Sunday Meal

A few days ago when I was on my way to my grandmother’s house, a nameless whiff came out of somebody’s kitchen window and passed by me through the air. It caught me off-guard, and I was reminded of a particular Sunday meal from my childhood. Sundays were my favourite in the whole week. Growing up in a Bengali household, Sundays were always meant for something that tasted different, something that touched upon a platter out of the ordinary weekly tastes of fish and rice. Unlike other days, Sunday mornings were usually slow and lazy with no alarm clocks or the pool car honks to wake to. It was customary to wake up yawning at nine to grinding sounds of the shil nora to legitimately feel like Sunday had arrived. Mixer grinders had still not been fashionable in our kitchen, and the shil nora’s grinding was the only tolerable sound that could motivate me to get out of bed. 

Growing up I had seen many cooks move in and out of our kitchen. Both my parents being working people had to abide by the changing punctualities of different cooks while I had to abide by their changing taste buds. Every cook left behind their own mark, sometimes by adding too many green chilies in the maachher jhol, sometimes over-boiling the rice, sometimes even under-boiling it, and sometimes by making the best egg curry I had ever tasted in my life. The last mark was left by my ranna’r dida, something I would call the one cook who stayed throughout my growing years. 

Ranna’r dida would literally translate into “the cooking grandmother”. She was an old lady with a tied-up bun and a perpetually annoyed face. She lived as our tenant next door and was our permanent cook for the most part of my teenage years. She introduced to us some excessively spicy recipes from her village home in Murshidabad while my mother introduced her to moderate the spice content while keeping all the recipes same. My mother, despite having office all day, had always been attentive to what was being cooked and how it was being cooked. She had always been particular about strategic cooking so that we had every vegetable combination on our plates every week. She hated it when the vegetables were not washed, the sink was left unclean, and most importantly, when cooking was more of a rushed misadventure than a slow taste-making journey. I believe she received all these habitual culinary strictness from her mother, my grandmother, but only in ways that exceeded her. 

Anyhow on Sundays, kitchen strategies and gourmet skills usually took a backseat. A warm laze enveloped the kitchen floor, the sink, and the utensils. At about ten, a big round plate of luchis was placed on the dining table. Our dining table was adjacent to the small kitchen space, conveniently close to check whether the alur torkari was ready. Many people would like to call this a typical Sunday version of puri-sabzi but a Bengali household can never get enough of the name “luchi-torkari” simply because of the steaming image that pops up with it. The fat, round luchis seemed like they could create an endless pit in my stomach and there was always space for one more. Every time, I would have the last one saved to eat with some sugar. My father believed no Sunday breakfast of luchi-torkari could ever end without some dessert. I believed he was right. 

Besides enjoying the late mornings and a very exciting breakfast, Sunday mornings were special for my art class. My art school was just about a few metres from my home. It is strange to think that I don’t remember a single Sunday from my childhood when I didn’t have art class. I usually stayed there for a few hours and came back home just in time for lunch. It wasn’t unusual for everyone to associate Sunday lunch with some extraordinary, very special meal, and for my very dear art teacher, it was nothing different. When it was time to go home, he would call me close and ask me whispering, “Are you having mutton today?” My answers would mostly be a shy yes because even at the age of eight or ten, I knew that “Robibarer ranna” or Sunday lunch, could only mean mutton curry. 

When my father brought me home from art class, I could smell the aroma from the far end of the alley and quicken my pace. Breathlessly, I would even leave a prayer or two to thank God for letting Sunday come by so quickly. It wasn’t a very rich, gravy style of mutton curry that my mother loved to make, although, a special lunch would usually mean so. The dish was in fact quite the opposite. It had the least bit of curry but was more of a soupy kind for which we called it mutton jhol and not mutton curry. It was light, with a colour of reddish yellow, and had specks of dark-red oil floating atop. Here and there would be pieces of some brown caramelized onions that could easily pass as a whole category of dish themselves. The spices were mostly mild but ranna’r dida would sometimes add a few sliced-up green chilies to leave a fiery aftertaste. It might have left my parents drooling in their mouths but my drools were more from my nose and eyes than my mouth. The mutton pieces, as I remember, were the perfect balance of both fat and fiber, and my father ensured to bring them from the only shop in our area that sold such. They would open up delicately bit by bit, and simply dissolve in the mouth just in seconds. When my mother served the jhol on top of the steaming boiled rice, I could barely stop gulping. “Just two pieces”, I’d say, “and aloo.” The aloo was of course the best part about the entire dish, both for me and my mother. She said that mutton without aloo is no meal for a Sunday. She took special care to never leave them hard and chewy. So, every time I took a bite, there would first come a thin fried layer of brown crust which would then give way to the softest potato mash that melted completely in my mouth. After every last bit of the mutton and the rice was over, I would still have a half-eaten piece of aloo saved for the last bite. I learned this from my Maa who would never leave a clean plate without a last piece of aloo. In the end, she would place that last potato crumb in her mouth and close her eyes. For a few seconds, it would seem like her world had paused. I believe it was her own little part of Sunday leisure, and I would follow her religiously