Little India and a Quiz

Deepavali 2023 is 12 November....

Little India is 2 stops on the MRT (mass rapid transit) beyond my apartment on the way home from work.

I'm made up. 

Tigger would have loved it from the deck of his carriage.

So much colour. So much good food. So much unpackaged, choose your own, buy as much or as little as you need/can afford. Garlands of fresh flowers. Scent. Spices. Preparations being made for Diwali. Decorations.

With the lights on but probably better when 'proper dark'

Round the next corner a street of jewellers and colourful clothing emporiums. Stunning Nehru jackets outside one shop, saris the next, more garlands, heady scent drawing honey bees.

You might want to turn the sound down for these.

It was the food I came for, so it was mainly the food I photographed. Yam Aunty will blitz the quiz, I might just scrape in a pass mark, but I have already been befriended by a shopkeeper lady who has offered to guide me around the rest - names, how to select them, how best to eat them, preparation, recipes..... I wonder if she does that for all her dim foreign customers.

Today I settled for stuff I can eat without cooking: tomatoes, pomegranates, grapes, pink bananas....

I make no apology for the following photo overload. There is more to explore, SOOOOO much more.

Palm Hearts? X (Banana flowers)

Quiz 1 (slightly smaller than grapes)

Tiny, marble-sized eggplants

Chokos (I love these)

Quiz 2 - about the size of an adult human head

Quiz 3 - bit smaller than a ping ping ball

Quiz 4 - variety of sizes, gherkin to full sized cucumber

(Imagine the vegetable creatures your kids could dream up and make with those!)

Yard long beans I think (we used to get these in Greece)

Quiz 5 possibly an easy one but about twice the length of an English cucumber....

Quiz 6, 7 & 8

Quiz 9 (top basket)

Fresh dates

Okra

Quiz 10 - apple sized (doesn't smell like an apple)

Pink Bananas (usual banana colour on the inside)

Dragon Fruit (and mangoes)

Round two of the quiz next week....

I watched fascinated as the woman ahead of me carefully selected a coconut, shaking it to ensure it contained water, paid for it, then got the shop boy to crack it open by smacking it on a metal bar in the grill over the drainage channel in the street (whereupon all coconut water poured into said drain🤔 huh?) There is even a machine at the shop they can use to sort of mince out the coconut meat and off she trotted happily clutching her disembowelled coconut components (minus the water). I like drinking the coconut water. It was a real treat as a kid to be allowed the water carefully drained from the prize before the shell was smacked open.

My Dad loved coconut. For him it represented being the son of a grocer during WWII. The kids were allowed to ask for one sought-after fruit for their birthday. His request was always a coconut. One coconut all to himself. As a kid you (or I) possibly didn't appreciate what parents choose to forgo in order for their kids to gain experiences. Coconuts still weren't plentiful enough to be cheap and were still a special treat when I was a kid and Dad always let us have the coconut when one turned up.

I may have been told to share it with my brother, which might have been an attempt at an important life lesson.