Monkey Nuts

The other day I went grocery shopping and saw ‘Monkey Nuts’, or peanuts in their original shells for the uninitiated (such as myself), and it was a trip down memory lane.

Monkeying around

I have often thought I’ll write about my Patna days lest I forget the details, but don’t usually have the right words. If I may say so, I had an idyllic childhood. School and marks were a different story. I was brought up in a joint family with kids across the neighbourhood of around the same age who became the daily hangout gang.

I was therefore introduced to gully cricket and badminton, cycling, ‘running’ hide-and-seek, and Enid Blyton-inspired secret clubs with passwords for entry. There was the never-seen-before and never-seen-again enterprising spirit of starting a neighbourhood library (where we freely borrowed and lent books and had a fine for delayed returns), annual new year performances done with the level of zest and ingenuity that had to be seen to be believed, impromptu litti parties and actual 2kg cakes won for captioning pictures in Hindustan Times Patna. My brother got the 1st prize for the following ditty:

“My kind of life is lived by few

While others eat, I cook their brew”

We had our cake and ate it too.

My mom made it a point to take us to summer art camps, enrol us for music and swimming lessons, and rebel against patriarchy by making sure her daughter sat with her for the kalam-dawat puja (one reserved for the men of the family). Here, she was joined by my bua (my dad’s cousin) and her two daughters. We were a middle-income family, mind you, but always felt richer than our circumstances.

I grew up with the very real privilege of community life, a privilege I could only appreciate after moving cities as an almost teenager. Holi and Diwali, the two main festivals we celebrated with gusto, lost their charm in apartment complexes. On the upside, I no longer had to try very hard for good grades (I shifted from the more difficult ICSE board in Patna to an easier CBSE one in Noida).

Standing in that Sainsbury’s aisle transported me to a formative memory – of running to the threshold of our courtyard on learning that the Mungphali Wallah had been spotted. Of indeterminate age, but to the kids quite old, he would make his rounds, chit-chat with the adults and tell the children his day’s tales, all while making the required packets of mungphalis ordered, always with a pudiya each of salt and pepper.

It would be the high point of our evening, followed by sitting with cousins, eagerly shelling the peanuts and happily eating them. Those were simpler times, and I’m not going down nostalgia lane for the sake of it. When the memory was triggered, I realised how much more it meant to be part of society than obsessing over speed or efficiency. Daily rituals could tie us to people, places and time, and hold the common thread of anticipation, connection and joy. More importantly, perhaps, they served as a leveller, where we weren’t buyers or sellers (the transactions felt incidental), but regular faces that acknowledged each other and made the world a little more familiar and warm.

I dutifully bought the monkey nuts (elite name tbh) and caught myself wondering if cracking them would open a secret portal to my childhood. I didn’t get Narnia, but muscle memory instead (crack, salt, eat, repeat) – much like the one set off by cycling earlier this week (mount, pedal, brake… wobble?) – and for that moment in time, it was a compromise I could live with.