I jostle my way through peak summer crowds to reach the small counter of the Famous Jigarthanda outlet at Kamarajar Street in Madurai. There are over a dozen outstretched hands along with mine, eager, and waiting. We see the golden-brown dessert being assembled in under five seconds: a chilled concoction is poured into tall glasses, then topped with scoops of caramel-coloured ice cream. This ice cream, the defining ingredient of jigarthanda, was first made in the kitchen of a one-roomed, 100 sq ft home in the nearby Mahalipatti neighbourhood, 70 years ago.   

The Hindi word jigarthanda can be translated to ‘that which cools the heart’. The dessert, which consists of jelly-like bits of badam pisin, ice cream, basundhi, and nannari syrup, is present in every other street in Madurai, and has now spread to other parts of the State and beyond. Famous Jigarthanda is said to be the name that gave the dessert its present form. The shop has 20 branches in Madurai, and 400 others spread across Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka and Puducherry through the franchise model. The Kamarajar Salai outlet alone has over 1,000 walk-ins a day during summer.

The man who started it all, Sheik Meeran, came to Madurai from Arampannai village in Thoothukkudi in search of a better life in the 1960s. He decided to try his hand selling ice cream inspired by a few kuchi ice sellers in Madurai. Meeran bought a few extra litres of milk from the local milkman one morning. “His wife Noor Hudhaya simmered the milk with sugar over a wood-fire,” says Mohammad Rabic, a cousin in the family.

Once it cooled, Meeran churned it in a hand-cranked ice cream machine that had an insulated outer compartment of ice mixed with salt. He then scooped the ice cream into a steel thooku and set out to sell it door-to-door. Meeran had four sons and two daughters and one of his sons usually accompanied him. S Amanulla, the youngest, remembers walking with his father along the mud roads of erstwhile Madurai.

Meeran was known as the ‘ice bhai’.

“We would start from home at 10.30am, selling a serving for four or eight annas,” recalls Amanulla. Meeran would holler ‘ice! ice!’ as he walked with the steel container. “We carried small bowls fashioned out of palm leaves to serve the ice cream; some people also bought it in their own containers,” he adds. They were usually sold out by 3pm, after which they started preparations for the next day.

Meeran made ice cream in small batches, enough to feed his family. “Our life revolved around ice cream,” Amanulla says. He would wake up to the sweet smell of boiling milk, going to bed after a dinner of buns with leftover ice cream on many nights. As a baby, he slept in a thottil enveloped in the aroma of sugar and milk.

Meeran was a stickler for perfection. “He was a stern disciplinarian father. Movies were a strict no-no,” says Amanulla, recalling their conversations when they were out selling ice cream. “He would instruct me to have the spoons and bowls in order, and once, sent me to Vathalagundu in a bus to deliver a small consignment of ice cream for an order,” he says.

Gradually, word spread on Meeran’s ice cream and he started getting orders for weddings and small events. He switched to a handcart and in the 1970s, operated on a cart from the same spot where their most popular shop stands today in Vilakuthoon. By then, his older sons, the late Beer Mohammad, Chintha Mathar, and Shahul Hameed, had joined him.

“I would go to the cart in the evenings to wash glasses for two hours just so I would get a cup of ice cream,” laughs Amanulla. It was by accident that Meeran discovered the combination for jigarthanda. “One evening, he had almost run out of ice cream,” recalls Rabic. “He had only a little left, and some nannari syrup, milk cream, and soaked badam pisin that he’d kept for toppings.”

Meeran, who didn’t want to send his customers empty-handed, threw in a little of everything and offered it in glasses. The result was a nutty, mildly-sweet dessert.

That evening, Madurai tasted its first jigarthanda.

“The chilled dessert was served in front of parks and cinema theatres even then, but it was watery cold milk with badam pisin,” says Amanulla. Customers came back the next evening, asking for the same thing. “He then perfected the combination over the next few weeks to arrive at the present form,” Rabic adds.

It was not like the dessert became an overnight sensation. Meeran worked at it. “Once he wrapped up the cart past midnight, he would stand in queue at 3.30am to fill drums with water from the Corporation for use the next day,” says Amanulla. “A major part of the work was physical; father would lift heavy blocks of ice to the cart, also ensuring milk was sourced and boiled at home.”

His wife Noor did a lot of the heavy-lifting at home and their sons too were trained to do the same; which is why Amanulla doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty at their factory even today. Famous Jigarthanda has five factories in the city, and most of the work is automated. But the mixing happens at the counter, seconds before the glass is handed to the customer.

Amanulla can never forget the taste of the ice cream his father made at their Mahalipatti home in the 60s. “People would say it tasted like amirtham [the food of the gods],” says Rabic. It is that taste they aspire to, and they are actually very close.