

On our first evening at the table, there were two spoons. My father looked at them for a while. Then he stood up and left without a word. The door closed. My mother lowered her head. We waited. When he returned, he had a small package in his hand. Inside were forks and spoons.

No one spoke that evening. But something was missing. It stayed on the table. The new cutlery did not fill it.

One day at school, a man came into the classroom and said that shoes would be given to poor children. The teacher called out some names. Mine was among them. I stood up. I was happy. But as I walked back to my seat, I couldn’t lift my head to look at anyone.

That day, I learned that joy and shame can occupy the same place. As the sound of the shoes I would wear echoed through the streets of my imagination, I didn’t want anyone else to hear it.

One afternoon after school, a girl was waiting for me at the gate. She was my father’s employer’s daughter.

“Your family is at our house,” she said. “I came to get you.”

We walked together. Not side by side—there was a distance. She walked easily; I tried to match her steps. She stopped at a greengrocer’s stand. Bought a banana. Paid for it. Peeled it and handed it to me.

“Eat it on the way,” she said.

It was the first time I had ever eaten a banana. I took a bite. The taste felt unfamiliar. It was sweet, but distant. It didn’t belong to me. It wasn’t the taste that lingered—it was the smell. As if it belonged to another life.

I tried to take another bite, but I couldn’t. I kept walking, holding it in my hand. It was softening, crushed between my fingers, its scent growing stronger.

I couldn’t hold it like that forever. If I didn’t eat it, it would be rude.

The girl was walking a little ahead of me. I looked around. No one was there. I quickly slipped the banana into my pocket. My hand stayed there for a while.

After a bit, she stopped.

“What happened?” she said. “Did you throw it away?”

“I finished it,” I said.

She looked around. Seeing nothing in my hand, she believed me. We kept walking. Something inside me felt both hidden and exposed. As if I had done something unseen, yet everyone knew.

That night, as my mother was taking off my coat, she noticed the weight in the pocket. She reached in and pulled out the crushed banana. She looked at me.

“What is this?”

I told her what had happened.

“Why didn’t you eat it?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer.

She threw the banana in the trash. For her, it was a simple matter; it ended there.

For me, it did not. That moment settled somewhere inside me. Like something I could not name. Whenever I remembered it, it touched the same place.

Years passed. I studied, worked, rose in my position. I have been working at the same institution for a long time. I now have an office, a desk, a sense of order. What was missing became invisible. Or so I thought.

The other day, the young son of one of the employees came into my office. After carefully looking around, he picked up a banana from the fruit on my desk. He held it for a while, then handed it to me.

“Can you peel this for me?” he said.

I peeled it and gave it back. As he ate, I watched him. He was inside the moment.

I, on the other hand, was still holding on to something from years ago.

My hand went to my pocket.

As if it were still there.

It had long since rotted.

But its smell…

had never gone.