"Holi"day in Shirdi

Holidays and mini vacations are what makes the break so eventful. My in laws were visiting from Assam and had requested a visit to Shirdi to pay homage to Sai Baba. The first break came our way during the long Holi weekend. 

We packed our bags and drove down in our car towards Nasik.. as we took a turn towards Shirdi from the highway, we saw small little stalls being set up on the roadside... the local farmers were selling local produce like grapes, raisins, cabbage, onions...

In the course of my travels across the country, mostly by road,  I have realised that nothing beats the freshness of local produce. The half kilo of grapes were big and sweet... the pale green skin was thin and a bite of the fruit, flooded the mouth with its sweetness and tartness. The raisins were the same.. freshly dried. Each fruit had the taste that I had never got whenever I had bought them from the Star Bazars in Mumbai.

My husband stopped the car and decided to buy the veggies for the week.. we were so spoilt for choice. The brinjals were big, fat and round, the cabbages were green with all their leaves intact and what amused us all, was when Bobby took a long knife to cut the extra long stalks of the cauliflower. Looks like a pro, huh....

Shopping in the hot sun of 44 degrees is tough. With local sugarcane juice stalls all over, we quenched our thirst with ganne ka juice, seasoned with freshly squeezed lemon ... slurrrrp.. some things are just worth it...

We were in Onion Country. Nasik supplies the country's onion requirements. The onions... big, pink skinned and dry... selling for 8 bucks a kilo was not what made me buy them, but a thought that the farmer's wife could see the joy on our

faces when we were buying their rich harvest.

But when we reached home, we realised that the packed onions were mostly rotten... serves me right for being taken in by the benign face...

We could not pay homage to the deity at Shirdi as the queue snaked across miles and miles of human faces. We were told to pay a sum of 5000 bucks if we wanted the Darshan. There was just no way I would pay to seek divine blessings... yet another very disturbing aspect of India.

But it was fun... lovely long drive, great vegetable shopping, a few hi's and hello's with some cheats, a distant Darshan of the Shirdi Sai Baba...India is so beautiful... the vibrancy of the people, the culture, the heritage of agriculture and food, has to be tasted to understand why we say India is so unique. Incredible India, it truly is... kaash, 2014 would have had many more lengthy holidays.