Delhiwale: Heatwave pulped and cooled
Sip on refreshing bel juice before monsoon arrives in Gurugram's Sadar Bazar. Vendors prepare the traditional drink with care, using hand-operated mixers.
Heat-stricken citizens will be as relieved with the monsoon showers as the city’s parched earth. however, the juice of bel, or wood apple, may then be missed.
Every year in April, bel juice carts start to blossom across the streets of the megapolis. Their sightings peak around this time. The bel tend to vanish as soon as the first monsoon rain hits the land in early July.
Today is a searing mid-June day, and Sadar Bazar in Gurugram is teeming with its share of bel juice vendors. They trundle their wheeled carts up and down the main market street, sharing the pavement commerce with the numerous all-season hawkers of cotton candy and rat poison. Many of these bel juice wale, including veteran vendor Nand Ram, also take turns in the next-door Jacobpura, the locality adorned with beautiful balconies and doorways.
This afternoon, Nand Ram has a large plastic mug filled to the brim with the mush of the bel pulp, a strainer is lying on the side. It is fresh, he insists.
On receiving a customer, he pours two spoons of the mush into a paper glass, which he then fills up with sugared water. Crushed bits of “baraf factory” ice are added on request.
At this hour, Nand Ram has completed 50% of his working day; his cart reflects the fact. One half of it is piled up with whole bel fruit waiting to be cut. The other half is claimed by the shells of the fruit, which will be thrown into the garbage.
The cart’s most striking sight is of the “machine,” the hand-operated metallic mixer in which Nand Ram pulps the flesh of the fruit into gold-hued mush (the flesh is first scooped out of the fruit with a spoon). The “machine” is used by vendors across the (Delhi) region, says Nand Ram, and is sourced from Old Delhi. “You get it there either from Lal Kuan or from Meena Bazar for about ₹6,000.”
Bel is said to be Bhagwan Shiv’s favourite fruit. Ayurveda too holds it in esteem. Its juice certainly is thicker than other street juices, and far more filling. While it doesn’t rejuvenate the body in an instant (in contrast to the immediate thrill of sugarcane juice), the relief it releases into the bloodstream lasts longer.
An idyllic way to avail the joys of bel juice, if you happen to be in Gurugram’s chaotic Sadar Bazar, is to get it packed in a glass, and consume the drink while lounging in the shaded courtyard of the remarkably silent Apna Bazar building complex. The place is never crowded, the daylight enters into it only in bits and pieces, and the summertime air within is not as hot as it is outside. Complemented by the serene setting, the cooling juice swiftly lulls the senses into deep repose.
PS: The photo is of vendor Shahrukh’s cart at Ashram.