Coconut Medicine 2

Today the ingredients of the poultice were assembled: turmeric, moth balls, rock salt, Sam's Fortified Neem Powder. The tree man supervised their mixing, put the medicine in a bag which he attached to his holster-basket, and began to climb. First he slung the longer rope -- partly covered with black rubber for extra traction, perhaps an old bicycle inner tube -- around the trunk above his head, tied the ends together to make a ring, and kept a smaller ring of the same material around one ankle. he jumped up onto the trunk, pulling himself up with the large ring, and rested both feet on the smaller one.


In this way -- throwing the larger ring upward and bringing up his feet -- he continued up the trunk like an inchworm. The palms' crowns must be about 30 feet high.


He climbed up to the base of each crown, cut down the lowest ring of leaves with his machete, along with whatever coconuts were ripe, dried-up leaves, and stem clusters from which coconuts had already been harvested. Finally he applied the medicine around the coconut stems and came back down. Each tree took about half an hour, and he charged Rs. 50 -- a little more than a US dollar -- per tree. He also carries away the cut leaves, which are made into rough brooms or coarse woven mats for thatched huts.

What strength he requires, to climb those tall, branchless trees and to do so much tending, without any more support than two rings of rope!

Coconut Medicine

Our cook, Mary, is the in-charge for our three coconut trees. She tells the gardener when to cut the ripe coconuts down, and monitors their quality. A couple of days ago she told me that the coconuts have become dry -- she brought a pot full of halved fruit, to show me the white flesh.

I suggested that she call the coconut tree man. He had come at about this time in 2006, when the coconuts were falling before ripening, and did the trees a lot of good by climbing up to the crown and applying a poultice made from rock salt, mothballs, sambrani (a kind of incense), turmeric and edible camphor, bound with oil.

The coconut tree man in 2006. He has a heavy black rope slung over his shoulder, and wears a cone-shaped basket for his machete. The gardener is mixing up the poultice.

The prescription for dry coconuts is different. In addition to camphor, turmeric and salt, he wants something called vepampunakku, which he says is available from nurseries. Sadly, the nursery which I used to go to, the enormous and serene Saundarya, has long gone to development, and most nurseries are in the suburbs. (For that matter, the coconut man himself lives in the Srinivasapuram slum, which is about to be emptied and its inhabitants transported to a distant project – what will we do then?)

Mary discovered from him, and told me, that vepampunakku is a paste made from the seeds of the vepam tree, and that we have one in our garden –a smallish slender tree. She said that the fruits are also medicinal, but that the crows eat them all.


If anyone knows more about the vepam tree, or vepampunakku (and where to get it!), I’d be interested to hear about it. update: Now I feel silly: vepam is neem, it turns out. So that's why it's in our garden. Though I don't know why it's so scrawny -- neem is a big, spreading tree. Even its shade is supposed to be healthy. My gardener rode his bicycle to a nursery in Adyar and bought bags of "Sam's Nutri Neem-Plus 100% Pure Neem Powder, Fortified with Turmeric, Castor, Pungam and Illupai." Rs. 25 per kg. I still don't know what pungam and illupai are...

A Bouquet of Pineapples

Our Neti Pot

The New York Times has an article on what it calls a neti pot - what you use to irrigate your nose. It's certainly not called a neti pot here, but I don't know the word, so... I remembered that there was one among my late mother-in-law's things, and decided that it was time to try it out. I watched a YouTube video on how to do it -- only the person in the video used something called 'neti pot salt', while I used the salt that we have, which is iodised. Will I get cancer?

Anyway, it's done. I didn't like it -- the water ran out of my nose and down the side of my face, and when I bent over afterward and snorted as directed, it came out of my nose and my mouth, and it was pretty much like being in the ocean and getting seawater in your nose. My nose does feel clean and all, though, so maybe I'll try it again sometime.

This is our family neti pot (that's a very small flower):

Bandicoot

Last night I went into the kitchen. As I turned on the light a big bandicoot came out from under a counter and appeared to be charging at me. Though it might have been trying to get out of sight. But still. I uttered a kind of groaning sound and ran, or walked very fast, back through the dining room and into the drawing room where R was doing Sudoku. I said dramatically, "There's a big bandicoot in the kitchen!" He looked up briefly, said, "Go call Mary," and went back to the puzzle.

I went out back to Mary's room and apologetically woke her up. She got up enthusiastically, though, and grabbed a mopstick, hoping for a chance to bash the rat. We went inside together, I strewed poison cakes around, she tapped everything with the stick, but nothing emerged. Mary went back to bed and I returned to R.

He looked up again and said, "What happened?" I told him, and he said, "So, did it hiss at you?" "What??" "The little chuchunders don't hiss, but the big ones, if you turn on them they'll open their mouths." I said, "I didn't turn on it, I ran in the other direction." He gave a condescending laugh: ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. So I did the same to him: ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

In the night I dreamed that the Mongol hordes had come and were rampaging around upstairs, while we cowered in a small room. I had a bunch of very knobby, odd-looking jewelry, which I concealed about my person -- not a good idea, probably, with hordes of any kind. Eventually they left.

In the morning I came downstairs. A pipe that had been blocked was now wide open -- the bandicoot had discovered it somehow, and chewed through the blocking material, and escaped. I stood with Mary and Lakshmi, pondering over the giant droppings, sharing details of the exciting story, and wondering how the thing had gotten into the house in the first place.

Here endeth the wildlife story of the day.

My Office

Because I like getting glimpses of other people’s work spaces, I thought I’d show you my office. (I don't know why I call it that -- because it has a desk in it? Is there a better word? 'Study' sounds pretentious, and I do actually do some work here...) It’s only 8’ x 12’, it’s the most crowded room in the house (the rest of the house is NOT full of knick-knacks, in spite of what you see here), but it suits me well. Here goes:


The west wall. The flowers are ginger -- I had brought them in to draw them. They're almost dead, but I like them that way, spotted with black and curling up.



A worktable and shelves on top of two small filing cabinets. Books that I've bound. Art supplies. Stuff.


The north wall -- there are doors to the left and right of this picture. The glass bricks look black, but they're not -- they let in a pleasant diffused light. I tidied up the sketchbooks before taking the photograph :).



Part of the east wall (I'm not showing ANYBODY a built in cabinet to the left of the picture, crammed with files and papers to be filed). My desk, an old one, made of sheesham wood, and a little chest for paper and the printer and scanner, made of what is called 'country wood' -- i.e., too insignificant to be named.


The window, on the south wall, to the right of my desk. It's a grey day - in fact it's raining now. Not an ideal one for taking photographs, so there's flash burn everywhere.

So that's it.

New Year

The day after Divali is Gujarati (and some other people's -- but not Tamils') New Years Day, according to the Vikram calendar.

The weather is as good as it ever gets here: the temperature in the low 80s, with a steady breeze because it's the monsoon season. Our raggedy garden is looking its best. If you direct your eyes only at certain angles, it's still possible to ignore the new buildings coming up all around us, and to forget the nightly rumble and crash of trucks carrying supplies to, and dirt away from, the construction sites.

Sweet

Yesterday was the south Indian festival of Deepavali; today is the north Indian festival of Divali -- but it's all one: lights, fireworks, giving boxes of sweets and nuts, wearing new clothes, visits with friends and family. We don't really celebrate any festival, but we still wrap up a few boxes of nuts (called 'dry fruit' here) and other nice things to give; and receive a few boxes of sweets and other nice things. I lit one big candle, instead of setting out hundreds of tiny oil lamps.

The fireworks yesterday were properly deafening (though some dastardly person began at 5:45 in the morning, for which I curse him as noisily as possible). I expect they will be deafening again tonight. You can buy firecracker chains of 10,000 crackers -- you unroll them down the length of the street, and they seem to go on exploding forever. I have been told that chains of 100,000 crackers are available too, but fortunately we've missed out on them so far. Big bangs and flowers of light rise above the popping crackers.

I just ate TWO sweets (Mysore paak, a weakness of mine), and am feeling slightly sugar-sick, with an aftertaste of roasted gram flour and ghee.

So, Happy Deepavali / Divali! On to the next station in the festival season, which will only end with Pongal in mid-January.

Looking out the window at Cafe Coffee Day in Indira Nagar. It made an attractive picture, although it was too humid to sit outside. Coconut palms are a constant feature here; yet I realised that this picture might look quite exotic to someone in, say, Boston.

It has been raining almost every day. When it rains and I turn on the cold water tap, the water that runs over my fingers is actually cold, not just tepid -- it startles me every time.

Rain

It's the best kind of weather: rain, not heavy and therefore destructive, but fairly steady and saturating, so that the garden looks impossibly, radiantly green. The temperature is almost 20 degrees less than it was a couple of weeks ago -- in the upper 80s.

We went to Amethyst and sat on the verandah, watching drops of water dropping from leaves and drinking cappuccino. It was heavenly.

Several Things

A recent search referral:

plaster crumbling away salt infection

I read this and immediately thought, Yes, that's me all right...


Some good photographs of Chennai.

A new(ish) Indian blog directory.

I love mehndi. Here's a photoset of Indian mehndi on Flickr. And one of Arabic mehndi. (both of these links via Dispatch from L.A.)


A pleasant side-effect of the real estate boom: yesterday afternoon one of the city's few organised real estate brokerage firms sent us a bushel basket full of perfectly ripe banganapalli mangoes. How many such baskets must they have delivered all over the city?

I've eaten more mangoes this year than ever before, and the season is not over. Last night Mary surprised me with a sweet-sour curry of green mangoes from our garden, after I had eaten one of the meltingly sweet real estate-mangoes for tea...

It is equally sweet-sour to remember that mango season will be over soon; though if it weren't I would be in danger of ending up like the young English lady in India whose epitaph I'm sure I read about somewhere, who died of a surfeit of pineapple.

Sheets

In India, when you are talking about bed linen you don't say 'sheets' but 'bedsheets.' I suppose it's to save you from the embarrassment of asking a shopkeeper for sheets and being presented with pieces of paper, or sails.

I struggle with insomnia. Tossing twisting, contorting into the aches I will feel tomorrow, I forget what I am trying to do: SLEEP, dammit.

It's dry, dry, not finding sleep. The twisted sheets have sandpaper edges. The air-conditioner gurgles like a creature with indigestion. I will fold one sheet into a captain's hat, another into a boat, raise the sail and I'm away.

Mango Thieves

Six large mangoes were stripped from our tree overnight!! And I have a prime suspect, too... but I only used that post-title because it sounded so good: what I really want to talk about is saffron.

When I became a poor imitation of a Gujarati housewife, one of my first tasks was to phone in the monthly provisions order, something which my mother-in-law had been doing before my arrival. The provision store owners were also Gujaratis, so they had all the special things we need, like kokum, methi kuria and so on. Once a month their van would pull up, and the kitchen floor would be heaped with bags of rice, dals, oil, sugar, spices and so on. It was a big event. Now we have stores which somewhat resemble American supermarkets, and I prefer to go and buy the stuff myself; but they did not exist at that time.

So I carefully made a list and phoned the store. They always recognised my voice, and put me on to the best English speaker among them. I began working my way down the list. We ordered most spices in 100 gm. packets – cumin, anise and black mustard seeds, turmeric powder, asafoetida, etc. On that particular day, I also had saffron on my list. We didn’t use it very often, but it had run out. So, along with everything else I said, “Saffron, 100 gm.” There was a silence on the other end of the line, and the man who was taking my order said, “Sister, do you know what 100 gm. of saffron costs?” I didn’t, and he named an astronomical sum. It was my turn to be silent, then I said very meekly, “So, how much do you think I should order?” He said, “One gram should be fine,” and I quickly agreed.

I remembered this in the grocery store yesterday, because another foreigner was similarly taken by surprise – she was confronted with 4 or 5 grams for Rs. 315 (about US$7). I’ve been grinning ever since.

(update: I've gotten some good comments on this post:
Ravi said, "I encountered a similar case in a grocery store in Chennai many years back; but the ingredient then was cardamom. I think the customer lady ordered for about 100 gms and the guy in the grocery store immediately quipped 'Are you having a wedding at home?'"

Kumar said, "... I was sent by mother to get 1Kg milagai (red chillies) for avakai from our mango trees. I shortened it to "milagu" (pepper), ... I was laughed off and asked to check with my mother again."

Subramanian said, "Immediately on introduction of metric sytems ... I had been to a nearby grocery and I ordered 5 grams of Butter without any idea how much it would be. Then the grocery man ... said he is not even having such an accurate balance to weigh 5 grams ..."

It seems that looking silly at the grocery store is a common experience.)

Breath

The heat is so great now -- 105 or 106 F every day -- that whenever I open a drawer, hot air pours from it, like the breath of something living.


I went out for some errands, and found a small patch of shade in which to park. The nearest house had a small marble plaque on the gatepost with the name of the house: Surya Kripa ('the sun's benevolence'). Talk about putting the best face on things.

Sweet

When I hear the Tamil word for honey - then (rhymes with lane) – it feels very old, because it's a one-syllable word in a polysyllabic language. A bee is theni. Yesterday I learned that the word for beehive is then-koodu. Both Lakshmi and Mary were excited -- they approached me separately saying, Do you know there's a then-koodu in the garden?

Mary says that the honey will be most abundant by amavasi (the new moon) which is coming on May 16. After that the bees will drink it away, and the hive will dry up. R eats honey in his oatmeal, so they were trying to figure out how to get the honey for the household.

I went out with Lakshmi to see it. She pointed, but it took me a long time: I was looking for something like the cartoon hive which is swung at by a dim-witted bear, and which bounces back in his face like a punching bag, full of angry bees. But this was formed around a branch, very high in a eucalyptus tree. It was more than 2 feet long, and black, like a thickened growth on the tree itself. I felt it as a kind of natural blessing, and saw with relief that it would be very tough to get all the way up there. I said, "Let it be; we don't need that honey."


Now I am making a transition, from the Tamil word for honey to the Sanskrit word, madh; and on to its relative, the old English word for honey-based liquor, mead; and finally, over to an article in yesterday’s paper. The article says that our state of Tamil Nadu will soon sell imported liquor through the state-owned liquor stores, as part of compliance with WTO requirements. I am hoping that at the same time Indian wines will become available here too. It would be ironic if I could legally drink imported wine, but not the local stuff. And that in itself could be a good enough reason not to change – we need our ironies, after all.


One more transition, to another kind of sweetness: yesterday Ethiraj, the gardener, climbed up the big mango tree with a cloth bag tied to a long rope. He picked the fruit and lowered it in the bag, where the watchman waited to empty it, with Lakshmi on hand to call out advice, above and below. Now we have 100 mangoes, in addition to the 90 from the first picking. This year they really are good and sweet, better than ever before; and plenty for everyone.

Two Links and One Home News Flash

Links first:

From the Washington Post: Finally, Our Chance To Savor India's Favored Fruit ... "This is mango's moment. For the first time, India, the world's largest producer of the world's favorite fruit, has been granted access to the U.S. market. Best of all, it's the particularly coveted Alphonso variety that is on its way to grocers...."

From The New Yorker: Letter from Jaipur - The Idol Thief: Inside one of the biggest antiquities-smuggling rings in history.

Home news:

Our gardener cut his foot on the iron lid of the underground water tank, and it became infected. He walked gingerly, and wore a cloth wrapped around his foot for several days - he works barefooted. But then he removed it, so I assumed that he had recovered.

Three days ago he didn't come to work. In the afternoon his wife called and said that the infection had not gone away, and that he had been going to the hospital every day for an injection. According to her, the injections had generated too much heat in his body, so he had been eating only gruel and yoghurt (cooling foods). Finally, the diet and the foot together had kept him from getting out of bed altogether.

(I am writing about it because of the Indian notion of heat and coolness in the body which, when out of balance, leads to illness. Each new instance of this idea fascinates me.) (Fortunately, because or in spite of his mix of western and local treatments, the gardener has now recovered.)

A Day of Death

It’s All Soul’s Day today – for Roman Catholics, at least; not for my cook, Mary, who’s evangelical. I drove past the Quibble Island Cemetery today (which was an island in the Adyar river delta once, but is so no more, thanks to all the development in recent years) and saw that the gates had been thrown open, and that flower vendors had lined up on either side, selling garlands of yellow marigolds. A steady stream of people walked through the gate, garlands in hand, to visit their dead. A loudspeaker is blaring out hymns.


When it rains heavily in Chennai, as it did last week, and the soil becomes soft and loose with water, big roadside trees topple over. In our own garden, three eucalyptus trees – twenty years old and at least 55 feet tall - began to lean over our neighbour’s wall, breaking it in one place and threatening to crash down on their roof.

Today we brought seven men in to cut the trees down. We feel terrible about it; R and I both cried when the first tree fell. (Mary was practical: she said, "Such big, thick trees -- we'll get good money for them.")

The men worked so hard all day long – small men all muscle and bone, wearing tucked up plaid lungis, shirtless, barefooted; and with only a long rope, a two-man handsaw and some machetes for equipment. In between feeling unhappy and worrying about whether the job could be done with no damage to the neighbour’s property or ours (ten clay tiles smashed on our side, and a number of smaller plants and branches of remaining trees crushed and broken), I was full of admiration for their industry and skill. But it feels like a day of death, all right.

Lightning

A terrific thunderstorm last night. I saw a bright flash, as if a light bulb had exploded, and glass flying and clinking on the floor. A window had blown out. I photographed it as if I were a reporter at a crime scene, and tried to sweep up the shards. (In the morning Lakshmi found more, 15 feet from the window.)

I looked out the door where the watchman was sheltering in the porch, and said, "What was that?" He said, "Minnal" - lightning. "Is that so?" I nodded, and went back inside.

Coconuts and Poochis 2

Back in March I wrote about how we had applied a medicinal poultice to the crowns of our three coconut trees, because insects were spoiling the young coconuts. And whether because of our efforts or not, the next crop was superior. Now our newish gardener has declared that the coconuts need another dose. He's from the countryside and knows farming - certainly our garden has never looked better - so we have obeyed. In addition to what we had applied in March: rock salt, mothballs, sambrani (a kind of incense), turmeric, and edible camphor (used here in some sweets), we have now added asafoetida and a fragrant bark called (I think) vaasambu. Lakshmi, Ethiraj the gardener, and a coconut-tree climber worked to pound the ingredients between two stones in the ugliest part of our house, the area behind the kitchen:


The coconut-tree climber has an interesting looking container hanging from his belt to hold his machete. the rope over his shoulder is his climbing sling. He wrapped the pink cloth around his head to make an informal turban, shinnied up the trees, cut off excess leaves (how does one determine this, I wonder?), cleaned the crowns, applied the poultice and shinnied back down again. Now let's see.

Several Things

It's fever season. We always have malaria and typhoid, to greater or lesser degrees; this year we have chikungunya. I'd never heard of it; it has emerged after 37 years. And more recently, there's dengue. Dengue is usually more prevalent in the north, but I heard from someone here a couple of days ago that he had been diagnosed with it. Both are carried by a day-biting mosquito.

When we sit out on the lawn at night and I get bitten, I think, "Never mind, it's a night-biter," and if I get bitten during the day I think, "Never mind, this one isn't likely to be carrying anything." So far, this primitive magic has worked.

One night, very late, there was such a thunderstorm that it was like a very austere musical composition: concerto for thunder, with the soloist right overhead, and supporting thunder all around. It was so beautifully spare a piece that the only frill was the percussion of rattling windows. By the time the rain started, I had already gone back to sleep.


Petrol bunk red: