Raghu Dahi Bara, Ring Road, Cuttack

Sailen Routray

Taladanda Canal, Cuttack, in 2022
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Jnanaranjan Sahu

There are five of us. Guru bhai, Biswajit, Manoj, Abhiram and me. We are returning from the eleventh-day ceremony after Sidharth’s death. The afternoon is almost gone. The evening is about to rise from the depths of Kathajodi River flowing to our right. Manoj remembers that Raghu Dahi Bara will be on our way out of Cuttack. 

We have not had anything to eat since the morning, and hunger hits me like a handful of hail dropping out of a Baisakh sky, fierce and sharp. All of us agree to stop. Around a dozen people have already assembled on the roadside after Bidanasi chhaka, where Raghu’s stall materializes for a few hours every afternoon. Raghu only comes there to sit and supervise; it is his grandsons who manage the show now. The family arrives carrying their wares on a small commercial vehicle. 

An orderly line forms in front of the makeshift stall. We order a bowl of dahi bara–aloo dum each, the whitish brown of the dahi baras a stark contrast with the reddish gravy of the aloo dum. The mix is too hot for my taste. But hunger has no respect for death and has to be fed, and I gobble down the dahi bara, even as its taste fails to please my palate.

I pick up five pedas for twenty-five rupees for the group from a pedawalla peddling his wares nearby. The peda is crunchy and chewy. Its mild sweetness soothes the heat in the mouth, making my eyes water. A young boy on a motorcycle comes around asking for directions to Sati Chaura.

Sati Chaura is an old and famous cremation ground in Cuttack, which houses the remains and memories of poets, politicians, and an air force pilot who died in World War II. The memorial of the pilot has a small aeroplane on top that looks like the forgotten plaything of a giant child. Sidharth’s funeral there took more than three hours, eleven days ago. 

It is my second funeral in three years, not a large number perhaps, but in my case, two is too many. The first one was Baba’s, at the age of sixty-four in January 2014; Sidharth died in 2017, at the raw age of twenty-five.

What is the right age to die? Sixty-four? Twenty-five? Or seventy-nine? I ask myself these questions sitting on the hot seat of Guru bhai’s car after we troop in. The combination of the flavours of the dahi bara and aloo dum has disoriented me, but I am sure there is a reference somewhere in my memory that can help me ground it. 

When we are crossing Link Road on our way back to Bhubaneswar, there is a strong smell of vapourized water arising off the hot road mixed with whiff of singidas being fried. The concoction is like the taste of snot, tears and wood smoke from Sidharth’s funeral pyre mixed in my throat when I lay lounging just one memorial stone away from the group of friends hovering around his burning body like a murder of crows. The taste is just like the dousing gust of mild sweetness of the peda, after the heat of the aloo dum. 

I ask everyone in the car whether any one had been to Sati Chaura earlier. I repeat what the poet Bharat Majhi said when we left Sati Chaura a few days earlier after Sidharth’s body had turned to ash, ‘Sidharth amaku Sati Chaura dekhei dela—Sidharth ended up showing us Sati Chaura.’

Note: This piece was first published in the blog Chiragh Dilli as a part of the piece titled "This City, Other Cities" on April 6, 2018.