Billing for your sweet shop and bakery in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
A festival box of six sweets and a loaf of bread, each by its own weight or piece, on one bill.
Six trays, one box, one bill
Two sweets by weight and one by the piece, in a box across the water
A box that crosses the water holds sweets of different kinds: two by weight, one by the few pieces the relative asked for. Each keeps its own rate, so the box is not priced as one heap, and the total she pays matches what is in the tin when it reaches the island.
Coconut sweets counted by the tray, so the coconut order follows what sold
The coconut comes by ship, and a late ship cannot be hurried. See in the evening how much coconut barfi is left, and ask for the next coconut from what sold, early enough to cover a held-back ship, and not from the heap in the corner.
The second batch is decided at noon from the first batch's count
At noon the trays of the first batch are counted. If the Puja crowd of the evening has already taken half the laddu, the pan is lit again for a second batch, and if the trays are still full it stays cold. The decision is made from the count and not from the look of the counter.
Tools for a counter that sells sweets by the kilo and bread by the piece
Online orders
A customer on another island orders four Diwali boxes from the shop's own online page, and the order is written before the first tray of laddu is out of the oven.
UPI payments
The traveller scans the QR code, pays and takes her box in the last minutes before the ferry's last call, and there is no change to count out from the cash box.
Low stock warnings
The ghee tin and the sugar sack carry a warning. When the ship is late, the phone shows what is nearly finished, so you tell the family the box will hold what the store still has.
A queue before Diwali and a ship that is a day late
The half hour before the ferry leaves
In the half hour before a ferry leaves, people buy boxes to carry to relatives across the water. Each box is weighed, tied and added up in a rush, and the next ferry is a day away, so a wrong box cannot be put right. The bread and cakes on the other counter wait their turn.
The dawn bake in the damp weeks
You bake before the shop opens, and in the damp weeks bread does not keep as long as it does in the dry. By evening you know if you baked too much, and what is left will not be as good tomorrow. Nobody wrote down how many trays went, so the next morning's bake is planned from how the oven felt yesterday.
Diwali week with an empty ghee tin
Sugar, flour and ghee all come on the ship. When a carton is late the ladle waits, and the festival box you promised is half full. You find out how low the ghee is by looking into the tin, at the worst time of the week, with a customer standing at the counter. The queue behind her does not care that the ship was late, only that the box is not ready.
Where coconut comes first, coconut sweets follow
Coconut is the first crop of some of these islands, and the sweets follow it.
- Port Blair has the Haddo, Wharf and Chatham harbours for ships to the mainland, about 1,190 km from Chennai and 1,255 km from Kolkata. The sugar, flour and ghee for a sweet shop come in through the same three harbours.
- Trade in copra, dried coconut kernel, has long been the mainstay of the Nicobar islands, which depended almost entirely on copra exports for outside goods (2010 report). A sweet shop near that crop has coconut close at hand.
Questions island sweet and bread makers ask
A box ordered on my page goes on the ship to a relative, and a wrong box cannot be put right on the island. How do I check it first?
Read the bill back to the one who ordered, line by line, before the box goes aboard. Once the ship has sailed, a missing sweet or a wrong weight is an apology and not a fix. The ship leaves at its hour whether the box is right or not, so the check belongs at your counter.
In the damp weeks bread goes soft in two days. Which loaf do I stop baking?
Each kind of bread is an item counted by the loaf. After a damp week the bills show which kind went and which stayed on the rack. Bake the first kind more the next week and the second kind less.
Families stop for sweets on the way home after Sindur Khela. Which sweets go first, and how many trays should I make before the next Puja?
Each sweet is its own item, so the lines for Vijaya Dashami's evening name the sweets that families carried home and how many of each went. Count those lines in trays, and that is the number to make before the next Puja.
Khoa from the mainland and five days of Durga Puja
Before Diwali the Food Safety Department asks sweet-makers who buy khoa from the mainland to report each arrival so officers can inspect its quality. A shop that notes each lot when it arrives, with its date, has the arrival record ready when officers ask.
Durga Puja in Port Blair runs five days in October with crowds at pandals such as Bengali Club, Bhathubasti and Chouldary, and Sindur Khela on Vijaya Dashami. For those five days the town is out in the evening, and a sweet counter is on the way home.