Surangi, The Child Bride

Part 52

The heat of the Indian summer is as benevolent as it is oppressive. Had it not been for the seasonal rise in the mercury the luscious fat mangoes on the trees would not ripen to the heart's content, exploding the senses with their delicious sweetness, offset with a hint of residual tartness. Even the jackfruit trees are heavily laden with their spiny oversized fruit which take a little longer than mangoes to ripen. Wild jujubes and jamun fruit are bountiful in the summer, meant to be enjoyed by men, birds and beasts alike.

In the Konkan of the days gone by the summers of childhood were filled with idle days spent reading non-school books, playing team sports, and slackening on lazy afternoons when tiny feet would only rush to gather any fruit falling from the branches with the gust of the noon breeze. This bounty was enjoyed by sinking vulnerable deciduous teeth into the sharp tanginess of the raw mango, made bearable with some jaggery and ground red chilli. 

Summer also brought a flurry of activity in the kitchen when mothers, aunts and grandmothers teamed up to churn out the years supply of assorted spice mixes, pickles, papads, dried lentil dumplings  and wafers made from starches like rice, wheat, millets, sago or potatoes. No vegetarian meal was complete without these accompaniments. They had to be made painstakingly and sundried carefully so that their supply may last until the next pickling season. While the women cleaned, washed, pounded and stirred the contents in heavy saucepans bubbling on the hearth the men and children were roped in as there was always a shortage of helping hands.

The story was hardly different in the Oak family home and their neighbourhood. In spring when the mangoes were still firm a heady aroma of warm sesame oil and pickling spices such as mustard, fenugreek, fennel, turmeric, asafoetida and red chillies wafted in the air. The children helped cut up the raw mangoes, sprinkled them with salt and set them out to dry in winnowing fans, next to the clay jars left to sterilize in the sun. 

As soon as the fruit had dried adequately it was bunged into the heated oil and the pickling ingredients and then filled into the jars, leaving just enough head space for oil. This layer of oil would be replenished round the year to keep the pickle from spoiling. The mouths of pickle jars were tied with clean muslin and the jars were again left in the sun to begin the magic of the pickle's transformation. Madhav's favourite pickle was methamba, which were green mangoes sweetened with jaggery and a with distinct flavour of fenugreek and mustard seeds.

Once the pickles were done it was time to make the papads and the dried lentil dumplings known as sandgey. Even the children were enlisted to help roll the assorted papad dough into flat discs meant to be sundried. In keeping with the community spirit, children went from home to home, armed with personal rolling pins, competing with each other to roll out perfect spheres of even thickness, four to six inches round, depending upon instructions given by the women. Girls and boys as young as seven were adept at the business of rolling the papads. Needless to say a part of the raw dough always ended up as the children's snack, especially when the mothers were not watching them.

Tiny tots who were unable to roll out the dough were assigned the task of shooing away the occasional bird that tried to dive into the foods left to dry on old cotton dhotis or nine yard sarees. Their little hands would proudly wield weapons such as hand fans and sticks to scare the thieving crows away. 

"Why don't people make these things round the year? Surely October heat is also intense enough to dry any papads!" Dinkar remarked as he sat among the others, refusing to roll out any dough. To him it was a job cut out for the female species. Instead he just sat folding pages that he had torn out of old notebooks. 

  "Because the sun's heat is at its most intense in the summer and in October we are busy on the farms dealing with the paddy. And it is not just the heat, rather it is the sun's ultraviolet radiation that helps preserve the foods better!" Madhav was quick to point out as his rolling pin deftly shaped the papd dough into even size discs. That was just typical Madhav, finding perfection in every task he undertook.