Coconuts and Poochis

Like many, many households in the south, we have coconut trees in our garden. When I look out the window I can see our three, and four more from the houses beside and behind us. For years our trees provided us with all the coconut for our chutneys, and for the occasional glass of tender coconut water.

Lately, though, a lot of the coconuts have fallen from the tree before reaching maturity; some the gardener has cut down only to find that they had turned to dried husks. Last week one of the garden contract laborers who's been doing some temporary work here shinnied up to the crown of a coconut tree, and declared that it was infested with poochis (insects). He told Mary that if we purchased the ingredients, he would make them into a sort of poultice and apply them around the coconut stems, to kill or drive off the poochis. Rs. 25 per tree, plus a tip, for the labour and expertise.


Here's what Mary bought:

rock salt
mothballs
sambrani (a kind of incense)
turmeric
edible camphor (used here in some sweets)

The work was completed very quickly. I don't know how long it will take for the results to show, but we are well-poulticed now.

A Gift

Yesterday the paperkkaarar came to buy our old newspapers, Diet Pepsi tins, magazines, empty bottles and so on. We usually call him in -- he cycles by with his cart every few days -- only after the shelves in the ironing room are bulging with stuff. Mary and Lakshmi haul more things out of Mary's room: bits of torn paper, scrap metal from valves and pipes which have been replaced, empty tins of canned corn, plastic milk sachets. The proceeds from this venture are shared among us, under a long-established system which I haven't fully figured out.

Yesterday Lakshmi was shaking the paperkkaarar's coarse burlap sack to make sure that it was empty, and this fell out:


The picture shows the actual size -- at least on my computer screen. It's a press for making sweets, or savoury snacks. I was attracted to the design inside. I said, "I'll buy this from you." The paperkkaarar said, "Go ahead, take it, no need to give anything."

So I received a gift yesterday. It fell from a sack. It is worth nothing, even to the paperkkaarar. And I'm ridiculously pleased with it.

Several Things

Vijaysree Venkatraman, writer of the excellent A Propos of Nothing, has an article in the Christian Science Monitor: A spice box and a cookbook got her started, which includes a recipe for Indian beans and peas.

The photograph of a spice box which accompanies the article was taken by the author of Mahanandi, a luscious-looking Indian and western food blog which I hadn't come across before.

Food ... mangoes.... eating mangoes twice a day. We started with the mangoes from our own tree, not very interesting but dear to me because I watched them swell up in their tree overlooking the badminton court. On to banganapallis from the fruit vendor's pushcart. Then one day I went out and bought a box of Alphonse mangoes from Maharashtra. When we put the first bite into our mouths, both of us emitted an involuntary 'aaah', and then laughed, because they were so luscious, so voluptuous...

The Gujarati word for 'right hand' literally translates as 'eating hand.' I wondered if the left hand might therefore be 'toilet hand' or 'unclean hand,' or something like that, but it isn't.

We hired a new gardener. He started out as our watchman, who moonlighted as an auto driver, but he asked us to hire him as a gardener because he loved that work. He only requested that we match his previous salary from the two jobs. We agreed, and we like him and his work. One week after he made the changeover, his slum of 200 thatched huts burned down. The government gave the affected families Rs. 1000 each; and some local charitable groups donated casuarina poles and palm mats - including matting impregnated with tar for the roof. We also helped him. He took two days off and rebuilt his hut.

Four days ago he again took two days of leave, sending a message that an insect had bitten his face and it had swelled up. That didn't sound right to us; we suspected that he had actually been driving the auto again, to make some extra money. When he returned, he told R the truth: his neighbours had claimed that when he rebuilt, he had grabbed an extra four feet of land. They broke the hut and beat him up.

Lakshmi says that he married a woman from the fisherman community, and lives with them, and that they are all rowdies. Whether that's true or not, it appears that a gardener is no match for them.