Of Chai, Chaklis, Chuttas, Chulas and Catapults

Well, I’m on a temporary hiatus from my diet. So, these days, with a friendly chill in the morning air, instead of my coffee, I make adrak chai – hot, milky, sweet! And hot, milky, sweet chai can’t be had by itself. I need something namkeen with it. While anything salty will do, for the past two days it’s been chaklis. Those lovely, crispy, crunchy, deep fried, thick, jalebi-like things made of various stuff, like rice flour or besan – delicious! For one who usually expounds the virtues of healthy living and healthy eating, not exactly a healthy diet you would say. And I would agree. But the winter season just begs for steaming hot sweet chai and lovely, crispy, crunchy, deep fried things for the soul. And my soul succumbs to the call of the season, so to speak.

These days I buy my chaklis from the local grocer’s. Thankfully, they are not mass-produced in food factories. Not yet anyway, as far as I know. They are homemade by enterprising housewives, usually. So they retain their special homey taste and touch, which factory produced eats never do. How soulless the Lay’s potato chips are that flood the shelves of our shops these days! No matter what fancy flavours they come in, they simply cannot match our homemade munchies.

But, back when we were kids, when we were home for the winter holidays – we got about a month off – winter eats like chaklis, nimkis, samosas, kachodis were all homemade affairs, as far as namkeens went. As for the sweet stuff, my mother was an expert in besan laddoos, gulab jamuns, narkol-er naru (coconut laddoos), pithés and the like. Sometimes she would get the local mithaivala to come home and make soan-papdis and jalebis and various kinds of barfis and pedas. Sometimes she would rope in Ismael, who cooked for parties at the club, to make his crispy-outside-melt-in-your-mouth-inside scrumptious koftas. My mother, like most doting moms, loved stuffing us with food when we were at home. Hence, she used to take it upon herself to get into these chakli-nimki-samosa-kachodi-laddoo-narloler naru-pithé making projects with gusto. For, being a mom, she knew that us boarding school, starved-for-home-made-food, greedy, growing kids, we needed abundant amounts of mom’s love and chaklis to satiate ourselves. So, she didn’t just make ten or twelve, say, for the day. When you made chaklis or nimkis or jalebis for kids home for the hols, you didn’t think in numbers, but in kgs!

So, out would come the chula from the coal shed behind the house. Ah, those chulas, how I miss them! Cooking on a gas stove may be more convenient, less messy, but is devoid of the earthy romance of a smoking, smouldering chula. Besides, since we lived in one of the richest coal belts in the country, where my father worked, those two or three feet high, cylindrical metal bucket like things with round perforations all over them, were ubiquitous, and used by us whenever we cooked out in the courtyard. In the kitchen, where the regular meals were cooked, was ensconced this huge cast iron stove-cum-oven – into which a small kid could huddle and hide when she played hide-and-seek with her friends, or was just being difficult with her parents. This burned like a furnace when fired up and could take anything like 2-3 hours to fire up. But it also turned the kitchen into an oven, hence, when my mother needed to cook for prolonged periods of time, she liked using the chula out in the courtyard.

Now, lighting a fire in a chula is tricky business. Best left to the expert experience and patience of Rajam, my mother’s handyman, who was a part of our family since my memory goes back. Short and dark, with a wizened face set with eyes that had the wisdom of the ages, crinkled at the corners, with a permanent grin, baring yellowing crooked teeth with black gaps in them. Eyes, which got swimmy, as his tongue got slurry, when he had his kallu (whitish homemade liquor made from the sap of the palm tree), which he swigged straight from the bottle in the evenings, squatting on the small veranda of the servant’s quarters behind our house. Swatting flies, smoking his chutta (raw green tobacco leaf rolled into a funnel like shape, which chokes and tears the skin of your throat and lungs and makes you cough and cough until tears pour from your eyes – we kids would cajole drags off Rajam after he got too drunk to resist our insistent efforts), jawing with his buddies – the servants from the neighbouring houses who would drop by after work.

Rajam was an expert with the chula, amongst other things. The chula would be cleaned first, then filled up with well ordered layers of coal, which had to be broken first into fist sized pieces first with a small machete-like implement. Then the topmost layer of coal would be interspersed with pieces of firewood stuck into it. The idea being, that you lit the firewood – which when lit would fill the whole place with choking smoke – which would ignite the coal. The coal then belched forth more choking, sooty smoke, until it settled down into a smouldering orange glow with wisps of blue flames darting from it. That was when the chula was ready for cooking on. All of which Rajam accomplished silently with efficient ease, his chutta stuck in the corner of his mouth spewing gusts of acrid smoke, his eyes screwed into narrow slits, occasionally spitting out long streams of brown juices from the wad of tobacco tucked in a lump in his cheek. That’s what he always smelt of – chutta, kallu and chula.

While Rajam was the handyman, Rayamallu was the cook my mother always had to help her in the kitchen. My mother loved cooking, especially our Bengali dishes which she felt Rayamallu couldn’t quite get, so he usually just helped with the chopping of stuff and the grinding of masalas on the big grinding stone in one corner of the kitchen. (Somehow the masalas I grind in my mixer-grinder just don’t have the fulsome flavour that masalas ground on the grinding stone used to have.) Rayamallu was also the chatty one, so my mother would have long conversations with him in the kitchen about his village, his wife, his mother-in-law and so on. Lithe and wheat skinned, Rayamallu had a pretty and shy wife. When they were newly married, he would bring her home sometimes to meet us. She didn’t talk much, just sat with the pallu of her sari drawn half way down her face, while she fingered the thick silver anklets and toe-rings on her feet, her colourful glass bangles making soft chink-chink sounds. When my mother would ask her something, she would just smile shyly and glance at Rayamallu to answer for her.

Rayamallu also taught us how to make catapults from Y shaped thick sticks which he broke off from the trees, and whittled and smoothened with a dull knife, and strung strips of black rubber cut from old tire tubes. They were very efficient for bringing down the bunches of small sweet mangoes that grew in our Parsee neighbour’s, Mrs Talati’s, house. Not because we didn’t have mangoes in ours, it just seemed a fun thing to do. She always came out yelling, clutching her flowery blue housecoat to her chest, her short hair tight in pink curlers, angrily brandishing a feathery duster or anything else she had handy.

And later, at the club, her hair properly puffed up in curls now (very Queen Elizabethish), wearing a neat, well-cut western dress, a string of pearls around her powdered neck, high heeled pointed shoes on her feet, she would complain cantankerously to my mother, her accusing eyes peering over the rim of her specs -- “Mrs Chakraberty, Rita and Sumit have been breaking mangoes again from my garden, you must discipline them, no? -- My Persis and Khushroo never do such things -- I teach them not to do naughty things, no?” My mother, clad in her usual crisp Bengal handloom saree, her waist length black hair tied in a bun on her nape, would look guilty and promise to discipline us. Later, we would get a scolding – “See how good Persis and Khushroo are!” Whose effect my father always spoilt a little when he would choose that moment to recount how he and his brothers would sneak into their neighbour’s back garden to steal the guavas and the tamarinds that grew there. My mother would flash angry eyes at him and scold him for spoiling us.

Persis and Khushroo were major pains for us. They were so goody-goody. Unlike us scamps who always had dirt on our clothes, my frock usually ripped in places because I liked climbing trees and squeezing through barbed fences to get to forbidden places. Persis and Khushroo always looked like they had just stepped out from their dressing room – clothes neat, hair in place. No chula cooking ever sooted their faces or clothes. Whenever we got into any trouble, their exemplary behaviour would always be flung at us -- “Why can’t you be like Persis and Khushroo?”

While the chula was being fired up, in the meanwhile, my mother would be busy kneading the flour for the chaklis or samosas or nimkis, adding the masalas, which Rayamallu ground fresh from whole spices on the grinding stone which went rumble-rumble as he squatted over it, sweating and rocking back and forth, wiping his brow every now and then. The dough shaped in chaklis or samosas or nimkis, placed on a big brass plate, would then be taken out and Rayamallu, with Rajam lending a hand, and my mother, sitting on low stools, would begin the frying in the large, black iron kadai, filled with smoking hot oil. As the fries bubbled and sputtered, constantly stirred with a perforated ladle, they would be lifted out, dripping with oil, once browned and done, and put steaming and aromatic in plates. We kids would then rush in, sweaty and sooty from playing nearby, to grab them fresh and hot, biting eagerly into the rich savoury taste of childhood – so fleeting.

(My sister, who is 15 years younger than me, missed that part of our childhood lives, hence is missing from this story.)

-by Rita Putatunda