BANGALORE: Changing lifestyles have meant an end to the common sights on the city’s streets. The changes have come about either due to healthier eating habits or sheer convenience. For instance, as healthy iodised salt, which is said to prevent goitre, became part of the housewife’s kitchen inventory, the crystal salt, that once made grandma’s dishes delectable, gradually went out of favour.With this, went the salt vendor, who used to peddle his ware in a jute sack on a wooden push cart with big wooden wheels. He would pull up in front of houses, fill his aluminium measure with the white crystalline article and empty it into his customer’s container with a sound of sand falling into a metal box. Though packaged salt was also an option those days, it was merely called table salt but was not iodised. Today, of course, one can pick up iodised salt of one’s choice off the supermarket shelves. Another vendor who has become rare these days is the kerosene seller.Before the use of LPG became widespread, this aromatic liquid fuel was the standard cooking fuel at homes besides firewood and charcoal. The kerosene vendor too sold his stock either on a metal push cart or out of a drum mounted on a bullock cart. The container had a metal tap at its end with a metal bucket hanging from it and into which leaking drops of kerosene collected. Aluminium measures of various capacities also hung from the tap. As the people came out with their jerry cans and tin containers, milling around his tap, he would fill the measures with the fuel after turning the tap. While he is in a hurry to empty the measure into jerry cans, the customers insist that he wait till the froth disappears to check the actual quantity they are getting. The vendor then moves on, with the remains of some spilt kerosene and the bullock’s emptied bladder on the street and the fuel’s aroma lingering in the air. And at home, since the cook also handled the stove and the tumblers with the same hands, coffee too came with the kerosene aroma.Lifestyle changes have also reduced the visits to the neighbourhood flour mill. Waiting at the noisy mill, where the miller with fine flour on his hair and moustache, empties your wheat into the big machine with a large funnel run by a cloth belt attached to a motor, has become rare. As the grain goes down the funnel, the mill screams and coughs out the flour through a cloth pipe, which looks like the miller’s pyjama, into the container. Today, one can buy the brand of one’s choice at the stores. The crystal salt’s taste, the kerosene smell and the mill’s sound are just a memory.[email protected]
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