Come summer vacation, it was a time when the larger family got together to perform the annual ritual of making large jars of mango pickle, raw papaya pickle, jamun jam, ready-to-fry chips made of okra, potato and yam, along with a whole variety of pappads.
While the elder women sang songs together and cracked jokes sitting across the large sheets of ‘pappad canvas’, we kids feasted on juicy locally grown mangoes, watermelons, cucumbers and ripe papayas dunked in milk. As the summer heat wore away giving way to the wet and cloudy monsoon months, steaming bottle gourd koftas, snake gourd delights, custard apple, palak pakodas and all the ready-to-fry veggie makes of the summer made it to the dining table.
Replete with the festive season, these wet months from June to October made for the perfect season to indulge the taste buds before the fasting period of Dussehra made its entry. Marking the onset of....
