Tuesday, June 8, 2021

HIBERNATING HIBISCUS

  When I was little , we went home every year in the summer holidays to Madras as it was known then, and lived in my maternal grandfather's house. Holidays at his home meant immersing ourselves in the patterns of grandparental lives. Thatha had retired  and Paati was done with raising four living daughters and two sons , and now kept house amicably, cooking us all manner of delicious food, regaling us with stories, and an occasional game of chess.

 A variety of  chores  was distributed amongst the younger grandchildren. Paati's daughters , the two or three who came to live with her in the summertime , assisted her in the processes of cutting, chopping and grinding for elaborate  daily meals, to feed  around nine grandchildren and  seven adults,  three times a day.   I accompanied my grandfather on his early morning round of flower collection. When the chandini growing at the front of the house had not flowered,, there would be no flowers for the day's elaborate pooja. Then grandfather and I would set off, very early in the morning, to pluck flowers from the neighbouring stock,  the overhanging closed umbrella  shaped hibiscus or the kachnar, occasionally even the yellow arali, and bring them back in a lovely cane container, that  held arrows at some point in its evolution before it became a receptacle for fresh flowers. Sometimes, albeit infrequently, we brought home  from the vilva tree, three leaves banded together,  that  grandfather declared were sacred and  special to Shiva, the forester, who was accepting of dried leaf offerings. We plucked  flowers from the houses of neighbors from whom grandfather had taken  prior permission: These  neighbors were friends   he had made over  many years. Perhaps they were happy that flowers from their front yard were being offered to the gods, and our flower picking  adventures remained amicable. The betel leaves, also offered to the gods were bought in the evening from a small flower shop nearby.

 By the time I grew up, a young lad on a cycle dropped off a bundle of red rose petals along with a fresh set of betel leaves every evening. Grandma stored these away since they were consumed only after they were offered to the gods. 

 

Decades later, after I had filled my home with ornamental plants and succulents, and then expanded the green cover to the front of the house, I rescued two hibiscus bushes , one from a construction site where an old house was being torn down and  the other from a friend who was giving away surplus plants. The only ground left  for the hibiscus shrubs was behind my home, in the service lane which received abundant sunlight. Divesting them of their pots, I planted the small shrubs to flank both sides of the back door.  A bougainvillea at the head of the lane provided a pink and green canopy and  a thick curtain and the hibiscus are now  ten feet tall. Although I sighted buds, I rarely ever  saw the flowers. 

All this changed during the days of lockdown because  preparing for lectures and cooking  urgent meals in coordination with a  different life outside the house; was now replaced with pottering around the house in the early morning to  new rhythms that  demanded being rooted to the house   I noticed from an upper floor,   numerous women who  never introduced themselves,  routinely gathering  flowers every morning.  The hibiscus is a prayer worthy flower, everywhere in India,  flamboyant and noticeable, so my plants was routinely stripped of their flowers on a first-comer basis. 


 On one rare occasion, I stepped out into the service lane and saw both bushes in flower, and captured this  magical moment on camera.  Manju who has resumed helping  me with housework in the mornings has now declared war on the  foragers of flowers. In an earlier time,  Manju  used to live and work on her ancestral farm in Pashchim Banga. When she comes in to work, she brings in all the flowers that she can see. Of late there is an efflorescence of  hibiscus   inside  my home. I do not have the courage to challenge  assumptions  that  involve an  omnipresent God   who cannot  view flowers in the bush, or to rebut the argument that flowers in bloom cannot  bring joy to passersby  while retaining their own  leafy addresses. For now, Manju has taken this matter out of my hands, with her morning collection.


 




Friday, February 26, 2021

                     All In A Morning's Work

 I stepped out into the street today, armed with my mask to buy a small crinkled cantaloupe from  the fruit vendor. Another vendor cycled by slowly and I noticed that he had a stack of beautifully carved stones that are  amazing kitchen equipment requiring zero maintenance for upto thirty years.

I stopped him and we began a masked conversation, wherein I admired the chiselling he had done on the stones. Each stone slab  was  exquisite and a finished art work, reminding me  after a long long time that  everyday objects  could be  both functional and aesthetic, and add to working pleasure  every time they were put to  use. I use a silbatta (or ammi kallu as we call it in South India)  in my kitchen and it belonged to my mother-in-law. She would often use it to rustle up a small handful of dry or wet chutneys when the big and small mixies were not required or unusable in the event of a power cut. Now it sits on a ledge outside my kitchen, and it is a pleasant spot to grind and crush small spices and leaves, and little bits of rock salt when I cook.

 Silbaatas, other than being effective kitchen assistants could generate mirth and raise a laugh as I discovered when my daughter came home  from primary school with  news about an ohjective test on household objects and what they were made of. "Amma,what is a silbatta?," she had queried and I had pointed to the ammi kallu. "Oh! she replied, her face falling, "I didn't know this is called a silbatta and is made of stone. In the test at school I crossed out stone and circled paper as the correct answer." Amused at the idea of the  paper silbatta  I explained that  the grinding stone was named differently in different languages, wondering if it was solely up to mothers and language teachers to establish links and connections between languages. Shouldn't teachers of other disciplines also endeavour to do the same?

This year, it will be  thirty years since my mother -in -law passed away, but her silbatta continues to be one of the workhorses in my kitchen, because the texture of  crushed ingredients  in chutneys that silbatta -grinding produces followed by the effortless   wash  with water cleaning -up -after remains unparalleled. Over time, my silbatta has been worn down to smooth stone so I asked the iterant vendor if he could re-chisel my silbatta for me. He agreed and I brought it out  from its perch in my backyard to the front door where Bablu settled down to work his craft. A couple of neighbours also brought out their  old silbattas for chiselling.

Twenty minutes later, here below  is  my   new  Bablu -chiselled-silbatta., with its personal stone accessory. I  took an ordinary photo and then staged the next photo, on a red cushion.

  Kavita who comes in to help with  kitchen work  has been wanting a silbatta and I had promised to pick up a new one  for her, reluctant to part with mine. My sister confirmed that she too required a small  table top silbatta, although she hosts mom's  granite ammi  on her  terrace. Here are  two new guests, handchiselled  by Bablu, enroute to their new homes.




 After a long, grim winter,   the weather seems right and the possibility of connecting to the quiet pleasures of the quotidian have begun to surface. With many thanks to Bablu , here is looking forward to summery buttermilk  times, redolent  with the flavours of   fresh currypatta and green chillies,   silbatta -crushed with rock salt and hing!