Good Old Sap

Gums secreted by trees are a treasure trove of nutrition and have been used by communities in making seasonal delicacies

- Sangeeta Khanna

BACK IN the 1970s, the visits to my grandparents’ village in eastern Uttar Pradesh during summer holidays were always fascinating. In the orchards, we would collect gummy “tears”, or gond, from mango and neem trees and return home with sticky fingers. For us curious kids, the cues to what the gum was being used for were in the kitchen pantries, medicine boxes and dressing drawers. There used to be a couple of dibiyas (small brass boxes with lids) in which the gums were stored. Women used the mango gum to stick tikuli (dot, or bindi made of gold, silver and mother of pearl) on their forehead, while the neem gum was mixed with beeswax and smeared on cracked feet. People also used gum from the bael fruit to coat bamboo soop (a winnowing device) to prevent it from cracking and from weevil (a type of beetle) infestation. The village haat would have at least one vendor with a few dibiyas of gum for sale.

But the most important use of gums has been in preparing special foods. I did not correlate