Making Marmalade
I have not been writing. I have been consuming the news with alarming frequency. The more helpless I feel about the bombardment of Gaza by Israel the more I keep doom scrolling, but I don’t feel ashamed of it, or that I should be doing something else. What I do feel is the need to bear witness, to not turn away from the horror of it all, and to show my solidarity in some small way by suffering a little too. It isn’t masochistic in any sense of the word. And when I feel it too much I take a break, watch something funny, read a cosy mystery, create something. Till I go back to it.
Writing is out of the question. I am too fragmented to write anything, even poetry.
What I did do was go to an organic market. The Earth Collective at Sunder Nursery, every Sunday and now that the heat has dissipated on Saturdays as well. So I admired the wares - workout clothes from bamboo yarn, organic dals, a plethora of mustard oil, cookies made from sattu, tea made from aparajita flowers, serums with strands of saffron floating in it. Its all very lovely and quite expensive. Since I didn’t need serum or work out clothes and I bake my own cookies, I moved to the vegetables and fruit. I bough some oranges, the variety we call Malta in Delhi. They’re full of juice, have fabulous rind and smell divine.
If you have fruit for preserve you’d better get started quick, I told myself, sensing a reluctance to boil and squeeze and weigh and pulp and slice and stir and sterilise and pour into pots. I made marmalade last Monday. It’s turned out wonderful, packed with flavour and slightly runny, or to use chef language, soft set. I’m also soft set right now. Not soft in the head, no, but quite wobbly when i think about what’s happening over in the Middle East. The marmalade was a distraction and I’ll have some lovely things to give my friends at Diwali and Christmas. Well, I’ll probably need another batch for Christmas if people still want marmalade.
I also went to a Very Crowded Market in Delhi - Lajpat market and was pleased with myself for reaching as the shops drew up their shutters. As a result I found an ideal parking spot. But, the shop I needed wasn’t open yet. That’s not the disaster it sounds like. There’s no better place in Delhi than Lajpat market to kill time in. I located the narrow gully (alley to those who don’t know Hindi) where the homeopathic medicine is sold. My mother wants to try homeopathy for an ailment and since the homoepathic medicine in India is much better than the German (and less expensive) I am the provider of homeopathic meds to my family in Germany. After that I popped into the Export Surplus linen store because I need a new apron for the cook who cooks for my Airbnb guests at the cottage. I do my own cooking when I’m Kalpana in the Kumaon. I also found a tablecloth I couldn’t resist and some oven gloves. I resisted a lot of other things.
The rest of the week was spent baking sour dough bread daily in an attempt to master the crumb. I’ve mastered the crust, and the rise, but the size of the crumb evades me. It tastes very good and looks wonderful. As my mother says about my quest for a better crumb, ‘You are very fussy.’
How are you dealing with the news? Can you hold on to a belief in the goodness of human nature?
I am happy to watch my cats, my bread rising and marmalade setting. And I’m sure there are better days ahead, when I can bring myself to write again and finish the 3rd edit of my novel.