It is over two decades since I made a ritual of masticating a pinch or two of crushed betel nuts together with a couple of tender, light green betel leaves dabbed with pasty chunam (calcium) on the back of them soon after my dinner every day. The practice makes up for the deficiency of calcium in our body with the advancement of age as advised by physicians. The decades long, unfailing wont adds as well to an easy digestion of dinner. My wife on most of the days, partakes in the practice with me.
There are scarcely one or two paan shops in our neck of the wood albeit that ours is a densely populated residential locality with a few paan-chewers. Every time on my drive back home from the city I would buy at least two small glass or plastic bottles of scented chunam and shove them into my pant pocket before stepping back into the car parking lot. Back at home my wife would readily empty them out into a wide mouthed, lidded glass bottle certainly not before relishing the pleasant smell of the stuff.
Every day soon after our dinner dipping into the bottle I would take a pinch of crushed betel nuts, shove it into my cakehole and start chomping it before inserting into my bazoo a couple of rolled betel leaves dabbed with chunam at the back and set out chewing them till the stuff was reduced to a pulp and fit to be swallowed. Once while rinsing our mush in the washbasin after chewing the paan we were surprised at the lamentable lack of the reddish hue on our tongue quite contrary to the natural quality of paan to turn the chewer’s mouth red. This peculiar quality of chunam coupled with its unnatural and phenomenal smoothness left us in doubt about its genuineness. Taking a pinch of it, rubbing it between the fingers and finding it out and out devoid of even its blind bit of roughness my wife tout de suite concluded it was nothing other than maida and when I asked her if she was sure of it, she said she felt it in her bones. The test compelled us to forgo the habit of chewing betel leaves till unadulterated chunam was up for grabs in the market.
The pepper packets we buy from provision shops are by all odds an admixture of seeds of pepper and papaya fruit. Laying a few pepper corns on a plate and taking a close look at it for a while would expose the presence of a sizeable number of papaya seeds in them quite distinct from pepper with their smooth surface unlike the rough one of the pepper corns. As an additional test, pop into the mouth a couple of pepper seeds and crush them with your molars. Straight you will feel their sharp pungency that would compel you to look around for drinking water unlike papaya seed that tastes bitter and comparatively easier to be bitten than pepper corns. Unsuspecting buyers of such items should be quite gingerly without getting caught with chaff while buying such consumables from shops.
