Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 11
After tea, Shibbudada would say a merry goodbye to us, get into his car, and drive off to Number 7, leaving Taiji to walk back slowly on her own.
My father had taken on the job of general manager at one of North India's largest sugar factories, in Daurala, just outside the city of Meerut, and so avoided this recurring scene in the family drama. Most of the time he was not there at all. My mother had stayed with us because of school, but we joined our father whenever we could.
In Daurala, my father, far from his powerful relatives, shut out that world and once again created one of his dream homes. The house was a sprawling but very basic brick structure, entirely surrounded for miles and miles by sugarcane fields. Way in the distance could be seen the outlines of a dense guava grove. Other than that, there was nothing but the blue of the sky, the chirping of birds, and the sounds of pumps gushing water out of the earth. The sugar factory was such a distance away that we could neither see nor hear it.
My father built a large chicken coop in the back courtyard, which was filled with plenty of baby chicks to greet us whenever we visited, and in the walled vegetable garden he had the gardener plant what seemed most exotic and desirable to us, strawberries. We visited Daurala only during our shorter holidays. My father missed my mother. He did not even know how to fall ill without her. If his temperature reached anywhere near a hundred, he would start moaning, “Hai, hai.” My mother's gentle ministrations were needed to calm him down. She tried to spend as much time with him as possible. Whenever she went, she took my sister Veena and me along. If it was vacation time, Lalit, Kamal, Brijdada, and Bhaiyyadada came, too.
Once we were ensconced in the house, our favorite destinations were the sugarcane fields, and, if we wanted a longer walk, the guava orchard. The sugarcane was so tall we'd get lost between the rows of stalks. The thin, long leaves scratched our arms. A field hand would cut us a cane, which we would peel with our teeth and proceed to crush the juice out as we chewed on one end. We could then wash our sticky hands at a water pump and perhaps wet our feet as well. Our brothers, if they were there, brought their guns along and shot at the little black tiliyar (rather like ortolans), which we all considered a rare delicacy.
Sugarcane was a winter crop, and so were the guavas. We grew some of the best guavas—large, round pale green balls—which my sisters and I liked to bite into when they were still jaw-breakingly hard. The softer, fully ripe ones we took home to my mother, who instantly made chaat out of them. It was easy enough to do. We would stand around, eyes glued to her hands, mouths watering in anticipation, as she peeled the guavas, the skin coming off in long snakes, and then cut them into dice. She put these into a bowl, adding salt, pepper, ground roasted cumin seeds, chili powder, lime juice, and just a tiny bit of sugar. She mixed all this thoroughly with her hands, sometimes sprinkling in a few drops of water so the spices would adhere better. Then she would serve the guava chaat to us on a plate and stick toothpicks in as eating implements.
It was the toothpicks, used in the bazaars of Old Delhi in place of forks, that transformed homemade chaat into the illicit bazaar chaat, which my father had, with his repeated, ominous warnings, forbidden us to eat as it “carried diseases.” Whenever we placed a piece of spicy guava in our mouths, we could taste the toothpick, taste the illicit bazaar. My mother knew just how to add extra flavor to a simple treat.
Sometimes my brothers, armed with their double-barreled guns and their twelve-bore cartridges, would hop onto the small sugarcane-trains that ran through the fields and head out for distant lakes, looking for ducks, or go on deer and partridge shoots. At night, after we had feasted on some of the game, I would go to sleep with the sounds and smells of my brothers cleaning their guns and talking excitedly to my father about the hunt.
One day my father asked us if we would like to go to the sugar factory. Sugar and sugar cubes were made here by the tons. This would certainly be more interesting than watching the making of hydrogenated cooking fat, though I must admit I did like seeing peanuts being pressed at my father's previous place of work. What Dadaji thought might draw our real interest this time was the tonnage of candy that the factory also churned out. He had always brought some home, and my mother had doled it out to us in small amounts.
At the factory, all such curbs vanished. Half the workers stopped working to greet the family, and each one pointed to hillocks of toffees, wrapped candies, peppermints, lemon balls, and said the same thing—“Take, take. Take as much as you want.” We did. We kept eating candy as we saw the sugarcane juice being boiled and thickened, as we witnessed white sugar cubes neatly packaged into boxes, as granulated sugar came pouring out of large metal tubes, as we went up and down the factory's metal steps. In the end, we were so sick of candy that hardly any of us eat it now. Sad to say, in the course of that one single day I lost my sweet tooth entirely—or almost entirely.
My father, too, had probably had his fill of fat and sugar, as he eventually returned to Delhi and became the general manager of a cloth factory, Delhi Cloth Mills, also owned by family friends. From then on, instead of hydrogenated fat or bags of sugar, the household was never short of bolts of cloth acquired on the cheap.
SEVENTEEN
Visiting the Old City • The Lane
of Fried Breads • Monsoon Mushrooms
Whenever my mother wanted to visit her own family home, she said, “Come, beta [child], let's go to the City.” We knew what that meant: a visit to our nana ka ghar (maternal grandfather's house). Her father and mother had lived and died in the Old City, in a house where her eldest brother's family still resided. I think that, to her, the orchard site of her in-laws, beyond the City's walls, beyond the northern Kashmiri Gate, would always be the suburbia of the la-de-da set into which she had, by good fortune, married.
It was usually just my mother, Veena, and I on these City visits. The ritual generally began on a Saturday morning. After breakfast, my mother would remove the big silver key chain clipped to her waist and open her locked cupboard. Inside was a State Express 555 tin, from which she would fill my father's silver cigarette case, tucking a row of cigarettes behind an elasticized band. The cigarette case would be clicked shut and handed over to my father, who hovered behind her. She would also remove some cash, whatever my father needed for the day, and place that in my father's palm. The cupboard would be relocked, and the bunch of keys tucked back in her waist. My father would stride off to the car waiting to take him to his office.
Freed of household duties, which my mother took very seriously, she would pull out her attachee case. Yes, that is how we pronounced it. I thought it was an Indian word. I did not discover its French connection until I was fully grown. Into this rectangular leather box, this attachee case, went a fresh cotton saree, my mother's knitting or sewing, a comb, and a few gifts. Then my mother would disappear into her dressing room with its three-mirrored dressing table, and change into a printed silk saree.
I never understood this. Some odd sense of propriety had convinced her that she should travel and arrive in silk, change into crisp cotton for the day, and change back into flowing silk to return home.
By this time my father would have sent the car and driver back for us, and my mother, smelling sweetly of Hazeline Vanishing Cream, would step into the car, attachee case in one hand, her handbag in the other.
My father almost never came with us or deigned to join us later in the evening. He had been raised in the Old City, but once he left it, it gave him no joy to return. A part of him viewed it as old fashioned, germ-infested, and dangerous.
The residential section of the Old City then, as now, was a maze of such narrow lanes that a cow and a human could barely pass each other. We would have to leave the car on a wider road at a fairly distant point with instructions to the driver about the time at which he could collect us at the end of the day. Then my mother and her two youngest children would walk. We would have to walk carefully, sidestepping sleeping dogs and oncoming
My mother, ever elegant, in the back garden in Kanpur.
cycle-rickshaws. If a shopkeeper decided to empty a bucket of dirty water onto the lane, we expertly hopped out of the way as we simultaneously dodged a man carrying a hundred cardboard boxes on his head. If my mother stopped to buy sweets for her family, she knew enough to keep an eye on her handbag at all times. If we saw a street-sweeper approaching with her wild broom, we held handkerchiefs to our noses so we would not inhale the dust she raised. My mother walked at a steady pace, one hand gripping the attachee case, the other (with the handbag) holding her saree a few inches off the questionable ground.
Our journey took us through the Lane of Fried Breads (Parathe Vali Gulley), where I always urged my mother to stop for a quick paratha (fried puffy bread) stuffed with fenugreek greens. There were two or three open-fronted shops, all with shallow karhais (woks) set up almost on the street, right where passersby could be easily enticed. Inside the karhais, bobbing in a lake of hot ghee, were three or four big, fat, puffed-up ara fA as.
A word here about nomenclature. In our family, a small ball of whole-wheat dough, rolled into a flat round and deep-fried into a puffball, was called apoori. If it was stuffed with spiced split peas, it was called a bedvi. Aparatha, on the other hand, was a flatbread, made on a tava (a griddle), somewhat like a pancake. Why, in this lane alone, a bedvi— or stuffed oo n, if you will—was called a paratha, I do not know. And why, in this lane alone, was the karhai, however shallow, called a tava? Delhi was an ancient, idiosyncratic city. I never asked the questions, and my mother never explained. My preoccupation then was that the parathas, or whatever anyone wished to call them, came stuffed with a choice of green peas, potatoes, fenugreek greens, chickpea flour, spiced split peas, cauliflower, or grated white radish. Which one, or ones, would I choose? To make the choice even harder, combinations were also possible. All were expertly spiced, all were utterly delicious.
The peculiarity of these shops was that they charged only by the paratha. This had been the tradition since time immemorial— time immemorial, in this case, being 1875, when the first of these shops-cum-restaurants opened. The vegetables and condiments served with th e parathas were free.
As my father frowned on all bazaar food, my mother at first denied my request. But she herself was tempted by the smells and, if asked enough times, capitulated with a certain relief. “Just don't drink the water,” she would whisper, convincing herself that now she had dealt with my father's fears. We climbed up a few steps, went past a billboard reassuring us that only the purest “real” ghee was used on the premises (as opposed to the kind my father had churned out in his factory), and took our seats at the rough wooden tables. A young man whizzed by dropping pattal s (plates made out of semi-dried leaves) in front of us. He came by again, ladling out the chutneys and pickles with equal speed: sweet chutney, made with dried green mango, dried pomegranate, and dried jujubes; sour chutney, made with fresh mint, green coriander, and grated white radish; and carrot pickle, made with carrots, yellow chilies, crushed mustard seeds, and tamarind. Already on the table was some salt seasoned with ground roasted cumin and crushed red chilies.
Before any real food arrived, we would start dipping our fingers in the condiments and licking them. Then came the vegetables—meats did not belong in such places—carrots stir-fried with young fenugreek greens; potatoes, and peas cooked with cumin, asafetida, and tomatoes; cauliflower with ginger and green chilies. As soon as the vegetables were on our plates, the hot, hot parathas floated in, whichever we had ordered, all puffed up, ready to be deflated and devoured even before all the steam had hissed out.
My mother never allowed us to eat too much, as we were, after all, on our way to spend the day with her family. This was just a taste to tide us over until lunchtime. But what a taste it was— vegetarian, pure Old Delhi, and exclusively Parathe Vali Gulley.
We crisscrossed a few more narrow lanes before coming to the portals of our mother's family home, our nana ka ghar. There was no way anyone could gauge from the outside what the inside might be like. The well-worn wooden double doors were always shut. We would knock, and a servant girl would come to unlatch them to let us in. As the doors closed again behind us, the pace of life slowed instantly, and we seemed to enter an earlier world.
My nana ka ghar was of the same basic design as other attached houses in the Old City. All the rooms, on several floors, were built around an inner courtyard that served to let in light and air. Wealthier homes had several intricately carved stone courtyards, one leading to the next, some even with gardens and trees in them. But my mother's home was modest. One courtyard, plain, undecorated, and treeless, sufficed. The rooms were simple, too, with Moghul-style arched niches for closets, and seating either on low divans covered with white sheets or on the floor, with bolsters to lean against. The office room did have a desk, but it was the short-legged kind that required the writer to sit cross-legged behind it.
I must confess I thought then that my inner-city family and I had very little in common, though their undemanding, noncom-petitive nature made them unusually comfortable to be with. What attracted me there was the food, which was uncommon, and, of course, witnessing my mother's relaxed pleasure at being “home.” As in Kanpur, she seemed to be in control of her own life once again, falling into the pace of her childhood days with ease. Veena and I would climb up the narrow stairs to the roof. From here we could hear the hum of the city. If we spun around, our eyes could look down on family life in hundreds of courtyards that receded into ever-smaller sizes as they stretched into the distance. If we looked straight ahead in a southeasterly direction, our gaze would meet the grand dome and minarets of Jama Masjid, the seventeenth-century mosque. We could hear all the calls to prayer. Meanwhile, my mother changed into her cottons and settled down to knit or hem or attach a border to a saree— she rarely sat idly—and to catch up with family news.
There were few servants in this household, and the cooking was done mostly by my aunt, my mother's brother's wife, though all the women and girls pitched in, scraping bitter gourds, shelling green chickpeas, and pinching off small fenugreek leaves. My sister and I were rarely allowed to join, as we were considered “guests.” We hung around, unable to tear ourselves away from the aromas.
One of the specialties of the house was a sauced dish of monsoon mushrooms. I never had them as good anywhere else. These were not the common white mushrooms now sold all over Delhi, though they were white in color. Called khumbi, they consisted of very slight three-inch edible stems topped with elongated narrow caps that closed in on themselves so no gills were visible. These mushrooms chose to spring out of the earth only when the rains poured during the monsoon season. They were so delicate—and expensive—that they were sold in baskets, heaped into little piles. Their texture was smooth and satiny, not unlike that of the fresh straw mushrooms I have since eaten, but only in the Far East.
My aunt Mainji, with her large protruding teeth, knew how to cook them to perfection. She always said, “There is nothing to it.” There must have been something to it, because even my mother's khumbi were not quite like hers.
Mainji would take off her shoes, step into the kitchen, and squat on the floor in front of a brazier, blowing on the charcoal until it glowed to her liking. A pot would go on top of the coal, some oil next, and the cooking began. The mushrooms took but ten minutes and seemed to require only cumin, coriander, turmeric, and chili powder, but in some magical proportion that she alone had mastered. She prepared one dish after another. There was meat—all the men in her family required it, just as those in ours did—and several seasonal vegetables, each one more delicious than the last, tiny stuffed bitter gourds, okra with dried green mango, green chickpeas cooked in a pilaf, and pumpkin cooked with fennel seeds.
The pièce de résistance, for me at any rate, was the mushrooms. But would I get to eat any? Lunch was served quite late, and the men were always served first. Striped dhurries were spread out on a shady end of the courtyard, topped with a fresh white sheet. The men took off their shoes and sat down in a circle. The women served them, placing all the food in the center.
I would watch the mushrooms disappear, wondering if there would be any left for us. As the men served themselves generously, I would hold my breath. When it was our turn to eat, there were fewer mushrooms and more sauce. By that time I hardly cared. The sauce was delicious, too. I scooped it up with bits of my poori and just devoured it.
After lunch, some grown-ups napped; others sat in groups and talked. My sister and I went up and down the stairs, in and out of all the rooms, breaking off and eating a leaf of holy basil (tulsi) whenever we passed the plant near the prayer room.
For tea, Mainji sent out for some roasted white sweet potatoes (shakarkandi), some star fruit (kumruq), and some roasted water chestnuts (singharas). These she made into a spicy chaat to serve with our sweet, milky tea. Then it was time to leave. My mother gathered up her needlework, freshened up, and changed back into her silks. Attachee case and handbag in hand, she walked out of her family portals, and we followed. We always returned a different way, partly because of where the car could park and partly because my mother still had some unfinished business in the Tinsel Bazaar (Kinari Bazaar) and in Dariba, the Street of Jewelers. In the first she picked up spice mixes like chaat masala from a specialty stall that has existed in the same spot for all of my life, and in the latter she checked on pieces of jewelry that she always seemed to have on order, bangles, rings, and necklaces. We made our last stop right at the end of Dariba, just where it met the main street, Chandni Chowk. This was at the shop that sold jalebis, the squiggly, pretzel-like sweets filled with syrup. We liked them hot and crisp, straight out of the wok, and freshly dunked in syrup. The jalebis would be served to us on a leaf, which we would carry to our car. Our sticky hands and sticky mouths would be quite busy throughout the journey home.
