Aita’s (my father’s mother’s) house was known in the neighbourhood as ‘the house with the round-shaped kids.’ Aita had ten children and most of them had two kids each—if you have done the math, you know that’s a household of around fifty people all congregating every single year dutifully during Bihu and Durga Puja in Aita’s house in Mongoldoi, a small town in Assam.
It’s a good thing that Aita’s house was spacious with eleven rooms arranged around a square-shaped courtyard. Nearly every person in my family occupies significant amount of volume; hence we need space. And no, we don’t blame genetics for the roly-polyness of our household. Aita has single-handedly ensured that all her sons and grandkids are well-endowed in the body size department because somewhere along the line, my family espoused this philosophy that high calories = high energy = smart brains. I am not sure of the logical connection here, but that’s how it is.
At Aita’s house, we ate six meals in Rujuta Diwerker style, the only difference being each meal was around 500 calories each. Just to give you an idea, between breakfast and dinner, Aita would give us a mid-morning meal at 11AM consisting of rice, dollops of ghee and boiled eggs. She believed that we might get hungry if lunch was served late and she could not tolerate the idea of her grandchildren going hungry, for even a minute. She was like Rani Lakshmibai gallantly protecting her kingdom with her ladle and kadhai from the scourge of mid-morning hunger pangs. The reason lunch took so long to cook was because it consisted of rice, dal, 2 kinds of fried vegetables, fish fry, 1 greens, 2 kinds of subzis, 2 kinds of fish and one chicken or mutton curry or both—basically enough to feed a battalion of Rani Lakshmibai’s army.
(Even today, when I try to lose weight and I am killing myself with some random diet and doing Tabatha and HIIT and pilates, and yet my scale doesn’t budge, I know for sure that it’s probably because my body is still burning the tens of thousands of calories I consumed at Aita’s house thirty years ago.)
Every meal was a production, and the strangest thing when I look back is it seemed normal to us. I have this vivid memory of my brother and my cousin getting into a “Who can eat more” competition during lunch. They took breaks during the meal, went for a walk and came back to the dining table to eat another round again. After the meal, they both lay on separate beds, groaning and moaning because they had eaten too much and were having trouble moving.
My mother was angry at my brother for overeating and scolded him, “If you eat like this, no girl will marry you!”
That thought must have been disturbing enough for him to stop moaning. He raised his head slightly and asked, “Why?”
“Who will marry a Kumbhakaran?,” my mother retorted.
My cousin, who was on the adjoining bed took a break from moaning to add helpfully, “Borma (Tayiji), Kumbhakaran was famous for sleeping, not eating.”
My mother coolly replied, “He was a rakshas, like you both. Not much difference.” Then she gave the two speechless boys a Pudin Hara each and walked away.
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As if the meals themselves weren’t enough, Aita’s house would be overflowing with home-made snacks. Fifteen days before Bihu, she would invite some ladies from the village to her house to make snacks. They made laddoos (with til, coconut, muri, chivda and copious amounts of jaggery), pithas ( crispy crepes made of rice flour stuffed with sweetened coconut or til paste) and savory snacks like nimki ( similar to the North Indian matthi, but triangle-shaped, dotted with kalonji/nigella seeds).
Making these snacks was a community event—all of Aita’s friends would sit near the mud stove in our mud kitchen (that was outdoors separate from the main kitchen), drink endless cups of tea, while they gossiped and laughed and made the snacks in an efficient production line.
Once they were done, Aita packed containers of the snacks for the ladies to take to their respective homes. Then she would pack smaller packets for all the neighbours. The rest of the snacks were stored in old Dalda or Horlicks containers to be consumed by the family over infinite cups of tea. She would then send me and my cousins to go door to door distributing the freshly made snacks to the neighbours.
I loved going for snack-delivery in the neighbourhood, because the neighbours invariably gave us something to eat—some gave kaju barfi, some gave rasgulla and cream, some gave boondi laddoo—my sweet tooth couldn’t be happier. We would come back from the delivery route with a terrible sugar rush, cause a lot of mayhem in the house and Aita would assume that we need to be fed so that we can calm down. It was an endless cycle of eating, feeling too full, and then eating some more.
It was also a yearly ritual for Aita to make pickles and jams. Every year she made industrial quantities of mango pickle, chilli-mustard pickle, lemon pickle and kasundi (its like a mustard sauce). My aunts would chop mounds of chillies and mangoes. Huge quantities of mustard would be pounded with a giant stone mortar and pestle. Once the ingredients were prepped, the pickles were poured into large stainless steel vessels and they were left out in the courtyard so they could dry.
My roly-poly cousins also played in the courtyard. My brother and I were the eldest and most of them were much younger than us (all around 3-6 years old), though there wasn’t much age gap between them. So they were like a gang of small, cute, rounded bandits running around as fast as their chubby legs could carry them. Usually after lunch, all the adults took an afternoon siesta or watched TV while the small cousins were left to their own devices.
On this particularly lazy summer afternoon, Rinku, my cousin came into Aita’s room breathlessly. Aita’s room has three beds, and Rinku’s mother was lying on one of them. He quietly tiptoed to her and whispered something in her ear. She shot up as if she got an electric shock and said, “WHAT? WHAT DID YOU SAY?” She was so loud that everyone in that room and the adjoining room also woke up.
Rinku looked at the floor and said in a quiet whisper, “Pinku peed in Aita’s pickle.” You should have seen my khuri (chachi) that afternoon. First, she whacked Rinku on the bum for no fault of his. I guess she was too livid to know what she was doing. Then she took a stick and she went running to beat the living daylights out of Pinku, and Aita was running after her, and my brother and I were running after Aita, and Rinku and was running after all of us, with his sore bum and all.
Aita, who just couldn’t bear to see any of her grandchildren being beaten, even if he had just done the unthinkable, stopped khuri. “Come on, Manjula, he is only four years old. He didn’t know what he was doing.” Meanwhile, the other cousins got rounded up and the older ones got a round of scolding for not keeping an eye on the younger ones. Rinku finally got due credit from everyone for informing us in time and averting a major mishap—otherwise our household and all those in Aita’s neighbourhood would be consuming a rather unique kind of mango pickle that year. That was the momentous year in which Aita threw away fifteen kilos of mango pickle into the garbage bin and Pinku went down in the annals of our family-history as ‘Pinku who Peed on the Pickle.’
***THE END***
Epilogue: Currently, Pinku (of course I changed his name. Do you want him to kill me?!?) has rippling muscles and many ladies falling for him, sings beautifully and is studying to become a dentist. The rest of my cousins have more or less grown out of their circular shapes, though they all retain their passion for food. Three of them (including me) have food pages on Instagram and another one has a YouTube Food channel. Aita must be proud, wherever she is. Whenever I look at the mirror and fret about the amount of weight I need to lose, I also comfort myself with the thought that Aita would be really sad if I became too skinny. So, I think I have to maintain my well-upholstered self— at least, for Aita’s sake.
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Dear Reader, I am from Assam, so Aita is grandma in Assamese. I hope you enjoyed reading the story. Please drop a comment, if you did. I love hearing from you–it makes my writing that much more meaningful! ❤️
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