Leaf in time
Chewing paan is an acquired habit; the taste of crunchy green leaf and liquid honeys, mixed with the gentle crumble of candied saunf is exciting and thick in the mouth, but swallowing poses a problem.
The mixture chokes the moment I try to send it down my gullet, so I spit it out once the juices have been sucked dry. An operation that would have earned the derision of my old friend, Anasuya bai, who no one ever caught spitting paan.
Anasuya bai was our roundish, elderly ayah whose crinkly, sun-cracked face is the loveliest I remember from Pune.
She lived in a two-room servant quarters behind our house with her tall, grey haired, eminently venerable husband - Baba. The two of them served as gardener, cook, handy-man, baby-sitter and best friend for my family and me respectively. At the end of a work weary day Anasuya bai would sit on a step outside her house with a stack of green betel leaves, a betel-nut cutter, supari (areca nuts) and her choona dabba (calcium hydrogen or edible lime). She would smile a placid smile and hand out coarse salt to my small friend (from across the hedge) and me, for raw mangoes plucked off a nearby tree. We would dip our mangoes into grubby paws full of 'borrowed' salt and watch the paan ceremony.
Anasuya bai's paans were the real deal, raw and unprepossessing; unmoved by the frummeries of spices and fruit preserves usually found in the popular sweet paan.
She would lay a paan patta on one of her ample thighs, tear its creamy stem and apply choona to the underside. Next, she would crack the supari into small pieces and rub the fragments in the hard cushion of her left palm with her right thumb till a brownish, veiny residue remained. This she would transfer on to the lime-slaked betel leaf which she would fold thrice. The finished paan would be tucked between her left cheek and red, betel juice stained teeth.
They don't make them like that any more.