The Nostalgia Toast

Nostalgia on a toast!

I loved my summers, which we spent at my grandparents' place in Bangalore. My cousins from Bombay and Coimbatore, my two sisters, and I would spend a few lazy weeks, playing elastic, Hopscotch, bouncing a ball from a pillar and counting till we missed, playing hide and seek, and solving the crossword puzzle of the Deccan Herald and eating!

That crossword puzzle must have started it all. My cousin, and I particularly would compete to see who would get the paper first and solve the crossword. We would try to get up as early as we could, take a shower, gulp down our milk and wait for the newspaper man. Which was a good thing. The not so good thing was, in our eagerness to be the first, we sometimes woke up before 5am, and though my granny never showed it, I'm quite sure those tears i saw were not so much from happiness, but from despair. She must have thought "Oh no the brats are up, couldn't they wait till I had one tiny sip of filter kaapi couldn't they?

And ofcourse, being a grandmom who equated love with food, she had to think of a quick and filling pre- breakfast meal which would please us and yet not distract her from the cooking of the actual breakfast. I remember her in the kitchen, smearing slices from two jumbo loaves of bread, with homemade butter and chutney powder. While they would be toasting on the tawa, she would be washing the grinding stone for the chutney and setting the pressure cooker up. We would be given the very important task of getting the toasted bread to the table. The towers of bread slices would vanish in no time, and each one of us would be in a corner, eating, talking, fighting or reading and of course one of us would be solving the crossword puzzle while the other one would sulk and resolve to get up even more earlier the next morning.

Every once in a while, I make this, not just because I like it but because it takes me back to a world only I know about. My happy place! Today I made it almost the way my doddamma would make it, I curled up on the chair and I savored nostalgia with every bite I took. and Time actually stood still for a wee while.

This is a memory that uniquely binds the seven of us even though we are all in different parts of the world and I'm so glad for it. If this had a happiness quotient that i could rate, I would give it a perfect 100.

Grannies are the best, always!