The way to the tavern

Sailen Routray

Harivansh Rai Bachchan (1907–2003)
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia/org/Government of India

Around four months back, I was travelling with family from my mother's village back to Bhubaneswar. The occasion for the visit was my eldest mamu's first sraddha. 

The niece requested me to play something from my college days. In another trip I had played a few songs from the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

The numbers had included those by Indian bands like Silk Route and Indian Ocean, and Pakistani ones such as Junoon and Strings. Those times were a little less jingoistic. 

When I was thinking about what to play for her, I suddenly remembered what I absolutely must put on the stereo. When I was in college in Bhubaneswar, there was a period of a little more than one year, when I would play the Manna Dey rendition of 'Madhushala' on the tape recorder, every night before sleeping . 

To say that I was addicted to this particular rendition of the long poem is an understatement. The music by Jaidev has just the right amount and kind of instrumentation. The tune is lilting and melodious. And Manna Dey is Manna Dey. 

The cassette begins with the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan himself singing 'Madiralay jane ko ghar se chalta hai peenewala/ 'Kis path se jaaoon' asmanjas main hai woh bholabhala/' - "To go the tavern, the drinker leaves his place/ a little confused and undecided is the simpleton, about the path to take./"

Over the last many weeks till that day, I had been a little perplexed about my own choices about the path to the tavern. A couple of years back, I committed myself to a particular way, after being initiated. 

Till then I had explored four different ones, for a few years on each, always feeling a little out of place. The one I walk on now, after many months of practice, had started seeming like a natural part of my life, like cooking, eating, and walking. So, I formally committed to it. 

After more than three years of practice till then, there was some joy in walking the path. But my pace had been slow, the movements clumsy, the goal of the tavern, ever further away. 

Doubts had started creeping in. Am I on the right path? 

Then, on that evening, I heard Bachchan (the elder, more important one) sing, 'Alag alag path batlate sab, par main yeh batlata hoon/ rah pakad tu ek chalachal, pa jaega madhushala' - 'Different people suggest different paths, but this is what I say/ Stick to a road and keep on walking, and you'll reach the tavern./"

As I heard this amidst the mad traffic and noise of the Kendrapada-Cuttack highway, some knot within was untied. 

My path is my path. The tavern is on every step that I take. And the alcohol is every drop of sweat that I shed with the effort of walking.

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. 

What I want to talk about

Sailen Routray

Detail of the Church of the Assumption of Mary
in Lychivka, Khmelnytskyi Raion,
Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine
Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Serhii Zysko

What I want to talk about is this. Last night, at around ten thirty in the night, I was telling Rumi some stories. On the bed. To put her to sleep. And to help me sleep myself.

For the last four days, I am telling her stories of my childhood. It is not self-indulgence, hopefully. My father died ten years back. When I think about us, I miss many things. But what I miss the most is something I do not have. I do not know what my father was like as a child. He never told me. I wanted to know. I want to know. But I can't.

So, I tell Rumi stories about my childhood. Last night the stories were about the vacations we used to spend in baba's and ma's ancestral villages in Cuttack district, which are hardly three kilometer apart.

Baba's home was a mud house thatched with straw bales. It also had a false ceiling of wooden planks all throughout. It was hardly thirty feet by thirty feet. It had a small courtyard open to the skies in the middle. There were verandas inside the house, facing the inner courtyard. The outside walls were also rimmed by these.

When you entered from the backyard (which we invariably did, we rarely used the front door) the dhenki faced you right across. The corner on the right hand side had a tiny kitchen. It also housed the family deities. If you moved a little further to the right, there was a bedroom.

And then there was the amaara, the family storeroom for housing the year's harvest of paddy. The amaara was out of bounds for us children. But we spent quite a bit of time in it. Even during the height of the summer in early June, it was cool.

I don't mean it was not warm. I mean it was cool, as cool as the dew on a Margasira morning. The paddy was kept in a huge cube made up of mud walls. There was a passage running all around it. We children would run and play in the passage, completely silent, not wanting to be taken out.

Yesterday, it was very hot. It is so today. There is a heatwave. When I was telling Rumi about my summer vacations in Balabhadrapur and the amaara, I became very sad. I let the sadness be.

Today morning, I was listening to Rabi Thakur's "Mana mora meghera sangi" sung by Mahtim Shakib. The poetic voice speaks of roaming in orchards of taala and tamaala. I started crying. I realised then, why I was and am sad.

I am not sad, only because that mud house is gone, the family having demolished it and constructed a concrete cowshed in its place. I am not sad, only because I can't step into the amaara and feel its coolness that was like the embrace of a friend.

I am sad because I can't hold Rumi's hand and take her to that house. I am sad because there is a part of me that is still there inside me, but what I can share of it are only words, as it no longer exists in the physical world.

I wish Rumi and I could step into that house. I wish Rumi and I could run behind each other in that narrow passage a foot and half wide. We can not. Therefore, this is what I want to talk about.

Cafe Italiano, Chandrasekharpur

Sailen Routray

The office of Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), 2022
Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org/Subhra Singh

My family came to Bhubaneswar in 1987. I left it for Bombay in 2002 to pursue a master’s degree. At that time, Bhubaneswar was an agglomeration of towns and as a city it had no character of its own, unlike say Puri or Cuttack. But it was, for me, a city of street food.

One of the first places that Sidharth ‘showed’ me (after I shifted back to Bhubaneswar from Bangalore in 2013–14) as a part of his city was Cafe Italiano, where you could get a cup of cappuccino for thirty rupees and hang around for an hour.

The roof of the cafe was made of bamboo mats and its sitting area designed tastefully with cane chairs and tables of wood and tyres. Located in Chandrasekharpur and situated on the longest arterial road that joins Bhubaneswar to Cuttack, Cafe Italiano soon became a hangout for me and my friends, where we would often meet for sandwiches and coffee. I got married around the time and sometimes the wife and I would meet up with Sidharth and his girlfriend (who was studying English literature in college like him) there.

Till the age of sixteen, in 1996, I do not remember we as a family ever going out to eat. Even at home, eating together was not a rule as a family. Everybody ate when they felt like it, including Ma, who never waited for Baba. The only time we would eat out together as a family was when traveling to Balabhadrapur, our village in Cuttack district.

Of course buying fried snacks for the ‘afternoon tiffin’ was an indulgence a few times a month. But one bought the bara, singida and piaji and got it home. This was the culture in Bhubaneswar in most families. By the time I started going to college, I had very little pocket money. My gang in college would often eat out, but it was mostly street food. The occasional ‘treat’ would be at Venus Inn (a south Indian restaurant) or at Keyar’s (a multi-cuisine restaurant, the chief attraction of which was an ‘American Chopsuey’), both located in Bapuji Nagar, not very far from college. Since we as a family never ate out together, I had no clue about the options near our home in Chandrasekharpur in north Bhubaneswar.

Since the 1990s, it is Chandrasekharpur that has seen the most amount of concentrated development involving real estate, IT companies and private educational institutions. Bhubaneswar acts as a hatchery for migratory birds from all over the state—the eggs hatch and the chicks soon fly away. People come for government jobs from across the state. Their children go to school and college here and then move out for jobs elsewhere. 

This is especially true of Chandrasekharpur as a locality within the city. A large part of the population under the age of thirty-five consists of migrants. This segment has access to disposable incomes not seen earlier or in other parts of the city. This has meant a mushrooming of cafes, pizzerias and restaurants that specifically cater to this population. Cafe Italiano, started by Ranjan, is one such place.

The cafe has a cult following with a Facebook page maintained by fans. But more often than not, these fans are people no longer in Bhubaneswar. A large number of them moved to cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad or Pune after completing their studies or because Bhubaneswar no longer had a job that they found fulfilling. 

Sidharth also moved out after graduation in 2016 to Pondicherry to pursue a master’s degree. His body moved back in February 2017. I never wanted him to leave. The marriage between his Bhubaneswar and my Bhubaneswar was never consummated, Cafe Italiano notwithstanding. For me, his ghost still haunts the place, whenever the wife and I go there. It is a place suffused not with nostalgia but with what Russians call toska—a longing with nothing to long for.

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. Care Italiano shut shop a few years back. 

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. 

What it takes to stretch

Sailen Routray

 Sapta Chakra, from a Yoga manuscript in Braj Bhasa with 118 pages. 1899

                                                    Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org

Those of us who come to some form of spiritual practice and stick to it, often do so because we want to escape the madness and contradictions of the world, and have the need for certainties and clarity. However, anyone who has been following an adhyatmic tradition with some amount of seriousness for a while, soon comes to realize the hopelessness of this process.

Let me explain by taking the example of hatha yoga. Asanas are supposed to be about mastering movement. However, to be able to move the required parts of the body in a coordinated and effective way (which constitute asanas), you must be able to keep the ones not involved in the posture absolutely still. 

Hence, to perform the asana, you must keep some relevant body parts completely motionless. Say, you produce the necessary stillness of the relevant body parts. Then you start noticing the movement of the muscles, etc. in the form of a vibrating tautness. Some persistence and mindfulness of the practice will reveal it to you that this vibrating movement is a part of the maintenance of stillness. 

Therefore, movement and stillness are not opposites of each other. You can never completely resolve the supposed contradictions between the two in practice. Rather, they constitute a totality, which is made possible by an awareness of the process of letting this totality emerge by paying attention.

Some traditions make the claim that you need this attention itself to be total as well. However, therein lies another contradiction. This perhaps needs a separate post.

Manual for Making a Chariot

Sailen Routray

A painting by Sheikh Zainuddin (circa 1777 AD)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

 

You are walking in an ugly middle-class housing colony in Bhubaneswar in the hot July sun. The only saving grace is the foliage on the top of your head. The houses all resemble each other, although they have degenerated in unique manners. There is nothing interesting in sight, not even the poster of a c-grade Hindi movie. Suddenly something hits your nostrils, something maddeningly sweet and cloying that can very easily suffocate you. You look around, and find nothing. 

When you finally look up, a green canopy wobbles in front of your eyes with yellow specks on it. You wonder how a tree, no matter how huge, can hold so many flowers. It has to bow down. But it does not. The tree miraculously stays straight. One of the specks falls down and lands near your feet. You pick up. It’s perfect. The colour has the tinge of turmeric from Phulbani that has ripened under mahua flowers. It has a strange texture. The surface feels as if the flower is trying to find cleavages in your palm to enter it.

 

But not everyone experiences kadamba flowers this way for the first time. One of my earliest memories is of pulling chariots made out of these blossoms. They are perfectly round and yellow. Ideally you should not use already fallen flowers for building a chariot. That’s passé. You have to throw stones at the tall trees and hope that a few flowers fall down. After some attempts, they do. Ideally you should catch them before they hit the ground. 

You have to take four coconut twigs, all of the same length. With four flowers at the four vertices, construct a perfect square by piercing the flowers. Put the square on the ground. Now pick up a couple of pairs of twigs again.  Pierce the vertices of the square  vertically with the twigs. Bend all the twigs towards the center of the square. Pick up another kadamba flower. Make all the twigs pierce the flower at nearly the same place. Tie a piece of thick thread, preferably of jute, to one of the sides of the square. Now the chariot is ready to roll.