Bhagawati Snacks, Chandini Chowk, Cuttack

Sailen Routary

A gate for a Durga Puja pandal, Badambadi, Cuttack
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Satwik Satapathy

I had given up on singidas within a couple of years of moving back to Bhubaneswar in 2013–14. There is the north Indian samosa; there exists the Bengali singara; and there is of course the Odia singida. Like many things Odia, the singida bears a resemblance to the singara, but it is a different creature all together. True to a stereotype of all things Odia, it indeed is a poor cousin of the Bengali singara. The singida, like most Odias, is small, almost petite. As a snack, one should be able to eat at least five of these without feeling particularly full. The stuffing consists of only two major ingredients—potatoes cut into perfect cubes of half a centimetre each side and split peanuts, both stir fried with a hint of powdered turmeric, chilly and cumin.

Such singidas are no longer available in most parts of Chandrasekharpur. What is available now is the north Indian samosa, in abundance. One part of the answer might lie in the fact that most of the customers are from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and western Odisa—students enrolled in a dozen or so engineering and management colleges or young workers of IT companies. Other reasons behind the ubiquity of the north Indian samosa might have to do with processes of culinary standardization where the north Indian versions have come to symbolize the Indian cosmopolitan universal. Something called chow mein samosa is also increasingly available—a samosa stuffed with, of all things, tepid, tasteless chow mein. The fugitive singida had become for me a marker for the passage of time and a marker of change in a fast-evolving home town, where everything familiar soon passes into thin air.

And then Bhagawati Snacks happened. I had once gone over to Sidharth’s home in Cuttack for a night out. He had come out for a smoke, and we felt like roaming around the city. It was a late spring afternoon and I had started feeling peckish. We were in the Chandini Chowk area, and Sidharth was insistent that I go and try out the singida in Bhagawati Snacks. He and I had a running feud about what constitutes an Odia singida. I would not flinch from my position that the stuffing had to be stir-fried and that mashed potato stuffing for an Odia singida is an abomination. He hated my singida and preferred the mashed stuffing.

The samosa migrated to Odisa from two directions. It came to coastal Odisa via Calcutta and this meant that the coastal Odisa singida had a stir-fried stuffing. It reached western Odisa via Raipur, and this resulted in the western Odisa singida having mashed stuffing. Sidharth went to school in Sambalpur in western Odisha and grew up on the Sambalpuri singida.

In Bhagwati Snacks, the singida that was sold was Sambalpuri, with mashed potato stuffing. But it was definitely not a samosa. The outer covering had the same flakiness as a singida and the stuffing, though mashed, had cumin as its dominant flavour. If they had added any coriander powder, I could not register its taste. The taste of that singida was like meeting some long lost cousin, and after finishing one, I smiled and ordered one more. I saw my smile infect Sidharth, and with his lop-sided grin he asked me, ‘Jhakas na—Great, aint it?’

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. Bhagawati Snacks shut shop a few years back.