In our big and bustling household, there was always someone cooking in the kitchen and always someone eating – no one ever left without eating. As the wife of the eldest son in my father’s family, Ma had a lot of responsibilities, including cooking. I vividly remember the taste of Ma’s special treats. Ma was famous for the delicious nasta or snacks and desserts she made. She had learned how to make these fancy treats in her childhood home of Mia Bari, so many of her recipes were unique, and no one else in our village could make them like her.
Her morobba, or fruit candies, were legendary. Ma made morobba with the sour bel (wood-apple) fruit, which is the size of a grapefruit and has a hard shell that must be cracked open to reveal the pungent orange soft center. I loved her delicate morobba of chal kumra, a huge white gourd or pumpkin that grew on the roofs of our homes. Her papaya morobba had a beautiful pinkish orange color, and her morobba of ripe cucumber was a pale gold.
She also made a scrumptious sweet and sour morobba with green mango. She would grind coconut and make narkel borfi, a type of shandesh or fudge. Ma also made a delicious flan or caramel custard that we called “pudding.” Her dudh lau – a kind of rice pudding made with finely grated squash instead of rice – was incredible. She made all these treats with various locally available seasonal fruits and vegetables and would store them for several months. We had no electricity or refrigeration, so morobba would extend the life of our local harvest. She would store all these treats buried in muri or homemade puffed rice inside large old mustard oil tins. When the mustard oil was finished, we would save the tin con- tainer and take it to the market, where they would cut it in the middle and add a lid so that it could be used as a storage vessel.
Wintertime had a special magic for me because of Ma’s pithas. Pithas are a seasonal dessert or breakfast food made with ingre- dients such as milk, gur, sugar, coconut, flour, and rice flour. Ma knew how to make at least two dozen varieties of special pithas. One of her unique recipes was taler bhapa pitha. Tal is a fruit that looks a bit like a black coconut and grows on extremely tall palms. When you open the tal fruit, there are pulpy yellowish aromatic sections inside. Ma would extract this tal fruit, pulp it, and mix it with rice flour, coconut, and gur. She would let this mixture ferment overnight. The next morning, she would boil water in a narrow pot until it was steaming. Then she would cover the top of the pot with a tightly wrapped piece of cotton cloth and put a mound of the fermented tal mixture on it. The steam would cook this mixture into a fluffy yellow cake. It would melt in your mouth, and the flavor was divine.
My mother is the only person I knew who could make this delightful dish. With the same fermented batter, she also made long skinny lathi pitha (“stick” pitha) on banana leaves that she would cook directly on a tawa or flat pan on our outdoor wood-fired clay stoves. Cooking was mostly done outdoors in these stoves, basically a hole in the ground for the wood fire with a beautiful handmade three-legged clay form on top to hold the pots.
In the summer, we would have so many mangoes on our trees that we could not finish them. Ma would harvest and pulp the extra mangoes to make aam shotto, or dried mango fruit roll. This was an elaborate process. The mango would be peeled and pulped and mixed with a little gur and salt. Then it would be poured out on the leaf patis she made. The mango mixture would dry into a leathery dark brown thin layer. Ma would add more layers of mango pulp each day until it got around a quarter- inch thick. When it was all dry, she would carefully roll up the aam shotto, which would have the imprint of her patis. Her aam shotto was so pungent and flavorful and just barely sweet. Even after we moved away from Katakhali, she would send us her special aam shotto. My daughters were particularly fond of it.
My mother had seven children in total, all of us born at home in Munshi Bari with the help of my Dadi, who was a renowned midwife. I was my parents’ first child. I was born on 14 March 1938, when my mother was fifteen or sixteen. Most Bengalis do not know their exact birthdates, but we know mine because Dada wrote it down in his Koran. My mother had four daughters in a row – myself, Fatema, Lutfa, and Runu – before she had my two brothers. At that time, a woman had to bear sons to have value, and a mother was usually known by the name of her first son. However, it took so many years for Ma to bear a son that she became known by my name, her first-born daughter. Finally, around 1951 she had a son, my brother Taslim, followed by another daughter, Lina, and another son, Mahim, who was tragi- cally killed in a cyclone. To this day, my mother is known in Katakhali as “Noorjahaner Ma,” and I am known as Noorjahan’s Ma’s Noorjahan.
As long as my father was alive, my mother never called our household her own. She always thought proudly of her father’s house, Mia Bari, as her home. The hope with which my Nana had married my mother to my father was not fulfilled. Ma felt she belonged to an aristocratic lineage, but in the eyes of her in-laws, she had neither looks nor talent, only pride. Ma held her head high and never bent it for anyone.
When I was small, I thought Ma was always sad. Her two big doe-like eyes seemed to be brimming with tears. Ma had thick black bushy hair. I thought she was very beautiful, but she was considered average by others. In our house in Katakhali, I rarely saw my mother smile.
Excerpted with permission from Daughter of the Agunmukha: A Bangla Life, Noorjahan Bose, translated from the Bengali by Rebecca Whittington, Speaking Tiger Books.
