Best of Summer Camps In Childhood - Part 1

Times change and how.

These are the days of enrolling kids in summer camps.
There are subjects like maths and science, taught in some.
Some teach hobbies like painting, crafts, pottery making, etc.
Many kids learn a little about such activities during summer before the school reopens for the next grade.

In the absence of vacationing with grandparents or aunts and uncles, summer camps are a very good option to keep the kids engaged in a very positive way. Learning something and not getting into trouble when parents are not around are worth it but at a cost. Skills are learnt but not the life skills of interacting or bonding with others.

We too had our fair share of summer camps.

Most were at East Marredpally, Secunderabad where my mom’s sisters and brothers and their families lived in a complex of 5 houses inside one common compound wall.
We would hop from one house to another.
My aunt (maami) would cook for us all and lovingly serve us heavenly food.
My uncle (maama) being the eldest son, was the head of the family. He was revered and his advice was sought for on all matters, however small. We lived separately at Hyderabad and came on visits or during vacations.

There was so much bonhomie. My uncle would engage us in quiz. He would come forward to prepare some sweet, helped by all of us. I still remember the white pumpkin halwa he made for all of us. There was a kitchen garden in which the season's vegetables would be grown. White pumpkins were aplenty at home. Pumpkin in all dishes like dals, sambar, kootu, pachadi and still so many pumpkins left. Maamaji decided he was going to pluck some and make halwa out of it. We watched the process with so much interest. Pumpkins were cleaned and the thick skin scrapped away. Then the flesh was freed of all the seeds and grated finely. Then so much grated pumpkin for so much sugar to make the halwa. Such fun we had peeping into the huge hot vessel to check whether the pumpkin had cooked and become glassy. He would keep stirring the halwa and explain about the sugar, water, grated pumpkin, cardomom powder, etc.,

Each day at noon time we would look forward to some project in the kitchen. He would ask my aunt (maami) to prepare snacks like murukku(twisted flat in 3" dia roundels made from raw rice powder, etc), cheedai(marble-like snacks made from raw rice powder, butter, etc) or thattai.
We would help twist the murukku, roll the cheedai or pat the thattais but before that my maami would make a tiny pyramid with a little dough and apply some turmeric on it as a symbol of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. This was a superstition followed to avoid accidents from the wet dough bursting while dropping them into the hot oil. This pyramid was the last piece to fry.
After these snacks were deep fried, we would watch how the first ones would be dropped from a height to check its crispiness. If it broke into many pieces and made a good hollow sound then the snacks would be crisp. All of us would eagerly wait to taste them. These had low salt and buttery to taste. Of course now it is freely and readily available in any of these numerous sweet shops across Chennai.

We kids would wait for my uncle to play a familiar game each time cheedais were made. My uncle would hold a few cheedais in his closed fist and ask each of us to guess how many cheedais were there in his fist. The one who guessed the numbers right would get to eat that lot.

My mom’s eldest sister who was a teacher, would make us all write 3 pages of handwriting, one page of English, one of Hindi and one of Telugu. Then we were given a few sums to work in maths lest we forget our lessons altogether!
I was very mischievous so I would sit and write pages and pages of handwriting much ahead and submit one set each day with the current date marked and escape into the open to play in the hot sun for a longer time.
She found out one day and made me write an imposition - 'I will not repeat this mistake' a 100 times! I was careful never again to waste my time in writing them ahead.

These memories are from the time I must have been hardly 10 or 11 years old. Living among many elders and learning so many things make us what we are today.

More on learning the art of making pickles, jams, dry preserves, crispy preserves called vadaams or vadiyaalu in our 'summer camps' in my next blog.

Cheers!
Mahalakshmi