Want to get high on nostalgia? Come walk with me down the lane where vendors came pushing carts full of goodies, appearing cunningly outside school gates in the afternoons and in streets and festival venues during holidays. They were market-savvy, each with a trademark .
Does kamarkattu ring a bell? A small, gooseberry-shaped sweet, you could pop directly in your mouth or eat off a stick, quite like a lollipop. Unlike the lollipop, this was, however, relatively healthier as it was made with jaggery and coconut shavings. The syrup was overcooked and that made the kamarkattu hard and impossible to bite into, but that was the major part of its charm. The sweets used to be stored in a glass jar but the lollipop-like ones were stuck enticingly on a pole covered with coconut rope. The kid who shelled out a princely sum of one “thambadi” (1/192 of a rupee) could enjoy it; inflation raised the price to one or two annas, but never dimmed its popularity. Then there was thaen mittai (honey candy, 3 for 5 paise) sold from glass jars.
The watch- mittai or javvu-mittai seller had a characteristic sound: he carried an ingeniously made hollow pole with a wooden toy at the top. He would pull a rope and the toy would jump. A “that-that-that” sound ensued – a call that never failed to bring the kids out. His merchandise – a long pliable concoction of sticky sugar and maida – was wound around this stick. For 3 pies, he would flick a piece off it, deftly make a watch (or necklace) and tie it around the child’s wrist. As they debated whether to eat it or not, he would pick a tiny piece of paste and stick it outside their mouth. We may live in hygiene-conscious times, but I bet kids today would love to make this man's acquaintance.
Then there was the forerunner of rainbow sprinkles - colourful, sugar-coated jeera . Respectfully called arisi (rice) mittai , they were gleefully renamed palli-mittai (house-lizard sweet) by kids who likened their resemblance to lizard droppings. No matter what you thought of them, these were the cheapest sweets on hand and so the name had no power to dent their sales. Try asking for palli mittai the next time you order sprinkles on your ice-cream!
Another sweet that went by an extraordinary name was maaradaichaan (choker). This was a mixture of besan , coconut scrapings, jaggery and cardamom, fried in oil – when eaten hot it was soft, but would get stuck in the throat when it cooled down. A variation of this was chimili , a laddu of jaggery, roasted til , peanuts and tamarind pounded together; this one remained soft.
The paati who sat outside the school compound had a spread of attractions: kodukkaipuli (monkey-pod) fruit-strands, elandapazham , elantha vadai (a pounded, flattened mix of ber, jaggery, red chillies and salt) and elanthai podi . She also brought kalakka , and arai nellikka (small gooseberry) in season – munchies no nutritionist can fault. A major addiction she encouraged was kidukki , a spicy ball of crushed iluppai flowers with salt, tamarind, jaggery and chilli powder.
After that firebomb, the mouth would yearn for something cool and sweet and the paal -ice man who came ringing a brass bell was the answer. The huge mud pot on his push-cart was wrapped in red cloth. An indulgent grandparent would nod and say, “Go, buy one,” and the paal -ice man would ladle out a scoop, slap it on a banana or areca leaf and hand it over with a flourish. The trick was to lick it off without losing a drop. Soon, however, this became a stick or kuchi -ice. In the following decades, tube-pepsi (coloured water in a tube), paal -pepsi (with milk), goli soda, paneer soda and kola flooded the corner shops.
Of all these, a few are now available in villages and almost none in the city. The one retro sweet that has endured is the panju mittai or cotton candy. A brace of Tennessee dentists might have spun it out of a machine in 1897, but India is where it’s still going strong. As kids watched wide-eyed, the panju-mittai vendor would deftly gather the pink or white clouds of sweetness on a stick while ceaselessly cranking his magic machine. Can buying it off a counter and eating it from a plastic container have the same effect?
