Looking back half-a-century to the winters of the 1960s, what I remember beyond homework, exams and winter vacations is how the world of food around me changed with the seasons. With the inevitable consequences of the climatic patterns of the southern hemisphere and the migratory pattern of birds, new and exciting food options opened up in rhythmic cycles. And during the early decades of my childhood, visitors from Siberia dictated our main meals through the winter months.
Partisan as I may be to various members of the gourd family, from the month of September I started looking forward to the end of their long, summer reign. The appearance of water chestnuts was an unmistakable sign of more exciting times ahead. On days when a 15-mile drive from Lucknow could take you right into the heart of a village, freshly harvested water chestnuts were available all along the roads, next to the large ponds they had been harvested from, along the route to my grandparents’ homes. In those homes there would be fresh sugar cane to chew, fresh green gram to be pinched open off the bush which had been pulled right then out of the soil. In the evening the green gram would be roasted over open wood fires in which, buried deep in the embers, sweet potatoes would be roasting, to be eaten right there, beside the fire.
Back in the city, there were peanuts to be eaten in the warm sun with newspapers spread out to catch the debris. Freshly made translucent red guava jelly, in large transparent jars, is a colourful image in my childhood memories. A snacker’s delight, jelly was handy with bread, chapatti, rusk or biscuit, or just by the spoonful. The jelly, supposedly meant to last for the year, ran out in three months. Mealtimes overlapped with picnicking. Lunch was often eaten in the sun, and on very cold nights, plates could be carried closer to the angethi.
Fresh peas were welcome in all their forms. Turnip or beetroot with mutton and sakpaita (dal cooked with the seasonal herb bathwa) were house favourites. Towards the end of winter there woud be the oh-so succulent minced qeema, cooked with rasbharis (crane gooseberries), the bright orange berries adding a sweet and sour touch to the savoury meat. There were also the ever-present halwas—red and purple carrot halwas, pale yellow egg halwa, and fat round pindis made with ghee and sugar and different kinds of flours: golden wheat, besan or green moong. Gifts of these desserts were given and received—no household cooked delicacies only for themselves.
And then there was the omnipotent winter dessert, the rasawal. This was rice cooked overnight in cane juice and often enriched with raisins and other dry fruits. It was a laborious, back-breaking recipe because it required all-night attention—stirring the juice in a large pot over an open fire. Dark foam, which gathered as the dish cooked, had to be constantly removed to obtain the desired light colour in the finished dish. The rasawal was then cooled and filled into round red earthen pots and their covers were sealed with flour dough. The sealed vessel was placed on a straw ring to make it stable and a chord was tied around the neck to make a handle for carrying. The rasawal pots were then ready to be distributed to the households of a large number of deprived relatives now living in urban areas, longing for the taste of home. It would be a brave relative who would agree to carry the pots by train to other relatives in the city. This custom died naturally but after a few comic tragedies. Family lore is full of stories like when a pot of rasawal, while being transported by train, rolled over and cracked open, pouring out its gooey, sticky brown contents all over a crowded three-tier sleeper car.
However, there was one major winter novelty that has left some unusual memories and made the biggest impact on our immediate family: my parents, us four siblings, an aunt, cousins, and sundry other relatives in the extended family.
During the winter months there was the addition of a must-eat protein to our diets—the winged-game, the ducks and birds that my father was shooting every week. These had to be consumed by us, by invited guests, or by those privileged enough to receive gifts of freshly dead birds. For a few months a year, we regressed into the food habits of hunters.
Hunting was a passion for my father. Given the family’s feudal background, this wasn’t surprising. Yet my father was a city dweller with a city job, but with this one all-consuming indulgence that required feudal means, which he did not always have. As a younger man he had made his fair contribution to depleting the mammalian wildlife, having bagged his share of tigers, panthers, bears and crocodiles. I have memories of only the last big-game hunting trip that took him and his friends away for ten days. Vivid are the details of the preparations that had to be made for the trip, the whole household working overtime. I also remember the clear glass eyes of the large tiger that was the prize from this trip, when it came back from the taxidermist in Kanpur.
Permission to hunt big game had become hard to acquire and the logistics of such an exercise became increasingly difficult, particularly if it was one individual who took upon himself the job of organizing it. The one-day hunting trip was the only option left and my father indulged in this with vengeance for as long as he could. Winter birds from Europe and Central Asia flocked in abundance to the hundreds of jheels then spread across a 50-mile radius of Lucknow. This, rather than the terai of Nepal, became his new hunting ground. In the 1960s he tried to spend every free day that he had on these jheels. After all, how many clay pigeon shooting competitions could one compete in?
He collected around him a group of friends, younger contemporaries and often their relatives, who were happy to join these weekly adventures through the winter months. Some invitees did not own their own guns, and went along for the fun and the picnic. The group varied week to week, for there were many demands for invitations. And beyond this group coalesced a larger group of those who loved to partake of the culinary spoils of this slaughter, in meals that followed these bloody Sundays.
There were two flat-bottomed tub-like boats, large enough to seat at least four people, that were either loaded on to a trailer or tied to the carriers of the vehicles. Jhulli, my father’s favoured shikari-guide and boatman, would arrive alone or with an assistant the day before, having scouted around for jheels where there had been a large bird fall. That’s where my father would lead his gang of friends the next morning.
Before that, on the night before, the boats were loaded and the guns checked and rechecked. The hard-to-come-by and expensive ammunition was counted, apportioned and arranged in the carry bag. All the hunting and other needs for the next day had to be anticipated. This was routine work for my father’s Man Friday, Shabban.
Equally routine was the night of heavy duty for my mother, older sister and cousin in the kitchen because the full-time cook, a man who brooked no-nonsense from anyone, made it clear that these indulgences were not a part of his duties. Fresh food for two-and-a-half meals for about a dozen people had to be ready and packed to go. Tea had to be served to the guests, who turned up before daybreak. The party would gather to leave well before the sun rose so they had the largest possible window of light to get their aim at the birds.
The packed food had to be dry and non-messy, so it was always the same. Breakfast would be roghnitikias (flat, buttered round bread) to be eaten with khaghina (finely scrambled onion omellete), shami kebabs, a potato or vegetable dish, and tea from the thermos. Each delicate roghnitikia took a lot of time to make but was chewed down in a hurry because everyone was eager to get into the boats either to exercise their forefingers or to enjoy the spectacle of a bird being brought down in flight.
My father had a special deck chair made for himself, which fitted firmly in the boat. It even had a foldable sun guard. He settled in there as they set out for the middle of the lake and watched out for birds rising from the water. A close friend of his joked about how, in his later years, he often dozed off and it was only when Jhulli whispered, ‘Miyan! Miyan! Birds!’ that Miyan would wake up, take aim, bring down two birds from the sky, put his gun down and probably doze off again while Jhulli hurriedly rowed in the direction where the birds had landed.
This operation was crucial and had to be done with speed and accuracy because a lot depended on it. The bird had to be found hopefully with its heart still beating, and fished out for my father to consecrate into halal meat by reciting the words of the kalima while slitting its throat in one swipe, cutting through the carotid artery, jugular vein and windpipe in one motion. The blood thus drained out of the dead bird. However, if the bird was already dead, the exercise was in vain. Such a bird was set aside and the lookout for more birds continued.
By noon, the game bag usually became respectably full, and the hunters took a break for lunch which would be crumbly tikias, or fresh soft paranthas, to go with more of the kebabs and perhaps pasandas or some other dry meat or vegetable preparation.
Some people rested a bit after lunch on durries spread on the banks. Some played cards or just exchanged shikar stories. But not for too long because there was the last chance to get some birds against the setting sun. Blood appetites were fairly sated by the time the sun set.
There would be a snack at teatime before the party wound up its innings for the day. Bags were put together. The cars were repacked and the boats were ready to head back to the city—back to the cave with the hunt.
With Father away, the day, almost always a Sunday, was fairly relaxed for the family. It was the day you could do things without the need for his hard-to-get permission, like going to the movies. It was easy to sneak off to a noon movie show without fear and get away with it (unless someone unkindly squealed). But the evening was a show of another kind at home.
My father would sit there in his special low chair with dozens of dead birds lined up in front of him. The birds were counted and the halal and non-halal sections rechecked. This would be the role forced on me even as I stubbornly refused to be a part of it. To my father, masculinity seemed synonymous with the gun, and on one of my forced outings, I had embarrassed him no end in front of his gun-crazy cronies and their progeny when I vividly demonstrated my inability to put a gun together. This public exposure of a family skeleton had so mortified him that from then onwards, much to my relief, he preferred to keep me hidden in the family closet.
I felt like I was being drawn into the dead bird display as revenge. My father knew of, and even encouraged, my love for animals and birds by letting me keep many as household pets. With my interest in birds, according to him, I should relish the opportunity of first-hand intimacy with wild birds. Except that these were dead, stiff, and covered in dried blood. It wasn’t easy handling them. Yet I was expected to tell one bird from another and separate them according to their species. There were all sorts of migratory birds in the bag: Pochards, Pintails, Moorhens. There were birds that were rarer, like the Mallard, and these I was urged to take a good look at. When I complained about how difficult it was to really see the plumage under all the caked blood, my father bought me a beautifully illustrated book on birds so I could tell them apart. Pictures of these birds in their prime plumage and full glory only made it worse. The mutilated corpses of such gloriously textured birds looked surreal.
When my chore ended, others took over. The non-halal birds were sent off as gifts to various friends who had no compunction about eating them. Shabban would have to work well into the night to get the remaining birds cleaned without delay, removing innards and de-feathering them.
The rest of the week saw the cooking, serving and consuming of these creatures. Sundays were usually followed by a mid-week dinner for my father’s friends. The all-male gatherings naturally centred on food, particularly on the spoils of the last shikar. Cooking standards of the family were well-known, and now there was the added attraction of varied protein.
Not that this new meat was any gourmet’s delight. In spite of the rich cooking traditions within the family, there seemed to be a very restricted repertoire for cooking game. The awareness that the meat of every species had to be dealt with differently was fully understood, and that is where the challenge lay. The flesh of these birds was darker and tougher than chicken. Care had to be taken with how dark the onion was to be fried for each bird so as to not make the resultant curry too dark. The fat of different species had different gamey smells which simply had to be countered in different ways. Some needed more yoghurt for tenderizing than others.
Yet, there were only two ways these birds were cooked. First, there was the inevitable qorma, the cut-up bird in a gravy. Second, there was the whole bird in a pot roast, particularly the larger species like Knob Billed Ducks. Inevitably, a variety of different qormas started appearing at the table—the Teal qorma, the Seekh Par (Pintail) qorma or the Murghabi (Waterhen) qorma. The art lay in evolving a perfect recipe for each game bird. Today my elder sister, who was very involved in all consequences of the hunt, still remembers what sort of meat needed what kind of treatment. With so much attention required to perfect the qorma, it wasn’t surprising that there was little experimentation with other recipes.
So was the case with the birds that were cooked whole. They were cooked with one basic recipe, with attention given to treating the different birds differently. These meats could never carry off a dinner by themselves. You could not use them in a biryani or make kebabs out of them. You couldn’t add seasonal vegetables to them, nor could you do anything more fanciful like a do piyaza. Therefore, there was always a supplement of regular mutton and chicken dishes on the table.
When the party was over, there was still plenty of game for the family and visiting relatives to consume at every meal over the course of the week. Then the next supply of Siberian protein flew in on the coming Sunday. And so it went on from December to February.
Over the years, things began to change slowly. The bags dropped from an easy hundred birds to much smaller numbers. The diminishing supply wasn’t unwelcome to us, though it was a source of depression for my father. The composition of the bags too had begun to change. My father had enjoyed downing migratory Siberian ducks and looking at their varied plumage at the end of the day. While he had earlier been snobbish about Moorhens, which he considered local and too easy to hunt, they now began to form a growing percentage of his weekly harvest. He even discovered the culinary delights of the Murghabi qorma.
My father was an impulsively generous man and had been happy to send his non-halal bounty to non-Muslim friends. Soon, this generosity began to pinch as halal meat numbers came increasingly close to single digits. It bothered him enough to consult a maulvi about what constituted halal meat. The maulvi said that since the intention behind the rule was that man should kill only what he wants to eat, the finger on the trigger was just as crucial as the hand on the knife and if the kalima was read when the bird was shot, its meat was halal. Voila! I can’t help but speculate what it might have meant if the maulvi had been consulted during the good hunting years—how much more duck meat would we have had to consume? We, with effete Lucknow noses, had never developed a taste for the gamey smell and taste of the fruits of the wild.
I haven’t eaten game since my father stopped hunting. I now indulge myself in distant memories, distilled with age and humour, into a flavour of the past, which was as much about food as it was about a way of life.