Ginger & Cardamom

Monika tagged me to write about the domestic horrors. Well I have been a very civilized kid throughout. My lazy self and averseness to do anything in the kitchen which includes lighting the gas stove, they are really complicated procedure and should be done only by the trained professionals (Read: Mom). Then upholding of family tradition in taking laziness to new levels, I never experimented with Ironing of clothes or anything of the sorts. Even all the electrical circuitry experiments which was the most I did along the house were carefully handled.

So I have not involved in major domestic disasters, except for a fact where I almost try to burned the house down by leaving a switch open for a fan which had its coils burning or the other time when I burnt down the Hostel room with the incense sticks (Agarbatti) which I left burning on my room after the prayers. But there is one disaster I managed which was not very deadly, but yeah it’s a paramount display of my care and concern for the family, health and hygiene, despite that I got thrashed badly by my mom Hitler V6.0 22^nd Reprint. So here is how the story goes-

I was a kid then you know something like 8-9 years old. The time around May used to be a happening time in the house, as my holidays would have been going on and my cousins Ekta & Shweta would come to live at our place and I used to get someone to play with me and boss around for some time. This was also the time when my Mom used to prepare a lot of delicacies, specially different kind of Achars (pickles). Now my mom is an amazing cook and she puts in lot of effort to ensure that whatever we eat is home made this generalizes from daily meals to sweets to ghee to pickles to papad. As a matter of fact I have hardly seen any of these being ever bought in my home.

Getting back to the story, so this may the mango produces were good and my mom decided that she would prepare aam ka achar (mango pickle) for everyone in the family. Undertaking this mammoth feat she actually put in pickles in a tub must have been around 10 kgs of kacha aam ka achar. I don’t know where and why, but during some part of her preparation this pickle needs to be left out in the air for drying or fermenting. I don’t really know why, so mom actually made place for the huge tub which had all 10 Kgs of Achar on the table and then she left for some work outside home. At this time me and Shweta were at home playing around the house and having fun, when my sharp eye for details noticed the biggest fallacy done by my mom. She left had left the tub with all the Achar open, and there were mosquitoes all over the achar.

Being a diligent student that I was, I remembered my teachers telling me that mosquito bites can cause malaria. Well and I didn’t wanted everyone eating the achar to be sick, so I we decided that we would set it right. So we got which was proclaimed to be the best solution for mosquitoes on national television aka doordarshan, the Odomos and with all due diligence we applied odomos on the achar where the mosquitoes were sitting.

Being the humble person I am, I forgot to report this incident to mom, No point making her feel guilty her responsible son had covered her tracks and the achar was good to go. When my mom saw the achar she tried to figure out what went wrong. She also thought if butter had fallen into the achar. Then finally she asked me, if I knew what happened. Well I surely did and I being a true gentleman, I obliged and narrated the story in full detail. Man what happened after that was real disaster, I got a well deserved thrashing and mom had to throw away a lot of her achar.

Everyone in the family including my sis & mom we still laugh like crazy, over this incident. But deep down I just thank god, the hit & baygon Sprays of the world were not invented, and bombarded from the TV at that time. God knows what would have happened then.