An India-Pakistan Match & Nani's Patti Samosa
In this beautiful essay on displacement and resilience, Nupur Hukmani writes about her Sindhi grandmother who made a home for herself in Pune, after Partition, and a delightful afternoon spent in the company of neighbours, an international cricket match and samosas.
When I was a child, Nani was the embodiment of all things stereotypically maternal — loving hugs, home-cooked food, and the person who told us endless stories. As I grew older, I look back on the kind of woman she was, and I realise she was anything but a cliché.
When British cartographers drew a border between India and Pakistan to partition erstwhile undivided British India, it triggered the destructive displacement of countless lives — the social, economic, and political effects of which are felt even today. Born in the city of Karachi (present-day Pakistan) in 1928, Nani was a Sindhi Hindu. She was among close to 7,00,000 Sindhi Hindus that fled the city during the Partition of India, in 1947.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about her life because both she and my mother (her only child) passed away some years ago. However, I do know that she raised my mother single-handedly in a Partition refugee camp in Pune, which still exists by the name of Ranjeet Society. The camp housed persecuted Sindhis, who were forced to abandon their assets in Pakistan. Nani and my mother lived in a one-room house that had an attached match-box-sized kitchen, and an even smaller bathroom. There was a common toilet outside in the building corridor. Nani was a single mother, a homemaker, and struggled to make ends meet on meagre government compensation. However, she ensured nothing less than quality upbringing and education for my mother. Even after my mother married my father, Nani continued living in that house, until her death. My sister and I too, spent a large part of our childhood in that house.
Both my parents worked full time, so Nani became the family member we spent the most time with. At home, we mostly spoke in Hindi and English, ate Maharashtrian food on account of the cook being a Maharashtrian, celebrated festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi, and were blissfully unaware of what it meant to be Sindhi. Nani’s house was our only connection with our mother-tongue and our lost culture. She wanted us to know our roots, and tried her best to ensure that: she spoke in Sindhi with us, so that we could learn our mother tongue. (We giggle remembering how she’d choicest Sindhi abuses when we replied to her in Hindi!). She tell us stories of her lost life from Karachi — the city she grew up in, the food that they ate, the multani mitti (Fuller’s Earth) directly sourced from Multan, that they used as a face pack, and the games that she played as a child. She even tried to teach us to write in Sindhi, which is written in the Arabic script, but on that account, she failed miserably. She loved to cook and to feed. She made some truly incredible Sindhi food — Sindhi curry, bhuga chawal (brown rice) methi aloo, methi pulao, the holy trinity of Sindhi breads — koki, dodo, and lolo, churi (a type of prasad made out of ghee, sugar, and wheat flour), aloo tikki, sai bhaji (literally meaning green vegetable to be eaten with the bhuga chawal), aloo tuk, arbi (tapioca) tuk (tuk, meaning fried), dabal (bread) pakora, bhee (lotus stem), besan ji aani (gram flour discs in gravy).
Many Nepali students lived in Ranjeet Society on rent. The absence of affordable college eduction in Nepal brought them to Pune. There were a bunch of 20-year-olds who stayed in the house opposite Nani’s. All of them, like my grandmother, loved cricket. Nani had a knack for making friends across age groups, since she had the necessary qualities for socialising — she loved to talk, she loved to gather people around her, and she loved to cook for them! The Nepalese loved her and would spend a lot of time in her house — watching Bollywood movies with us, sharing meals, waiting for phone calls from their families back in Nepal. My sister and I spent a lot of time in Nani’s house since we’d go there after school, for lunch and a nap. My mother would pick us up later in the evening, after her work, to take us back home.
To help ease the responsiblity of cooking and caring for us, these students would take turns babysitting us. They would entertain us with stories from Nepal — stories of the mountains, of the Yeti, of the Temple of Pashupatinath, or a story about the flavours of yak milk. They showered us with gifts whenevver they returned from Nepal: imported chocolates for us, spices for my grandmother, and Nepalese stamps and postcards for our collection. I absolutely loved them. My child-self was enamoured by their sartorial choices, the accent they spoke in, and the delicious momos and noodles they made for us.
My earliest memory of Nani involves food and cricket. One Sunday evening, when I was barely four, all of us — Nani, my sister and I, and our Nepalese neighbours — were going to watch a decisive match of cricket together (India vs Pakistan of course). Everyone was looking forward to a nail-biting match and needless to say, to India winning the game. Beating Pakistan at cricket is not just about winning a match, it is equivalent to saving one’s political, territorial, social, and collective self-esteem. The Nepalese, too, were in support of the Indian team, of course.
We usually had frugal meals at Nani’s house, but they were always delicious and made with utmost love and care. However, that Sunday was exceptional. My sister and I were excited about eating Nani’s samosas — an event as rare as the sighting of Halley’s comet! She called them patti-samosas because they were different from the more popular, large-sized samosas — you have to cut the rolled dough for the outer coating into small strips, or pattis, and fill them with a mixture of potato, onions, and lots of spices.
That morning, she began by expertly kneading an intense mass of dough with her fragile, blue-veined hands. Meanwhile, a copious amount of potatoes were set to boil on her stove. Once boiled and cooled, she handed them to my sister and me, made us sit on the floor on a newspaper, and asked to us peel them as we watched a movie on her tiny television, which had only one channel — Doordarshan. I am pretty sure the movie that afternoon, like every other afternoon, was Bobby, starring Dimple Kapadia and Rishi Kapoor, which for some reason, was played an unhealthy number of times on Doordarshan (including the night that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in India in 1975).
While we peeled potatoes, Nani busied herself chopping onions and green chilies for the filling, and effortlessly cutting the pattis into precise straight lines, as if it were second nature to her. She took each strip and carefully filled it with the potato-onion mix; a labor of love. She made about 50 samosas like this, meditatively. It was noon by the time she was done preparing. We had a lunch of rice and potato gravy, and headed for a happy siesta.
Come evening, our guests began arriving. There must have been 15 of us that day. Nani got busy frying the patti samosas with deep and immediate urgency, till they were crispy-brown on the outside. On the stove, there was chai boiling away. Outside the kitchen, we were huddled around a tiny television set, totally engrossed in each ball that was played. Nani was an expert-level multi-tasker and she did this that evening too — frying samosas in the kitchen, bringing hot ones in to serve, dumping them onto our plates, and even shouting “Six!” along with us, every time India scored.
To this day, when I think about that evening, I realise how ecstatic my younger self was, in that charged atmosphere. The multiple aromas in the house, the proximity to so many excited people coming together to watch the game, the sound of the commentary of the match in the background, the elated cheering each time India scored, and the dead silence every time we lost a player — all these moments are etched in my being. They are such sensory experiences I am almost physically transported back to that tiny room.
However, what really defines that memory for me is the first bite of the samosa that I took, while Nani stood next to me, pausing a moment to watch the match. The taste of perfectly spiced, soft potato filling — tangy, hot, and savoury — in harmony with its crispy casing, against the notes of adrak chai — was truly sublime. I also remember my grandmother walking towards me in her everyday white cotton sari, and dotingly place two samosas on my plate. I remember her smooth silver hair, her wrinkled smile, her particular smell. I remember how thrilled she looked that dreamy Sunday evening, to entertain a massive and loud crowd of people she called her own.
As an adult, this memory has visited me innumerable times. Each time, it evokes a different feeling and reflection in me. Most recently, I wondered how Nani might have felt on that particular day. What was going on in her mind while she cheered for a country that was not theoretically her homeland? Her life had been redrawn without her permission, when powerful men in high politics decided to divide the country under the garb of a historically guiltless story of ‘independence.’ This history has always been focused on the ‘why’ of the Partition — it never told us the ‘how’ of it. How millions of personal identities, like my Nani’s, were lost on that fateful day and were redefined by an invisible state. How stories of personal and intergenerational trauma could never wholly be captured in numbers or words, only to remain repressed memories. And how the entire Sindhi culture and people were forced to transform instantaneously, just so that the Sindhis who moved to either side of the border could stay alive. I am an amalgamation of all the eclectic cultures — Sindhi, Maharashtrian, and to some extent Nepali too — that I grew up in. And yet there is a void of not entirely knowing where I belong — because people like my Nani did have a choice to stay who they were in the past. Nani loved joking with us about a lost treasure she had left behind in Karachi. She wanted us to go look for it when we grew up.
Nupur Hukmani holds a Masters in Psychology and has been an educator for the last eight years. She is passionate about writing and loves incorporating writing as a medium in teaching. She is currently pursuing a Masters in International Human Rights from the Indian Institute of Human Rights, Delhi. When she is not teaching or writing, she loves reading, cooking and long-distance running.
ALSO ON THE GOYA JOURNAL
