Locomotoring

This recipe of Macher Mudi Ghonto is my thamma’s recipe, my paternal grandmother’s, passed down to my mom. Singaporean’s make curried fish heads. Japanese use fish cheeks. This preparation can be best described as a fish head pulao, except the shape of the fish head is not preserved while cooking. It isn’t that we are queasy watching the fish head looking back at us. After all, we do have the other famous Bengali preparation “macher matha diye moong daal” moong lentil with fish head, where one can look deeply into fish eyes and suck its brains out with great gusto.

My thamma was an immigrant, the kind that the Brits created by partitioning Bengal into east and west. She was a young mother when she left her home in Bangladesh to arrive in Kolkata. Like many immigrants from those days, they had left their home with nothing to rebuild from scratch. Her family, my dad and his siblings, grew up in cramped quarters in Kolkata. In today’s world, we have become so sedentary that we need constant reminders to get off our ass to get some movement in. I remember her as one who moved continuously. She was either drawing water from the communal tap or cooking in her 30 sq ft kitchen or feeding the extended family or washing or cleaning. When she sat down, it would be to pray and meditate. I remember her as deeply religious, she would constantly chant prayers while working and when possible, run her fingers through her prayer beads. On one rare occasion, I remember her drawing an intricate Madhubani sketch on a child’s slate with chalk. She had an amazing hand and patience for fine details. In another world, she might have made a good surgeon.