India

I grew up on Elliot's Beach, in Madras, on the eastern coast of India. Every evening, my cousins and I would scamper alongside our grandfather as he brandished his carved walking stick down the stairs from our flat, across Second Avenue, and down Beach Road, waving to the neighbors along the way. The route we took was covered in sand, and in the cool of the evening we would all walk barefoot to the shore, where the whole of our village, Besant Nagar, went to socialize. From our veranda you could see the Indian Ocean, and the sun rising above it every morning. Because of the heat, the beach was off-limits to us except at the end of the day and, because of the waves, only with an older member of the family.

On Elliot's Beach, you could see old men sitting in circles playing cards, young lovers furtively trying to meet, gangs of teenagers whooping and joshing each other, and children playing like crabs on the sand. In those days, there were still shells to collect, and we always competed to gather the best. We were allowed to put our feet in the water, but my grandparents loathed getting wet and we were usually discouraged lest they had to rescue us. Once in a while, you saw a lady daring to go in, and because she didn't want to hitch up her sari and bare her legs, the material would balloon out around her as she submerged herself with squeals of terror and pleasure. Most Indians at that time could hardly swim.

The best moment of the evening came when I heard the distant cry of Jhoti, the peanut man. He always wore a wrinkled plaid cotton dhoti, which he folded upward in half, exposing his leathery black legs. He balanced a wicker basket on his head with one arm. A rectangular tin box swung from a semicircular handle in the other. Whether we were building sand castles, trading shells, or playing the most violent game of tag, we always came to a frozen halt when we heard the cry of Jhoti.

My grandfather would be sitting nearby with a cluster of retired judges discussing some pressing political issue, and we would descend on him, pleading like little birds for enough rupees to buy the delicious morsels we knew lay deep within the basket on Jhoti's head. My grandfather always kept a few coins tied inside a knot at the waist of his white veshti (the Brahman dhoti), and we begged him to perform the embarrassing task of untying the knot in front of the most venerable seniors of the neighborhood. If he instead reached inside his breast pocket for paper money, we knew there was somebody in the group in front of whom he didn't feel safe untying the knot. My grandfather was a very reserved man, and often he shooed us away and we'd be forced to go to my grandmother, who never carried much money in the evening.

Jhoti had every savory snack you could imagine. In his basket, he had salted plantain chips, puffed rice mixed with fried semolina and curry leaves, and peanuts that were dry-roasted with salt, with chile powder, with lemon and black cumin salt. He had peanuts covered in batter, roasted with molasses. And he had diced tomatoes with fresh cilantro, green chiles, and salt to mix with the treasure I coveted most: boiled peanuts, which were protected from the elements by the tin box. Jhoti would place a scoop of boiled peanuts into a bowl made of dried lotus leaves and then fold in the tomato concoction, finishing it off with a squeeze of lemon juice. The soft peanuts were tangy, and after being quickly blended by Jhoti's deft hand, all the flavors and the sensations of hot and cold would burst simultaneously in every mouthful. The freshness of the cilantro, the spiky bite of the green chiles, and the sourness of the lemon � all this was anchored by the buttery warmth of crumbling peanuts.

One of my cousins loved the molasses peanuts, but in those days I had little desire for anything other than my mini nut salad in its dried-leaf bowl. My nose became so trained by my craving for what lay at the bottom of Jhoti's box that I often began to smell those peanuts before I heard his cries from down the shore. They smelled like boiling rice, but without the velvety starch element. I later recognized that scent from my childhood memories: It was the distinctive aroma of bay leaf. (Jhoti would throw a bay leaf into the water, I am sure of it.)

Eventually, Jhoti would earn enough to buy a cart with a bell that he would ring as he entered a lane in our neighborhood. He would pull his string to produce a metallic tap and then there would be a ding half a beat later. We began to listen for that sound. He had also invested in a balancing scale, and soon measured out his peanuts on one side while piling octagonal iron weights onto the other. By the time I was in fourth grade, he favored cones of newspaper instead of the lotus-leaf bowls his mother used to patiently stitch for him. I hated the newspaper cones, as they always became soggy with the lime and tomato juices that seeped into them. But Jhoti said that his mother was growing old and could no longer keep up the pace of bowl production necessary for his expanded business.

When I was in high school, Jhoti's cousin took over the peanut cart. He stopped carrying boiled peanuts altogether, and now the recipe survives only among those of us who remember those evenings on the beach in the late '70s, when Second Avenue was still covered in sand, and there were still shells on the shore.