Eating
flowers in Pipili
Sailen
Routray
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| Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
In the house in Pipili there was a kanchana tree
at the edges of the garden. The house was an old-fashioned Atu house. The roof
was made of chancheri (strong bamboo mats) the colour of riverine sand drenched
in a sudden burst of summer rains. This was topped with a slanting thatch of
straw that needed repairs every year, a full month before the summer monsoon
rains. Often if the repairs were delayed, with the premonsoon showers parts of
the roof would start leaking, especially on the inner verandah. It would be my
responsibility as the eldest child to start putting pots and buckets under the
leaks. Thankfully, these leaks were not numerous, and the task was light and
not onerous for a five year old boy, tall for his years. The year we moved into
that house, I started going to school; but this was discontinued immediately,
as the class teacher viciously picked on me. The next time I went to school was
a full three years later in Bhubaneswar, when I was eight.
The walls of the Pipili house were of plastered
burnt bricks, and the floor was cemented. The floor was not smooth; it
resembled the mottled hands of Lakhi, a prematurely old dalit woman of the
Bouri caste who came to help ma with the housework. Her younger daughter China,
then around ten but short for her age, was my only playmate. Lakhi Apa would
clean and swab the floor and do the utensils. But my mother’s liberalism borne
out of her growing up in a household with one non-Hindu parent (belonging to
the Mahima sect) stopped there. It would not extend to let Lakhi do other
housework like fetching water from the tube well or grinding masala in the
sil-batta. During the scorching summer months, the house stayed cool; when you
lied down on the bare floor face down after Lakhi had swabbed it clean, your
cheeks felt a raw coolness that was like the touch of a shaded pool of
water.
The kitchen (with an earthen chulah) was a small
annexe on the verandah at a right angle to the bedroom. There was only one
other room, that was pretentiously called a ‘drawing room’, of which my most
vivid memories are of sitting across an ageing tuition teacher (who started
coming in after I stopped going to school) whose favourite punishment was
pinching me on the thigh when my attention wavered. You entered this room after
coming past the local office of the Orissa State Electricity Board (OSEB) where
baba worked as a junior engineer.
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A Ho House in Mayurbhanj District, Odisha
Photo Credit - Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedia Commons |
Ours was a rented house and had two and half
rooms. A nest that is not quite a home: what we Odias call a basaa; a
habitation. But we stayed there for almost three years. The rent was a royal
sum of ninety rupees when we left in 1987. The front of the house faced the then
Bhubaneswar-Puri highway. The garden at the back was huge, almost half an acre
in size. It merged into the neighbour Sanju Mausi’s garden with no hedge
separating the two. Sanju Mausi was a Christian, so was our landlord. We lived
in a Christian hamlet.
The first wedding that I remember took place in
the local Church; the bride’s wedding gown the colour of kanchan flowers, a
white that was neither bright nor dirty, but a colour that in Odia is denoted
by the flower itself - ‘kanchana ranga’; dirty white being ‘gheea-ranga’ -
‘ghee-white’. The kanchana tree was near the border of the two gardens. There
was also a pear tree that stood beside the kanchana; its fruits were the size
of small apples and had a slightly pinkish core that ma periodically converted
into the most delicious ‘pijuli jelly’ ever. But for me the star attraction of
the garden was the kanchana. Not that it had much competition.
The garden
was more of a backyard. It had a few straggling hibiscus plants, a kalami mango
tree, a yellow oleander tree, and not much other vegetation apart from grass that had been allowed
to grow tall and wild in patches. There was a chicken coop. We had a cock, a
few hens and large, intermittent broods of chicks. As a child, one of my
household chores was to remove the ‘kuduki’ of the hens. After a hen had laid a
dozen eggs or so, its body would heat up and it would want to start sitting on
her eggs even if all these had already been eaten. If its body were not cooled
off, it would not lay any eggs for the next twenty one days. So, I had to take
the hen to Sanju Mausi’s pond and forcibly keep the chicken under water (with its
head bobbing on the surface) till the time it ‘cooled off’. For some hens this
would need to be done twice or thrice at one go.
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| Pumpkin Flowers (Wikimedia Commons) |
The
backyard also had a cattle-shed that housed two cows and their calves. The cows
did not give much milk. But their output was enough for us to avoid buying dal
regularly to go with the rice. Parboiled (usuna in Odia) rice with milk
and mashed potatoes was standard fare for lunch for us kids on many winter
days. Dinner for me was often khechedi with ghee, curd and mango achar. The end
of the monsoons and the onset of the Puja season had one more attraction. This
was stuff made of kanchana flowers. The one kanchana tree was enough to provide
an almost endless supply of flowers for ma’s kitchen in the season.
My mother
turned milk into curd and chhena, cream into ghee, the residue of the beaten
butter milk into spiced chalhaa, mangoes into achars and khata, and flowers
(kanchana of course, in late monsoons and the autumn; but also those of the
pumpkin vine on the roof of the kitchen) into fritters, bhajas and curries of
many different hues, that often added variety to our diet.
The
chickens and their chicks who marauded the backyard and scratched at everything
in sight, the cows grazing on the grass, my father’s busy schedule, ma’s
disinclination to work on the land, all conspired to prevent us from having a
vegetable garden. Milk, curd, ghee and the flowers substituted for vegetables
on many occasions, apart from the few straggling specimens bought in the local
market. Baba’s low salary and his inability to take bribes meant that ma had to
be inventive, for all her three kids to be well-fed.
Although I
loved the dishes she made with the kanchana flowers, I remember the tree
vividly for another reason altogether. The small basaa was swarmed by my two
younger sisters who, even when toddlers, were the best of buddies and would not
allow me to play in their group of two. And being unsocial, I did not have any
other friends apart from China who was much older. Like most loners, I learnt
reading before I could write. My father would support my indulgence in reading
at the cost of his own (of cigarettes, the occasional bottle of cheap whisky
and the stray Hindi pulp fiction tome by Rajkamal Prakashan). When the weather
was right, I would often escape the house, go to the kanchana tree, sit under
it and read. For a child that had no school, no friends, and no other
entanglements, that kanchana tree was as close to a friend that he ever had for
those three years.
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| Backyard Mushrooms (Wikimedia Commons) |
Kanchana flower chatak: (Serves four)
A chatak is neither a curry, nor a chutney or
for that matter, a khata. It is a savoury made with flowers that is useful to
whet the appetite when one is down with a cold or a fever.
Ingredients:
Five dozen kanchana flowers, twelve small arbis
(called saaru in Odia), ten black peppers, six strands of pippali, two square
inches of peeled ginger sliced into small pieces, half a tea spoon of mustard
seeds, one tea spoon of cumin seeds, five tea spoons of poppy seeds, two medium
sized twigs of cinnamon, eight table spoons of grated coconut, three table
spoons of desi ghee, one tea spoon of crushed jaggery, two twigs of curry
leaves, salt.
Method:
Remove the stalks, stamens and pistils from the
flowers. After these are picked, wash thrice with lukewarm water. With a
peeler, deskin the arbis, cut into quarters and clean with water. Pluck the
curry leaves from the twigs, wash these with water and set aside.
Grind the peppers, strands of pippali, sliced
ginger pieces, poppy seeds and twigs of cinnamon into a fine, thick paste with
very little water.
In a wok, add two table spoons of ghee. When it
is smoking hot, first add the jaggery. When the jaggery starts melting,
decrease the flame of the stove and add cumin and mustard seeds, and the curry
leaves. After the cumin seeds start turning brown, add the sliced arbis and the
kanchana flowers. Add a tea spoon of salt. Stir on a low flame for around 7-8
minutes. Add the masala paste and stir.
After the masala is cooked properly with the
flowers and arbi, add the remaining table spoon of ghee and sauté for five
minutes with the occasional sprinkle of water to prevent the masala from
sticking to the bottom. Boil two small cups of water separately. Add the
boiling water to the wok. Simmer on a low flame for two minutes and then add
the grated coconuts and cover the wok. Cook on the low fire for around five
minutes. With a spoon press on the arbis; if these are a little firm, yet allow
themselves to be mashed, then the dish is done.
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Photo - 'Boy with a Pumpkin Vine' (1854)
Photographer - Varin Frères
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
Kanchana flower rai: (Serves four)
A rai is made with a masala paste that has a
mustard seed base. Many Odia curries (called ‘besara’) have a mustard paste
base as well. But the rai differs from a mustard paste based curry in five big
ways.
First, in a besara curry, the masala is sautéed
first; whereas in a rai, the masala is added on top after the other base
ingredients have been stir fried. Second, in a rai, no sweetening agent is
added. In a mustard masala based curry, generally a little bit of jaggery or
sugar is added to take the edge of the ‘kasaa’ taste of the mustard off. What
is the ‘kasaa’ taste? That is another story in itself.
Third, a mustard based curry has a souring agent
like dried raw mango (ambula, not amchur) or tamarind pulp added; the rai has
no such additions. Fourth, the rai is always a lot less hotter than a curry, as
it does not have much heat-inducing substances such as black pepper, pippali,
or chillies. And, perhaps the biggest difference is the last one – it is
possible to add onions to a curry with a mustard base, but it is criminal to
add it to a rai. If anyone commits such a heinous offence, the minimum penalty
should be a public flogging with ten slashes on the posterior. If that sounds
too excessive to you, make it five.
Ingredients:
Sixty kanchana flowers, eight arbis, four tea
spoons of mustard seeds, four tea spoons of cumin seeds, one medium sized (and
moderately hot) red chilly, fifteen cloves of garlic, 5-6 black peppers, five
cloves, five green cardamom pods, salt, one table spoon of turmeric powder and
three table spoons of desi ghee.
Method:
Clean the flowers as you did for the kanchana
flower chatak. Likewise, clean and cut the arbis.
Grind the mustard seeds, three tea spoons of
cumin seeds, red chilly, garlic cloves and black peppers together into a fine,
creamy paste in a mortar and pestle or on a sil-batta. Do not make this masala
in an electric mixer. Grind the cardamom pods and cloves separately and keep
aside.
In a wok heat two table spoons of ghee. When the
ghee smokes, add one tea spoon of cumin seeds. When the
seeds start turning brown, add the sliced arbis and the kanchana flowers, and
stir fry on a low flame for five minutes. Then add turmeric powder and one tea spoon of salt. Stir well for two
minutes. Add one cup of water. Cover the wok. Cook for five minutes on a low fire. Remove the cover,
and cook for another five minutes so that the water almost completely evaporates. Then add the mustard
paste. Add one cup of water and cook with an open wok for another seven minutes or so on a very low flame.
Five minutes after adding water add a table spoon of ghee. Sprinkle water and scrape the bottom of the
wok regularly, so that the masala won’t stick to the vessel. After the arbi is cooked, add the cardamom
and clove paste. Again, sprinkle a little water. Cook for a couple of minutes.
Take the kadai off the fire.
In a wok heat two table spoons of ghee. When the
ghee smokes, add one tea spoon of cumin seeds. When the seeds start turning
brown, add the sliced arbis and the kanchana flowers, and stir fry on a low
flame for five minutes. Then add turmeric powder and one tea spoon of salt.
Stir well for two minutes. Add one cup of water. Cover the wok. Cook for five
minutes on a low fire. Remove the cover, and cook for another five minutes so
that the water almost completely evaporates. Then add the mustard paste. Add
one cup of water and cook with an open wok for another seven minutes or so on a
very low flame. Five minutes after adding water add a table spoon of ghee.
Sprinkle water and scrape the bottom of the wok regularly, so that the masala
won’t stick to the vessel. After the arbi is cooked, add the cardamon and clove
paste. Again sprinkle a little water. Cook for a couple of minutes. Take the
kadai off the fire.
Note: A shorter version of this article was published with the same title on 21st April 2019 in The Sunday Magazine of The Hindu newspaper.
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| An Evening in Pipili (Wikimedia Commons) |
