The Kolkata Diaries: Potol and Other Tales of The Kitchen
I made sure to leave my recipebooks behind when we moved to Kolkata. Stashed them away in a forgettable corner of our Delhi house (at the back end of our dog’s biscuit drawer), so that they didn’t accidentally get packed into my burgeoning bag as a last-minute Just In Case impulse. After my brief Hyderabad culinary adventure, I know only too well that cooking easily becomes my insulation tape from the world; the kitchen my perfect runaway corner of steam and sweat that nobody prefers to chase me into.
No, I decided. This time, I want to face a new city head-on. I want to do other creative things: those things that remain scrawled as bullet-point wishlists on the last pages of my To Do diaries. Paint. Write. Grow a garden. Explore a city on foot. Call my at-home aunts. Perhaps also shoot off that email to longlost friends who’ve given up on my can’t-keep-in-touch ways. A shiny new impossible me; bohemian, socially adept, when she’s not being sexily vagrant-like.
Of course, DNA interfered. All I did from the moment I dropped our bags on the floor of our Kolkata apartment, was turn first into my mother (maniacal hours spent fervently scrubbing everything in sight) and then my father (trudging home with dinosaur-sized grocery bags). Ironically, I realised, home eventually comes to mean exactly those things we hated about our homes when we were growing up; the invisible cloud of odours that assaulted when you trudged home at curfew hour; overboiled milk, coriander garnish, the ripened steam of a puffy moon-shaped phulka, the heavy tendrils emanating from a cooker-full of silky mutton, chased perhaps by a whiff of that undyingly pungent anti-cockroach spray.
Post discovery, I’ve taken to my culinary adventures with renewed insanity, sans guilt of uncoolness or the writerly dread of being predictable. Ask me what the Kolkata nightlife scene is, I give you zilch. But ask me what the bajaar-e-haat scene at Kolkata is, and I drown you in my verbal thesis (also silently award you a giant brownie point, all the while thinking, ‘curious person, this?’). If there’s something that makes me return to it like a drug, it’s the tiny universe of a bazaar. I feel silly little bubbles of excitement go phut-phut as I move through narrow lanes lined with knick-knacks (banana leaf plates and kulladh cutlery, among other things), and a catch-in-my-breath anticipation in those moments before panoramic views of plenitude open up --- glistening sunset tomato tints sitting pertly next to perfectly lined ridge gourds; mangoes the colour of molten sun, nestled in leaf-lined, couch-sized baskets; a dozen textures and patterns of green, lined in jhinge-saag-drumstick-parmal-banana-raw papaya combinations.
What must be the reverse equation of a village clod entering a swanky city for the first time? Pray tell, ‘cuz that's me. The sanitised, deprived supermarket shopper entering the Bengali haat-e bajaar - wide-eyed, speechless, ready to be robbed and bullied by clever sabziwallahs in their Bangla-drenched Hindi. In the first set of my visits, it meant being swept with confusing waves of elation-dejection, simply because I couldn’t bring myself to buy - if at all recognise, at times – the luscious curiosities on display. Some divine joke this, that in this season of my home chef duties, the vegetables in the market do not lend themselves to the regular everyday recipes I can cook with my eyes shut and eat with my brain on standby. Here, the vegetable markets are flooded with vegetables I never ate as a kid, mainly because no north Indian human being - least of all my very Punjabi mother - could cook them well. For instance, the Bengali staple: Potol. (Parmal, for those who prefer their vowels unstressed, and cannot speak, as my husband jokes, as if with two giant rasgullas stuffed into their mouths.) All these years, Potol had merely been an eccentric way describing the top entry from my Top 3 Don't Eat Ever Vegetables list - the waxy vegetable from hell, all seeds, no flavour. A living proof of vegetables' failed attempts at emulating the thickness and texture of candles, basically. The only place where they ever tasted good, were in my very Bengali father's memories, narrated ad nauseum to me, almost as a dare (“fry in mustard oil, spice with a bit of ____ and it’ll taste fantastic, sach mein!”).
It's at moments like the ones I've been having decades later - standing in a buzzing Park Circus bazaar, swamped by a sea of green gourd population, the air thick with shouts of 'Didi! Didi! Potol diye deben?' - that I regret not paying much attention to Papa's 'Ohooooo! Potol!' ecstatic chants (his voice reaching and shattering acceptable decibel levels in no time, then stretching and hanging the end syllables for maximum pleasure). I regret not making the effort to call what I thought was merely his bluff; I regret not making his instructions appear in the kadhai. Because if I had, not only would I have a detailed, methodical, foolproof recipe (like all recipes of my scientist father are) for my veggie-from-hell, but also perhaps because then I’d have a warmer, more slow-smile-inducing feeling when a vegetable vendor offered to weigh me some Potol. I won’t be stunned, repelled, flooded with memory, surprise, guilt instead; I won’t display usual instincts of turning away, eyes averted, quick shake of the head, low ‘nahinahi’ murmurs propelling towards the familiarity of baingan.
I found therapy though, wafting by on a stack-top in an uncle’s metal wire basket at Oxford Bookstore (the said baskets a custom-made feature only for the Kolkata outlet, am sure). In a stolen glance, the red book flashed at me; The Bengal Cookbook, it tempted. I pounced on a second copy on the bookshelf nearby, and dug in, only to be engulfed in that part-terror, part-respite feeling I often encounter only in books - when on the random flip of a casual read, an incomprehensible knot in my days and nights makes itself visible and ribbons open with relief. Nah, it’s not just because there are 8 different ways to cook Potol in here. It’s also because in here, are stories of the people who made these recipes happen, thus becoming entwined with them, in a mythical way almost. The ‘Hungry New Bride’ who conjured the pilaf called Bahu Khuda (literally, the bride’s hunger) when there weren’t enough leftovers from the family’s meal for her dinner; the nifty Bong woman-of-the-house who took one look at darkening, swelling clouds and decided that a pot of Khichudi must go on the boil, her last chance at stocking up on vegetables from the market pretty much swept off with impending rain. The ingenious widow Monama who found a way to give a fake deep smack of meat to the niramish phoolkopi; the Jethima ____ who found fame for a traditional payesh that hid her secret quickfix recipe trick. It makes me fancy that I am in some way part of this trajectory, this history in lower case; that I can put my father and me in this unnamed story, this unofficial list of Bengali food-loving cooks. Not chefs mind you, but people who cook because it allows them to ‘cook up’; to make longings, cravings and memories solid; to believe in the illusion of being whole; to know that there isn’t a pleasure more voyeuristic than watching someone close involuntarily their eyes after a taste of what you just served off the stove.
With that realisation today, maybe I will quit taking pleasure in being a food snob (‘poor eater’ my mum calls it), and take up my father on his phone-delivered list of strange Kolkata-peculiar objects that I can try eating. I did attempt ripe jackfruit and jaamrul after his endless exhortations though, mainly because mochaar and thor cleaning processes sounded rather daunting (anything that involves oiling hands must be for mechanics, no?), and perhaps moreso because I am too shy to ask the grinning sabziwallahs/ fishwallah in my faux Bengali about where exactly in that mountain of fruits is a Taal Koa or which one is really the Chittol maach.
As I eat my way through Papa’s recipe-universe, perhaps I will learn to trust other people’s memories, the way I trust fiction. There's still hope that I will open my fiercely-guarded private universe, and let some air in. Perhaps pigs will fly, and I will face the fear and revulsion hiding in my Top 3 Don't Eat Ever Vegetables list, even stop joking about how Pui just sounds like a pathetic attempt at sounding French. And maybe that moment will finally arrive, when as the skies tear up with theatrical effect and thunderous applause, I shall go up to that man sitting amidst a sea of greens in Park Circus bajaar, and ask him, my voice not quivering enough, “Eyta Pui shaak kauto daam?’
No, I decided. This time, I want to face a new city head-on. I want to do other creative things: those things that remain scrawled as bullet-point wishlists on the last pages of my To Do diaries. Paint. Write. Grow a garden. Explore a city on foot. Call my at-home aunts. Perhaps also shoot off that email to longlost friends who’ve given up on my can’t-keep-in-touch ways. A shiny new impossible me; bohemian, socially adept, when she’s not being sexily vagrant-like.
Of course, DNA interfered. All I did from the moment I dropped our bags on the floor of our Kolkata apartment, was turn first into my mother (maniacal hours spent fervently scrubbing everything in sight) and then my father (trudging home with dinosaur-sized grocery bags). Ironically, I realised, home eventually comes to mean exactly those things we hated about our homes when we were growing up; the invisible cloud of odours that assaulted when you trudged home at curfew hour; overboiled milk, coriander garnish, the ripened steam of a puffy moon-shaped phulka, the heavy tendrils emanating from a cooker-full of silky mutton, chased perhaps by a whiff of that undyingly pungent anti-cockroach spray.
Post discovery, I’ve taken to my culinary adventures with renewed insanity, sans guilt of uncoolness or the writerly dread of being predictable. Ask me what the Kolkata nightlife scene is, I give you zilch. But ask me what the bajaar-e-haat scene at Kolkata is, and I drown you in my verbal thesis (also silently award you a giant brownie point, all the while thinking, ‘curious person, this?’). If there’s something that makes me return to it like a drug, it’s the tiny universe of a bazaar. I feel silly little bubbles of excitement go phut-phut as I move through narrow lanes lined with knick-knacks (banana leaf plates and kulladh cutlery, among other things), and a catch-in-my-breath anticipation in those moments before panoramic views of plenitude open up --- glistening sunset tomato tints sitting pertly next to perfectly lined ridge gourds; mangoes the colour of molten sun, nestled in leaf-lined, couch-sized baskets; a dozen textures and patterns of green, lined in jhinge-saag-drumstick-parmal-banana-raw papaya combinations.
What must be the reverse equation of a village clod entering a swanky city for the first time? Pray tell, ‘cuz that's me. The sanitised, deprived supermarket shopper entering the Bengali haat-e bajaar - wide-eyed, speechless, ready to be robbed and bullied by clever sabziwallahs in their Bangla-drenched Hindi. In the first set of my visits, it meant being swept with confusing waves of elation-dejection, simply because I couldn’t bring myself to buy - if at all recognise, at times – the luscious curiosities on display. Some divine joke this, that in this season of my home chef duties, the vegetables in the market do not lend themselves to the regular everyday recipes I can cook with my eyes shut and eat with my brain on standby. Here, the vegetable markets are flooded with vegetables I never ate as a kid, mainly because no north Indian human being - least of all my very Punjabi mother - could cook them well. For instance, the Bengali staple: Potol. (Parmal, for those who prefer their vowels unstressed, and cannot speak, as my husband jokes, as if with two giant rasgullas stuffed into their mouths.) All these years, Potol had merely been an eccentric way describing the top entry from my Top 3 Don't Eat Ever Vegetables list - the waxy vegetable from hell, all seeds, no flavour. A living proof of vegetables' failed attempts at emulating the thickness and texture of candles, basically. The only place where they ever tasted good, were in my very Bengali father's memories, narrated ad nauseum to me, almost as a dare (“fry in mustard oil, spice with a bit of ____ and it’ll taste fantastic, sach mein!”).
It's at moments like the ones I've been having decades later - standing in a buzzing Park Circus bazaar, swamped by a sea of green gourd population, the air thick with shouts of 'Didi! Didi! Potol diye deben?' - that I regret not paying much attention to Papa's 'Ohooooo! Potol!' ecstatic chants (his voice reaching and shattering acceptable decibel levels in no time, then stretching and hanging the end syllables for maximum pleasure). I regret not making the effort to call what I thought was merely his bluff; I regret not making his instructions appear in the kadhai. Because if I had, not only would I have a detailed, methodical, foolproof recipe (like all recipes of my scientist father are) for my veggie-from-hell, but also perhaps because then I’d have a warmer, more slow-smile-inducing feeling when a vegetable vendor offered to weigh me some Potol. I won’t be stunned, repelled, flooded with memory, surprise, guilt instead; I won’t display usual instincts of turning away, eyes averted, quick shake of the head, low ‘nahinahi’ murmurs propelling towards the familiarity of baingan.
I found therapy though, wafting by on a stack-top in an uncle’s metal wire basket at Oxford Bookstore (the said baskets a custom-made feature only for the Kolkata outlet, am sure). In a stolen glance, the red book flashed at me; The Bengal Cookbook, it tempted. I pounced on a second copy on the bookshelf nearby, and dug in, only to be engulfed in that part-terror, part-respite feeling I often encounter only in books - when on the random flip of a casual read, an incomprehensible knot in my days and nights makes itself visible and ribbons open with relief. Nah, it’s not just because there are 8 different ways to cook Potol in here. It’s also because in here, are stories of the people who made these recipes happen, thus becoming entwined with them, in a mythical way almost. The ‘Hungry New Bride’ who conjured the pilaf called Bahu Khuda (literally, the bride’s hunger) when there weren’t enough leftovers from the family’s meal for her dinner; the nifty Bong woman-of-the-house who took one look at darkening, swelling clouds and decided that a pot of Khichudi must go on the boil, her last chance at stocking up on vegetables from the market pretty much swept off with impending rain. The ingenious widow Monama who found a way to give a fake deep smack of meat to the niramish phoolkopi; the Jethima ____ who found fame for a traditional payesh that hid her secret quickfix recipe trick. It makes me fancy that I am in some way part of this trajectory, this history in lower case; that I can put my father and me in this unnamed story, this unofficial list of Bengali food-loving cooks. Not chefs mind you, but people who cook because it allows them to ‘cook up’; to make longings, cravings and memories solid; to believe in the illusion of being whole; to know that there isn’t a pleasure more voyeuristic than watching someone close involuntarily their eyes after a taste of what you just served off the stove.
With that realisation today, maybe I will quit taking pleasure in being a food snob (‘poor eater’ my mum calls it), and take up my father on his phone-delivered list of strange Kolkata-peculiar objects that I can try eating. I did attempt ripe jackfruit and jaamrul after his endless exhortations though, mainly because mochaar and thor cleaning processes sounded rather daunting (anything that involves oiling hands must be for mechanics, no?), and perhaps moreso because I am too shy to ask the grinning sabziwallahs/ fishwallah in my faux Bengali about where exactly in that mountain of fruits is a Taal Koa or which one is really the Chittol maach.
As I eat my way through Papa’s recipe-universe, perhaps I will learn to trust other people’s memories, the way I trust fiction. There's still hope that I will open my fiercely-guarded private universe, and let some air in. Perhaps pigs will fly, and I will face the fear and revulsion hiding in my Top 3 Don't Eat Ever Vegetables list, even stop joking about how Pui just sounds like a pathetic attempt at sounding French. And maybe that moment will finally arrive, when as the skies tear up with theatrical effect and thunderous applause, I shall go up to that man sitting amidst a sea of greens in Park Circus bajaar, and ask him, my voice not quivering enough, “Eyta Pui shaak kauto daam?’
posted by Punky PJs @ 1:48 AM
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