Handling the Scorching Summer Heat

                                                                   by Sheela Rani Chunkath

With the mercury going up and up one is looking for different ways to quench ones thirst. Aam Panna and Nannari Sherbet (see earlier articles) are my favourite summer drinks. To make Aam panna you need one whole raw mango (approximately 100 gm in weight). Roast the raw mango over the fire as you would a brinjal for baingan bartha. If the shin chars a bit that is fine because it imparts a wonderful woodsy, smoky flavour to the drink. Peel the skin and remove the pulp from the seed and mash it. To this add coarsely crushed mint leaves, ½ teaspoon of black salt, 5 teaspoons of sugar and 2 teaspoons of roasted cumin powder (roasted lightly). Add 3-4 glasses of water strain, add ice cubes and you have wonderfully cooling summer drink.

Ayurveda prescribes something not so tasty for excessive thirst and fevers called Sadanga Kvatha Churanam. This formulation is from the Astanga Hrdya : Jvara Prakarna. As the name implies this kvatha churanam has six ingredients. The first is Mushta also called Nut grass or Cyperus rotundus. You can see dogs dig for these tubers and eat them when they are presumably not feeling quite well. The tubers are diuretic and anti-inflammatory. It has a whole host of essential oils, flavonoids, terpenoids, sesquiterpenes, cyprotene, cyperene, aselinene, rotundene, valencene, cyperol, gurjunene, transcalamene, cadalene, cyperotundone, mustakore, isocyperol, acyperone etc. Now would you consider a herb which has all these wonderful substances to be a pernicious weed? Yet that is what it is on my farm and I am devising various ways to eradicate it. No luck though unless I completely submerge it for some days while growing paddy. Wherever I see this on my vegetable patches and spend good money weeding them out I take heart that it has such wonderful properties. Anyway mushta is our ingredient number one.

The next is chandana or sandal wood. All of us are familiar with its wonderful smell and know about Veerapan the sandalwood smuggler who practically decimated the entire wild sandalwood tree population in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. I love sandalwood and as I was looking for alternatives to face powders and powder compacts I zeroed in on sandalwood. I used my stone and sandalwood billet, kept rubbing the wood on the stone and got a lot of sandalwood paste. The smell is oh so subtle and relaxing. I made a thin liquid from a small quantity of the paste and rubbed it on my face. I had to smoothe it down as it kept drying in patches on my face. I felt very good but towards the evening found that it was so cooling that it had affected all my sinuses. So if you have a kapha constitution don’t apply chandana on cool wintery days. Now that summer is well and truly arrived go ahead and use it. The next ingredient is dried ginger. It brings down temperature in fever and so is used when excessive thirst is accompanied by fever. If you have no temperature (caused by heat) you can leave out this ingredient. Black vetiver, called Hrivera and regular vetiver called usira are two of the most cooling herbs.

In the early years of my service, the Tamil Nadu Secretariat was a great advocate of vetiver. Come summer and you would find open corridors hung with huge vetiver thattis or herbal curtains (for want of a better word). There would be people periodically watering the thattis and the corridors would be full of water and a divine smell. I remember grumbling that my saris were getting wet. I think someone in the Finance Department must have thought this a good excuse to lower unnecessary expenditure, as over the years the vetiver thatti has slowly disappeared from the Secretariat corridors. It probably was a colonial inspiration for the white sahib to keep cool.

The last ingredient is parpataka or Mollugo cerviana. Different parts of the country have difference herbs masquerading as parpataka but in Tamil Nadu and Kerala we use Mollugo cerviana. Where do you get all these herbs you may well ask. In our now familiar and famous country drug store. Take equal quantities of the six ingredients, grind coarsely and keep as a mixture at home. For about a litre of water add about 2 spoons of the powder, reduce to about half a litre and use it as drinking water. Carry this with you if you are going out in the sun. I was inspired to write about this as a farmer friend (actually an ex-management consultant) was feeling the heat after supervising farm operations in the blazing sun. My hats off to our regular farmers who toil in the sun and hardly ever used Sadanga Kvatha Churanam. Now did I say hats off! Please keep it on when you go out in the sun!

--- The writer is retired Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu. She can be reached at Sheelarani.arogyamantra@gmail. com. Earlier articles can be accessed at http://arogyamantra.blogspot.com/