Deepavali is festival of lights, as the name suggests. To the common man, it is of new dresses and sweets. I have already bought my shirts - one for the road. Cooptex offers 20, 30 and 40% discounts. Luckily I bought a few weeks ago. My friends went for shopping last week to big saree shops, only to be directed by the Security to ‘queue No. 6’, or wait at the ‘eighth bench’ please, and so on.
As for dhoti I didn’t buy any because that it what I have in plenty ever since I attained the age of 50. Whenever I attended any religious function, the return gift was dhoti - Mayilkannu veshti, or the artificial jarikai one. The problem is that while going around wearing them you can’t be explaining to the onlookers that you have just not these two pairs of them but dozens.
Everything about life these days is Diwali. My friend Shankaranarayanan who conducts Aanmiga Valli, too selected the topic “Diwali’ for his question-answer session the other day. Yes, he is “PP3’s Amithabh Bacchhan”. If Amithabh’s is Kaun Banega Crorepati, SN’s is, Kaun Banega Biscuit-pati. Sorry, the winner can claim prize only once, thereafter it will be just a clap. By now everyone has realized that under the calm exterior, SN wears a tough interior when it comes to selecting questions. Far from audience-friendly.
Recalling my childhood, every housewife in the village used to make some sweets or the other. In most cases one item would be Mysorepak. Some ladies end up making, not wantonly, the melting variety, a la Krishna Sweets; some others manage the conventional type - with visible holes, neither soft nor hard. like the seeru variety in marriages, while a few unlucky ones prepared ones that are hard to bite, but can come handy to scare street dogs away. Understandable. After all, in those days these were prepared only once a year. Each festival had a specified food item or snack - cheedai for Janmashtami, modakam for Vinayaka Chaturti, or Adai for Kartigai, etc..
My mother too used to prepare sweets. The year was 1955. On Diwali eve hardly had she finished preparing Mysorepak when labour pain started for her younger brother’s wife. She was rushed to the dark room usually reserved for delivery. All the other ladies had already assembled there. My mom hurriedly hung the sweet tookku-paatram on the high ceiling that denied access to children, and rushed. A young lad then, as soon as I found the ladies busy in the delivery room, I reached out to the paatram aided by stool and chair, and had sweets to my heart’s content, only to be caught next morning when my mom felt the ‘heavy-weight’ paatram transforming itself into a ‘light weight’.
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4 comments:
Memories flow through in RK Narayan style. Nice sir
TRRanganath- Bl-1/G-3.
As usual, a good, interesting write up from Sundaram.
In olden days, in village houses, whenever ‘bhakshanams’ are made, the practice was to keep them in the ‘machullu’, “a dark Strong room” in those days , under lock and key, and the keys will be with the lady of the house always, therefore entering and stealing was next to impossible. Wonderful and enjoyable were those days.
How many Mysore paks did you eat, Chitappa? And what was the “punishment” next day? 😊
Sir,you have likened C.Shankarnarayanan as our Amitabh Bacchan .May be we should anoint him as our Big C 😃.
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