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V Gangadhar

The adipose issue

Again I am on a diet. My umpteenth one. No sweets, fried stuff or other goodies. Besides being a diabetic, I also have this tendency of putting on weight even if I drink a glass of water. For someone who loves food, and particularly sweets, life becomes an ordeal. The mango season come and went, but I controlled my urges and ate less than a dozen mangoes during the three-month season.

My wife, who watches over my diet, was duly impressed. She has no weight problems, remains slender and can eat as much as she likes. But there are times when she 'forgets' to eat, even when the refrigerator stocked the most delicious goodies. This summer, though, she had my share of the mangoes too and I did not grudge her.

Every other person I know is on a diet. One of my friends is on a permanent liquid diet. Another one survives on fresh fruits and salads and the third fasts thrice a week. They all keep away from puris, bhajis, jhangiris and pongal dripping with ghee. The sacrifice often shows on their faces. They scowl, lose their tempers quickly and curse the newspapers and magazines which devote several pages to food and recipes.

I guess it's Murphy's law once again. The more you love to eat, the less you are allowed to eat. In my case, before the onset of diabetes some 10 years ago, I never counted calories. In fact, I never counted anything I ate -- be it jhangiris, laddus or mysorepaks. The aim was to finish off the items as quickly as possible and put aside, for cleaning, the vessels in they were stored.

I think people ate much more in the past than they are doing now. Going through mystery queen Agatha Christie's autobiography, I was astonished at the amount of food the family consumed and the magnificent spreads that accounted for Sunday lunches and dinners. Jane, the family cook, joined the household as a slender girl. When she finally quit after nearly 25 years in the kitchen, she was huge from sampling the delicacies she had cooked. Eating was a pleasure; no one bothered about body weights, calories or cholesterol problems.

It was like that in most South Indian homes. When I was young, this was how my day went. The morning began with two glass of filtered coffee. There was no breakfast, except on rare occasions, because we had our lunch around 10 am! Lunch was heavy and quite substantial -- rice, sambar, rasam, vegetables, pickle, pappad and curds.

Around 1 pm, we had what was known as irandantharam (second lunch). This was a further serving of rice with curds or buttermilk and mango or lime pickle. At 3.30 pm, we sat down to tiffin and coffee or tea. The tiffin could be idli, dosa, vadai, sevai or adai and, at least three times a week, the cook prepared a sweet dish. Dinner, which was around eight pm, was a repeat of lunch. Though we had a cook in the house, my mother and grandmother were always in the kitchen supervising the arrangements.

These were the official eating arrangements. But the children of the house were not satisfied; they had to munch something or the other all the time. The store room was always full of snacks like murukku, seedai, sweet puris and a wide variety of sweets. This system of eating was called poha vara. Roughly translated into English, it meant 'going and coming'. Because, whenever you passed the store room, you walked in, filled your trouser pockets with snacks and walked out.

Most of the houses were full of children in those days and they would eat all the time. Occasionally, the elders took the precaution of hiding the eatables so that the kids would not overeat and become sick. This was a real challenge for us.

People are familiar with the saying, "Stolen kisses are the sweetest." For us, stolen snacks tasted most delicious. We used all our ingenuity to locate the hidden eatables and polish them off. My eldest sister and I were considered the family experts in this field and, to this day, we agree that there was nothing tastier than munching laddus which the cook had hidden in what he thought were 'inaccessible' places. We discovered them faster than Sherlock Holmes discovered vital clues in murder cases.

Surprisingly, I never fell ill or suffered from occasional stomach upsets. It was great fun going out to play with your friends when your pockets bulged with eatables. And some of them were stuff only youngsters could eat. I remember a particular sweet, porivilankai, which was in the shape of a hard ball. Only youngsters with exceptionally strong teeth were able to bite into it. But that did not deter us; the harder it was, the more we enjoyed it.

This was something that went on in every house. Occasionally, I visited my uncle who was a lawyer in small towns like Ottapalam and Perinthalmanna. Some of his clients were poor locals who could not afford to pay him in cash. Instead, they brought items like jackfruits, bananas, mangoes, ripe coconuts, freshly-laid eggs and so on.

Uncle had a large family, consisting of seven children who ran wild in those days. They had a simple principle; whatever items were brought home had to be finished immediately so that the problem of storing them did not arise. So, the mangoes, jackfruit, bananas and coconuts were bitten and chewed or skinned, cut into pieces and consumed on the spot. The eggs were made into omlettes. It was amazing how quickly all the stuff disappeared!

My uncle and aunt did not disapprove of their behaviour, either by thought or action. "Children," my aunt explained, as she passed me huge slices of mango, "should eat less of cooked food and more of natural food." I joined the fun.

Illustration: Laura Fernandes