Geetanjali Krishna: Sweet memories of Kodaikanal

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

It's a tiny shop, shelves agleam with shelves full of sweets. There are chocolates in over 30 flavours; fluffy marshmallows in a veritable rainbow of colours, and marzipans in fanciful shapes. My young son is entranced, and I'm afraid he might never want to leave. "Buy one flavour," I wheedle, "and then let's go." He assents, but insists on tasting five before deciding which flavour to buy. Thinking that maybe once we're out of the market, the choco-menace would be behind us, we go for a walk. But Kodaikanal is a chocoholics delight, where every shop, big and small, sells homemade chocolates.

Outside the Kodai International School, we finally give in to our taste buds and stop at a confectionery shop. "The rum and raisin chocolate here is excellent," says the shopkeeper, "would you like to try some? Our marshmallows are also very popular, especially with the school children here." These come in all sorts of flavours "" vanilla, strawberry, orange, chocolate "" each sugary morsel a candy lover's dream. I bite into some chocolate, and am floored.

Fat raisins full of rum burst on my tongue, their tartness balanced by the sweetness of the chocolate.

His family makes as much as 40 kilos of chocolate every morning, says the shopkeeper, to supply to five shops around town. While the regular flavours "" crunch, fruit and nut, bitter, white and so on "" are priced at Rs 350 a kilo, soft-centre and toasted almond chocolates are more expensive at 450 a kilo. "The nuts are most important "" the higher their quality, the better the chocolate will taste," says the shopkeeper, breaking off a hunk of fruit and nut chocolate for us to taste. "You won't find such delicious chocolate anywhere else in Kodaikanal!" says he. Since it's a small town, competition between chocolate-sellers can get intense, says he.

But in the next few days, when we visit lots of different chocolate shops in Kodaikanal, we discover something surprising. Regardless of whether we buy them from the chocolate shop on Coakers Walk (a lovely pedestrian path with great views), or from one of the many vendors on the lake, or from the drug store near the bus stand, the chocolates are uniformly good, and are priced the same too.

Kannan, a chocolate seller in the Kodaikanal market, tells me why: "even though there is no government intervention in the local chocolate-making industry, the unwritten rule amongst us is to not undercut our competitors," says he, adding, "the market, especially in high season is big enough for all of us!" And when he and a few other chocolate makers told me they use Cadbury's chocolate as their basic ingredient, I realised that was why most of the chocolate I had in Kodai tasted pretty much the same.

Nobody knows how exactly chocolate-making came to be such a money-spinner for locals in Kodaikanal. "It's always cool here, perfect weather for chocolate making and storage," says one shopkeeper. In fact, local chocolate-makers swear their chocolates contain no preservatives at all, and still lasts for at least a month without refrigeration.

Kannan says that another reason why chocolate-making became popular in Kodai is that Tamils love chocolate. In fact, children here call all sorts of candy "chocolate".

Doesn't he get tempted to eat his own displays, I ask Kannan, looking at the tempting bowls of chocolate sitting seductively on glass shelves in his shop. He smiles, biting into a marshmallow, "of course I do! And I can afford to give in...which is perhaps the best thing about my job!"