Which vegetable is this?

I was a newly married girl just settled in my marital home in Pune with my husband .(Actually still a teenager, as my parents arranged a marriage with a 'suitable boy' when I was still in college!) In fact I was still attending the final year of my college and my experience in cooking was still in the rudimentary stage. I could cook a South Indian meal, both veg and non-veg, though my cooking was confined to the most common vegetables available.

When my parents and relatives left us after a week of settling me down in my new home, I was inconsolable. As a distraction, my husband took me shopping for vegetables. He said he would like 'poosanikkai' (ashgourd) sambar and asked me to buy a piece of it. We were standing in front of a stall which had big ball-like vegetables stacked in the front. One was yellow in colour and the other was green. I knew one of them was 'posanikkai' but didn't know which one.

I could not ask the shopkeeper for 'poosanikkai' in Marathi or Hindi as I didn't know the equivalent name in those languages. Confusion! Gathering a bit of courage, I stammered out to my new husband whether he knew which was 'poosanikkai' and then I could point it out to the shopkeeper to cut a piece of it. He was flabbergasted to find out that his wife didn't even know enough about cooking to identify his favourite vegetables and his face was a study in shock! He must have thought that his future home meals would be complete disasters, going by this experience.

But I acquitted myself well enough in my very first dinner as my chicken preparation with all the masala from my mother's recipe outshone the one he and his friend had been preparing in his bachelor days in 'British style' (with only pepper and salt)! As it was a Sunday he had bought a whole dressed chicken for me to preapre. (In our family we always prepare non-veg meals on Sundays and the poosanikkai was stored in the fridge for the next day's cooking.) So he forgot the 'poosanikkai' episode soon enough. Of course I didn't tell him until after the dinner that it was the very first time I had touched a dressed chicken! (My mother never let me prepare chicken in our house as I might have spoiled Sunday's lunch by experimenting the main dish with my beginner's attempt.) And it was quite a fight to cut it into pieces-my husband also never knew till a few weeks later, from his friend who was also newly married but a few months before us, that the shopkeeper would cut the chicken into manageable pieces, if we so asked.

But after this now-funny incident was recounted by me to all my relatives amidst laughter, any girl who didn't show any interest in cooking was immediately supported by her doting parents, quoting this incident. If 'P'(me) who couldn't identify poosanikkai could cook for a dozen people within a few days of her marriage, anyone could learn cooking in days!