nostalgia Archives - Page 5 of 6

12/05/201622/06/2024

How do you eat your mangoes?

The other day I was watching my kids eating mangoes. The fruit is peeled, stones discarded, then diced into neat little cubes or slices (if I’m feeling lazy). I then leave it in the refrigerator to cool till we get on with lunch. Later, the kids pick the fruit off the plate with fruit forks or toothpicks.

Mangoes in Lucknow have always been plentiful. I had once stumbled upon this quote by Ghalib, Aam meethe hon aur bahut saare hon.

That’s exactly how they always are here.

During the summer our cousins would come to stay with us. Each afternoon all six of us aged 4 to 10, would sit around a tub of mangoes out in the aangan. The tub would be full of water to keep the mangoes cool. We’d be dressed in the barest minimum – vests and slips – as we fished out the mangoes, oblivious to the heat, and competed at amassing the largest pile of guthlis. We’d peel the fruit tooth and nail, quite literally, and bite right into the pulp, delicious juice dripping from our hands, running down our chins and smearing our faces.

One of our favourite mangoes was the Lucknow Safeda.

If you know anything about this particular variety you’ll know it isn’t meant to be pealed and cut at all. It is more juice than pulp and has to be sucked on, not eaten. There’s a whole art to eating a Lucknowa Safeda. I’m not sure I’m equipped to explain. Let it suffice that it has to be handled with all the Lakhnawi nazakat you can muster. No, I’m not being a snob – the nazakat is crucial. The thing is the fruit has an exceptionally fragile skin. A little inelegant impatience and you’ll have the guthli shooting right out from the wrong end (of the fruit, of course) splattering you with juice and pulp.

Each time that would happen the expression on the face of the callous offender would be priceless, giving us hours of laughter. What’s worse, he would get an earful from his/her mum because mango stains are the devil’s own work when it comes to getting them off.

Anyway, once you’ve got down to the guthli without accident you scrape it off with your teeth and discard it. Finally you slurp off the remaining juice.

I am sure we weren’t the most sightly of sights, yet it was the perfect way to form strong bonds of shared memories. Perhaps that’s why even though we don’t meet, sometimes for years together, we can take up from right where we left off, the sweetness never varying quite like that of the dussehris, langadas and safeda.

Aam will always remain a very khaas part of my childhood memories.

21/01/201603/12/2017

Grandmas and green chickpeas

There is something about fresh seasonal produce that I find quite irresistible. Ruby red tomatoes, creamy cauliflowers, shiny purple brinjals, crunchy white radish and the greens – spinach, fenugreek, dil and coriander – all alluringly beautiful.

Hence vegetable shopping these days is an exercise in self control. The husband has his own theory of course. He insists it’s my all-encompassing shopping bug that does not even spare vegetables.

Just LOOK at those colours. I clicked this one at Mahabaleswar but you do get the idea, right?

But really, they’re so fresh and healthy that they’re a complete delight to behold. I buy them and get them home and then don’t quite know what to do with them. A case in point being chana or green chickpeas that make an appearance in the winter. It was Rachna who reminded me of them.

During winter months our grandmoms would sit in the warm afternoon sun in the angan, talking till the sun went down. Yet, they were never really idle. Even as they chatted, their hands would be busy knitting, cleaning rice or daal, making sewains (the handmade ones) or of course shelling peas or chana.

We’d be drowsing by, a book in hand. The clink of chanas dropping into the steel bowl took on a hypnotic quality. Through half open eyes we’d watch the bowl filling up steadily, while the branches with empty pods still on them, piled up on the other side. We’d chip in sometimes, eating more than we shelled, only to be shooed away.

They would then be ground by hand on a stone sil-batta to get a bright green paste, which was then cooked with the most redolent of
spices – cinnamom and bay leaf, cloves and cardamoms black and green and many many others.

Finally it would turn into a thick shiny emerald green flavourful gravy. With a blob of home-made butter, it sat on a mound of equally aromatic basmati rice and made our winter lunches memorable. It was called the nimoma.

My grandmom would also make green boondi laddoos. She would grind chana, make tiny boondis (just like the ones made from gram flour) then add sugar syrup and bind them into delectable laddoos.

The laddoos remained beyond me but the nimona I did try a few times. However, I never could get it right. It may have to do with
the fact that I don’t quite have a master’s touch when it comes to cooking. Or maybe I just don’t have the meticulous way with ingredients that turns them into works of delicious art.

Mostly, I suspect, it’s because, it is a mindboggling amount of work.

I cannot but marvel at how much dilegence and precision that generation put into cooking. That too without weights and measures and teaspoons and tablespoons. I’d watch in fascination as my grandmom would measure out the salt that went into our daily daal on the palm of her hand – and I’m talking rock salt crystals not the powdered salt we use today. She’d get it right each time, every time.

Here I am, not even able to make tea without precisely measuring out
the water cup by cup and woe-betide anyone who changes the spoon in my teabox. I never could get the ‘andaaz‘ thing right.

So I stick with the simple and uncomplicated – like this salad. The recipe is here at Rachana’s blog. I added flax seeds for extra crunch. Try it, it comes out great, I might add.

18/01/201615/04/2017

Sweet memories and some thoughts

Mel from Stirrup Queens has invited us today to share a memory of our favourite childhood candy and I realised I had more than one. Don’t worry, though, I promise not to get carried away.

To begin with there were these phantom cigarette candies. I shared this on Facebook sometime back and heard from many many friends saying how they missed them just like me. These had a texture quite like chalk and were sweet enough to put you off sweets for a long time, or so I thought when I recently sampled them again. I’d thought they were dead and gone till one day I got a call on the intercom from my 9 year old asking permission for a cigarette that his friends were offering. I completely freaked and asked him to come right home. And this is what he got. It brought back many many fun memories. When we were young, we would put them to our lips and pretend to blow out ‘smoke’ during the cold Lucknow winters.

I also remember a ‘sweet man’ who was quite a favourite with all of us. He’d stand outside our school with a huge box, which he hung from his neck, stacked with all kinds of sweets. My favourites were these tiny pink rose flavoured sweets that I cannot remember the name of. They came in a peppermint flavour too but the rose were my favourite. I remember the fragrance more that the flavour. Regrettably, I have never found them again.

Those were certainly simpler times. Sweets back then were simply an occasional indulgence, nothing more. They didn’t need to boast of additional benefits. Have you noticed how these days they come ‘packed with energy boosters’ or ‘fortified with glucose’?

And so each time our child has a meltdown and we reach out for a sweet to pacify our sad or angry toddler we can tell ourselves, “Wow I avoided a tantrum and I gave him an energy boost!” A win-win situation, right? And it’s way easier than helping him work out strategies to cope with his anger/grief. Advertisers have certainly made the whole exercise guilt-free.

Okay I’m over analysing this whole thing but I do have a lot of issues with sweets and the way they are marketed. For instance, have you seen how Kinder Joy comes in a boy version and a girl version?? I mean, must sweets (and toys and books and everything else) also have a gender now?

Despite all the advertising hoo-haa I wonder if my kids will remember them with as much affection and nostalgia as I remember my phantom cigarettes.

Linking to Mel’s #Microblog Mondays .

27/02/201509/09/2017

Grandmas are special

A few days back I was telling the twins about my grandmoms. That brought on a wave of nostalgia. We had two of them, amma my dad’s mother and chachi his aunt, who was just chachi to the whole world. They were inseparable yet squabbled all the time. My dad teasingly christened them Gulabo-Sitabo.

We had the best of both worlds – a strict mom who disciplined us all the time and the two doting grandmoms who more than balanced her out. Though it’s over a decade since they left us, somedays seemingly inconsequential occurrences bring their memories flooding back.

When I’m pushing the kids to have their milk I think of amma who was hopelessly fond of it. Whether she was ill or tired or not hungry at all – offer her a bowl of milk and she wouldn’t say no. It stood her in good stead when well into her 80s, she had a fall and even the doctor couldn’t believe that she had come away without broken bones.

She was a snorer – a loud and consistent one. She would be snoring loud and clear, yet if one of us asked ‘Amma are you asleep?’ she’d wake up with a start, “Of course not,” she would say indignantly. That turned into such a family joke.

She spoke chaste Awadhi (that’s a Hindi dialect), one of the sweetest tongues to me. And whatever she said was peppered with the richest collection of age old proverbs and sayings. She had the perfect one for every situation.

While amma was the religious one doing puja twice a day, Chachi was a young girl trapped in an old woman’s body. The high point of her routine was TV time. She had a fixed corner which she’d take right from the time transmission started. Those were the pre cable days yet she’d watch everything the television dished out – from programmes on agriculture and industry to the single weekly Bollywood film. She loved Bollywood.

She was the one who mended our clothes when the seams came off. She was the one who trawled markets looking for the perfect colour of yarn then figure out the ‘latest designs’ and knit sweaters for us even while pretending to complain about ‘these new fashions’. She would much rather chat up our friends than women her own age.

She’d haggle shamelessly with the man who came around to buy off old newspapers. Whatever she made by fleecing off the poor man came to us. Back when pocketmoney was unheard of, those few rupees were quite a treasure. She had the best stories to tell. A bit of mythology and a bit of legend with enough twists and turns and drama to satisfy the most demanding listener.

And she loved my sister – beyond the rest of us. Of course she’d never ever admit it even while blatantly favouring her. My sister was a complete potatorian, she loved potatoes to the exclusion of most other vegetables. Chachi would avoid mom’s eagle eye and dish up her favourite for her while the rest of us ploughed through the greens. If mum asked my sister to cook something, there was Chachi quietly and efficiently doing it for her and handing her the tray to go out and take the credit.

Of course it was completely another matter that our mum was a regular Hercule Poirot. She just knew everything. A royal battle would ensue but it didn’t stop her from doing it again.

How I miss them. With due apologies to my kids’ grandmoms, they just don’t make them like the old ones these days.

Come now, it’s your turn. What’s your favourite grandmom story?

Linking to ABC Wednesday for the letter G. Do drop by to see other G posts.

24/08/201215/04/2017

A book and some memories

I generally avoid buying books randomly. I look for a recommendation or a review before I pick one. The odd time I’ve bought an ‘interesting looking’ book I’ve got a terribly raw deal. However, this time during my trip to Dehradun I made an exception.

I came across this really quaint little bookshop inside a Barista. Lovely concept, isn’t it — Coffee and books? There was no way I wasn’t buying both and I chanced upon Saeed Mirza’s ‘Ammi – Letter to a democratic mother’.

For once, I’m glad I didn’t wait for a review.

It’s not a conventional book at all. If you’re looking for a storyline, or dramatic highs and lows you will be disappointed. If you’re looking for an autobiographical journey, arranged in neat chronological order you won’t find it either. The book seems like a compilation of pages from the author’s diary which takes the form of letters to his mother. He talks about his parents, their love story, his childhood, his journey to film making and his disillusionment with the system. The book delves a bit into history, breaks off to tell favourite stories on Mulla Nasruddin, then turns into a travelogue as Mirza takes to the road with wife Jennifer. The best part is a short film script that he incorporates at the end.

It’s meant to be read and savoured in bits, very very interesting bits.

I have to confess that there’s another reason why I bought the book. For one, Saeed Mirza’s a celebrity I like and admire. I’d been too young to understand/admire his films but I certainly loved Nukkad. Besides, he was a celebrity I once interviewed. Strange, it might sound, but each person I’ve interviewed or even met, during my working days, remains special to me. I keep a soft corner for them unless they’re someone really nasty or opinionated (like Shobhaa Dey, Gosh was she patronising!).

I met Saeed Mirza in Bhopal and interviewed him back in the 90s. He was staying with a friend when I first went to meet him. A colleague, an aspiring actor, tagged along hoping he’d push his case. Withing a few minutes of being there he realised he’d wanted to meet Aziz Mirza, not Saeed Mirza, and he immediately wanted to leave.

As it turned out the interview was a long winding one. The restless colleague kept making furious eyes at me to end it while I was in no mood to do so… it was way too interesting. He came away hugely irritated while I couldn’t conceal my amusement. I ragged him for a long long time after that. Mirza talked of writing a book then. “It will be a critique on me,” he’d said. I’m not sure it was this one.

The next time I met him he was staying at a hotel. I had an evening appointment and he welcomed me to his room with a glass of alcohol in his hands, certainly not a setting to put me at ease. I was grateful for the presence of my photographer friend. However, once he started talking I forgot to be uncomfortable and stayed on till nightfall. Quite a raconteur, he is.