The women who made my life so sweet!

It is Deepavali time in India, which brings back lots of memories of the phenomenal sweets that mother made for the occasion.  My favorites were the cashew sweet and the gulab-jamuns that she made.  I often swung by the kitchen and the pantry areas whenever mother was not around and gobbled up sweets that were off-limits.

As a kid, I ate sweets all the time. From morning until night. Sweets any time.  It continued on even into my young adult phase.  As an undergraduate student, I once had 22 gulab-jamuns in one sitting.

As an adult, it was always an additional pleasure to listen to my grandmothers recall stories about my fascination for sweets.  An incident that she recalled often, which always made me feel special, related to the milk-sweet, which was her specialty.  To make this "thirattipal,", my grandmothers patiently stirred, and stirred, and stirred milk for hours until it boiled down to the sweetest delight ever. I was about five years old and was in Sengottai when she decided to make this milk sweet for her grandson.  The process started late in the evening.  I was apparently sitting right by her side and started falling asleep, which is when I made my grandmother promise to wake me up after she was done making it because I wanted to eat that sweet as fresh as I could get them.

The extra kick in the story was when she described how she woke me up and I ate it half-asleep. And then woke up in the morning and ate that sweet before eating or drinking anything else.

It was well into adulthood, after a few years of life in the US, did I realize I hadn't ever thanked them for all the kinds of grandmotherly acts they did so meticulously.  I had never thanked them for making all those heavenly sweets.  My great-aunt was the only one alive by then.  Every time I met with her, I recalled all these stories and asked her once how she had the patience to make all those sweets and other snacks.  Which is when I found out that she often felt nauseated after that constant exposure to the smells.  Sometimes, the nausea was so intense that it led to, yep ... I felt awful.  But, it didn't matter to her.  That was her life and she enjoyed doing what she had to do.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my mother recalling some of these old stories of my fascination for sweets and about her awesome cashew sweets.  Mother didn't' make any sweets this time around because tradition bars any celebration for a year whenever there is a death in the family.  

The grandmothers, and my great-aunt too, were, however, diabetic, which is why all these memories are even sweeter.

A few years ago, my mother tested positive for diabetes.

Diabetes runs in the extended family. It seems like very few aunts and uncles don't have diabetes.  I wonder if it is only a matter of time before that switch gets flicked in my system.

This news item on Deepavali and diabetes notes that Wednesday is World Diabetes Day.  I hadn't known that.

Here is to hoping that we will all eat and live smartly enough to avoid the diabetic curse as much as we can.

After all this, will it be a surprise if I noted that I made a sweet?  Yes, I really did!

I made a carrot-payasam over the weekend.  It was wonderful.  But, nothing like the sweets that my mother and grandmothers and great-aunt made.

My thanks to all those women who literally sweetened up my life.