We Indians eat a lot of sugar.
When I say a lot, I really mean a lot. With English desserts, sugar is often disguised in the form of cakes and other carb-based vehicles that mask the sheer amount of butter and diabetes that’s gone into the production. Indian sweets do not even try. Jalebi is literally deep fried batter that’s soaked in orange-coloured sugar syrup until the structural integrity of the shell almost buckles under the weight of the syrup it’s absorbed. Soan papdi is a type of barfi (Indian sweet) that’s just layers and layers of spun sugar delicately balanced on top of each other. It’s given just enough substance by ghee and gram flour so that it’s substantial enough to eat but still dissolves on your tongue like caramel air.
They’re all insanely delicious. In small quantities.
The reason we celebrate and have so many different forms of very sweet sweets is that in Indian culture, sweets are more than just quick hits of joy. They are deeply ingrained symbols of hospitality, welcome, and acceptance. When you go to someone’s house, especially for the first time, it’s considered inauspicious to leave until you’ve had even the tiniest bite of something sweet. There’s a punjabi expression which loosely means to ‘sweeten your mouth’ or to ‘leave a sweet taste in your mouth’ which is often repeated in a tone which brooks no dissent to reluctant guests who have already declined the offer of a more substantial meal.
The theatre of offering – and accepting – a sweet is no little act. It’s an extension of giving – and accepting – love. To reject even eating the smallest morsel at someone’s home? Well, if offering sweets is a symbol of deep love and welcome, then rejecting it is akin to leaving your shoes on when you enter that person’s home and then proceeding to wipe the mud onto the carpet in the ‘formal’ living room reserved only for guests. In short, it’s extremely disrespectful and hurtful.
But for all these elaborate Indian sweets, the sweet that holds a special place in both my heart and memory is the humble, frosted-white lump of rock sugar about a centimetre in size called mishri.
My great-grandmother used to keep a white plastic tub about three or so inches tall and about the same wide, full of these hard treasures. It was mixed with small white nakul dana (which Google informs me is ‘mimosa sugar balls’ in English) and, sometimes, random green cardamom pods. Whenever my brother and I – and even my cousins on both dad and mum’s side – came over, we always had permission to reach over to her bedside table and pop open the lid; maneuvering carefully to avoid knocking over the black-and-white photo frames of people I’d never met, along with her collection of medicine bottles.
I never liked those opaque nakul dana that contaminated the mishri because they tasted soft and powdery. They were, in my young opinion, definitely the lesser of the two sweets and were the punishment you had to endure in order to get at the real prize. When I was small, I soon developed a trick of shaking and wiggling the pot so that the majority of sweets that tipped into my open palm were the mishri. Foiling those dastardly white balls.
There is nothing particularly special about the mishri when compared to all the wonderful barfia you can buy in Indian sweet shops. At the end of the day the mishri was just a rock of unflavoured white sugar that occasionally tasted of cardamom. Because of this we were only allowed a small amount as a treat to ‘sweeten our mouths’. But even so, slowly melting and crunching mishri is an experience tied indelibly in my memory to my great-grandmother. To her love, warmth, and welcome toward everyone that visited her home.
She was 94-96 when she died. We don’t know her exact age as record keeping in India in the 1910s was not a thing. Even though she passed over a decade ago, whenever I see mishri, I think about her. As most of you know, you never really stop missing someone who you loved and who loved you back. All you can really do is eat the mishri, and hope you live long enough to have your own pot to offer to your great-grandchildren while they politely listen to your stories and indulge your requests to massage your achingly old arms and legs. Waiting for their prize.
Steaming Chai 