Sweet moments

Every Christmas, I would 'help' my grandma (Mama) make sweets. She made some (milk cream, neuris (karanji), kulkuls, dal sweet, once she made nankhatai) and we bought some (marzipan, baskets and rose cookies) every year till she died, after which we only bought sweets.
We usually began operations two weeks before Christmas, with me helping to stir the dal sweet (and clean the pan and spoon later by scraping and licking it clean) and assembling the individual neuris by filling the dough circles with coconut and raisins.
While doing this last job, I would announce: "I'll make one (neuri), and eat one (raisin - which I loved), only to have my grandma swoop down on me and warn me sternly against it.
Another job I really liked was rolling kulkuls on a comb or the red mould we acquired later. This was the safest thing to give me to do, my grandma realised, as I would never deign to eat them till they had been swirled in the sugar syrup - the last stage of the operation - before they were done.
The other poignant memory I have of this time is of watching my grandma like a hawk after she came back with our order of sweets, to see where she was hiding them. Poor thing, the house only had so many hidey holes, so my sister and I would discover them sooner or later, and then gleefully wolf down some sweeties, which tasted even better as an illict pleasure than on Christmas morning, when we were lawfully allowed to have them.

My thoughts turn to Christmas...

It's that time of year again, when I begin humming carols and start dreaming of marzipan. I don't know about New Year's resolutions, but of late years, I have made many Christmas resolutions - I will send out my cards on time, I will try and make sweets from scratch (instead of sourcing them from someone else), I will make sure to play carols everyday, I will decorate the house in style - and inevitably, as the end of the festive season nears, I find I haven't done half these things. But this year... there I go again.

I say...

Presence makes the heart grow fonder

Creative inspiration

These days, my heart rate accelerates, I start breathing faster and my hands get clammy... when I have to write a story!!! Gone are the days when I would crank out one (or even more per day) without batting an eyelid. I'm now like the Calvin strip where he tells Hobbes that "for inspiration to strike, you must be in the right mood." "Which mood is that". "Last-minute panic." Bill Waterson channelled the deepest dark secret of a writer when he dreamt up this one, and at the last minute too, I'm sure.

Three months of purgatory...

Or my three-month drought. Or the worst time of my life. It's difficult to 'keep it together' when the man you love (and recently got married to, July 29 to be exact) takes off to the UK for work. But thanks be to the man above, I will finally be reunited with AR once he returns on Dec 9, a date for which I CANNOT wait.