KARACHI: “People say that one should cut down sugar to improve health, but once you start nibbling on my sweets you would never be able to stop. And what’s more, with so much natural goodness, they are good for health, too,” says Kalloo Bhai at his well-known gajak shop off the Numaish traffic intersection. For some strange reason he calls gajak as ‘gazzak’.

Besides gajak, he sells a variety of chikki (brittle), packets of regular popcorn stuck together by jaggery and glucose; marzipan-coated fennel seeds; crispy rice balls glued together with sweet sugar syrup; til kay ladoo and til kay samosay; crispy batashay; sweet reweri made from pure ghee, coconut toffee and bittersweet mango slices and so many other things I don’t even know the names of, though even thinking about them makes my mouth water making me want to swing by the shop again.

I am not the only one who feels this way. Today there is another customer at the shop buying carton-fulls of reweri and gajak to take with him to Dubai. The boxes of reweri that he buys have a picture of a big and fat pehalwan (wrestler and bodybuilder) with the information that the delight in the box has been prepared using pure ghee. Hopefully it wouldn’t make people who also savour the delight as big as the chap on the box.

The sweets are more in demand around this time of year as they have a somewhat warm effect. “Your throat feels dry, have a couple of til kay ladoo or some gazzak, and see how quickly your problem is taken care of,” says Kalloo Bhai.

“The til are after all sesame seeds, which carry sesame oil joined together with melted jaggery, which again has wholesome and healthy properties,” he points out.

Surprisingly the sweets are not very expensive either. The gajak you can buy for Rs320 per kilogramme. The coconut toffees are for Rs200 per kg as are the batashay and elaichi dana. The brittle made from peanuts or sweet corn set in melted sugar or jaggery that is allowed to harden later is slightly more expensive at Rs400 per kg.

“All these sweets are a hundred per cent local made and hence not too pricey,” the shopkeeper points out. “But,” he adds, “We are wholesalers so those who buy from us in bulk and sell these at their outlets out of big glass jars on their counters, or from pushcarts may be selling for more. Still, I doubt that they will ever be as expensive as those foreign chocolates, sweets and jellybeans.”

Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2018