What We Ate

There were no refrigerators in those days. Fresh food was prepared by our mothers three time a day. Now I can guess how women spent their time! In the absence of fridges, food had to be prepared fresh at every mealtime. They were on their feet all the time tending to the kids or cooking meals for their (usually large) families. If they had to prepare idlis the next morning for breakfast, they had to grind the soaked rice and dal the previous evening. So, the servant maids were engaged for not only washing the vessels but also for grinding the batter. The idli batter was ground with a huge mortar and pestle, till the local technicians invented the electrically operated grinders speacially made for this purpose.

There were no large restaurants in small towns. Women and children eating in the small hotels was unheard of. Only men who had some work in the nearby town used to take their food in the few hotels the towns had. Of course, when the returned home they used to buy sweets wrapped in 'mandharai' leaf and snacks parcelled in paper cones. (Villages did not have a sweetmeat shop.)

The term 'pocket money' was unheard of. All our needs were taken care of by our parents. Every month some festival or the other would be occurring and mothers would be preparing a variety of sweets and savouries, which were specific to each occasion. Our craving for sweets was satisfied on those occasions. Moreover, there were no mass-produced chocolates available then. Our grocers stocked boiled sweets and home-made chikkis (made of groundnuts and jaggery). No wonder I hadn't heard of dental cavities till I was well into my thirties:-)

When families travelled they used to make food for the duration of the travel. Our South Indian families used to make variety rice, chutney with tamarind as preservative so as it would last longer and large quantities of 'vadaam'. With a roll of banana leaves cut into small serving size to serve as plates and a blanket to spread on the ground as a dining place, we were ready to travel. Whether it was a train journey or car travel, the food was supplied from the huge tiffin carrier, filled with the packed food we had brought along with us.

Whenever we had our school vacation we used to visit our relatives, mainly our two sets of grandparents. As the other grandchildren also used to visit them at the same time we all had a very good time playing to our hearts' content. I loved my paternal grandparents' village as it prvided us with lots of places to play, a river with a narrow stream of water to wade in, a pumpset in the coconut grove where we could take a shower with the water gushing through with the force of a small waterfall.

Every morning, after our breakfast of hot idlis, we would run to the coconut groves nearby or the banana gardens at the banks of the river. We used to climb the mango trees in our grandfather's coconut grove and swing on the low-lying branches. We could eat the fruits of the guava and jamun (black berry) trees after much climbing and shaking of trees. When we left for home, our uncle would cut a huge jack fruit from our tree in the banana garden, we would roll it in a gunny sack and carry it in the carrier of his bike which he would have parked a long way back outside the garden. We had to walk in the dirt of the garden and we love it. We would take bath in the pumpset at this time and return home for lunch. We never felt the hot sun at all but my grandmother insisted on us that we should return home before noon. She used to frighhten us that otherwise we would be accosted by spirits that came out only at noon-maybe her way of keeping us from sunstrokes!

We could look forward to a sumptuous spread of food, prepared lovingly by our grandmother and aunts, when we returned home hungrily. Their banana flower curry was a speciality. As the bunches of banana fruits were harvested and sold, they were left with lots of flowers which were discarded. So they would use only the most tender bud at the end and use the other parts of the flowers as fodder for the cows and bullocks the family owned. We were close to nature and animals in the village. My mother's place also had fields and coconut groves and a pond at the backyard. My maternal grandfather would fish for sole in the pond and we had it for lunch fresh from the pond. In both the places, a lot of the local children were our friends through the years of our visits and looking forward to our arrival. The street would be full of playing children in the evenings, we the 'town kids' teaching the all the new games we had learnt at our schools.

How we looked forward to these adventures! The day our school vacation started, moms would pack our bags and we would be on the way to both the grandparents' homes. Most of my neighbours were children of other government employees like my father and they also went away to their native places likewise. The fathers would take a few days off at the end of the vacation to visit their parents and take us back to the place of work. What tall stories we had to tell when we returned after our vacation !