In the house that we grew up in on the periphery of Kolkata, there used to be a storage space above our bathroom filled with all sorts of knick-knacks. To my cousins and me it was a portal to another world.
One had to prop a wooden ladder against the entrance, go up the steps, open the tiny latch door, and climb in. We were usually not allowed to unless the grown-ups needed something from storage: it was much easier for us children to crawl around inside the small space than it was for a fully grown human.
So a few times a year one of us would be called upon to climb up the ladder into this chamber of mysteries to find specific objects. An adult would stand at the bottom, directing.
We were, of course, thrilled for the opportunity. We spent far more time than was necessary, clambering about, tinkering with other curiosities.
The exact objects we would be asked to retrieve depended on the occasion. Around Lokkhi Pujo in autumn it would be the large brass cooking vessels, or black stone serving utensils; during Poush Sankranti in winter it could be the terracotta mould for making chitoi pitha; and in the late monsoon it would be the taal-shiri.
A taal-shiri is a “ladder”, about a foot long, made of wood, trapezoidal rather than rectangular. The “steps” of this ladder have a triangular cross-section, and get progressively longer from the top of the ladder to the bottom.
It can be mistaken for some kind of a musical instrument, but its function is far more material. The taal-shiri is used to extract the pulp of the ripe taal fruit (ice apple). When the squishy, fibrous fruit is scraped against the angular edges of the ladder’s steps, bright, amber-yellow pulp cascades down slowly like lava. The air fills with the deep, sweet fragrance of the fruit.
Extracting the pulp, even with the taal-shiri, is a laborious process requiring arm and upper-body strength. When one person got tired, another would take over. Even we children would have a go at it from time to time.
The pulp is sweet with a bitter aftertaste. The most popular application of the pulp is taaler bora (fritters). A batter is made of the pulp with grated coconut, and some rice flour or semolina for binding. Dollops of the batter are dropped into hot mustard oil, and fried into small fritters, deep brown and crispy outside, bright yellow and soft inside. It is still one of my favourite things to eat.
A few years ago, when we were filming this recipe for Bong Eats, I wanted to use my grandmother’s taal-shiri in the video instead of a steel colander which is more common these days. So, I borrowed it from my aunt for a couple of weeks.
This was the first time since my grandparents passed that I was looking at the instrument. The wooden steps had been ground down from years of use, and had lost their edge. How old was this thing, I wondered.
“We used to grate taal on this when we were children. I have heard your grandfather did too, when he was young,” my father told me casually one day when I was speaking to him about getting a replica made.
That is how I discovered that this taal-shiri was at least 90 years old. It was among the things my great-grandparents had carried from Dhaka when they came to India as refugees post Partition.
What was it like to have to pack their lives into boxes, knowing they could probably never go back? How did they choose what to take with them? How did they decide what to leave behind?
There are some details I will never know, but in a way the details don’t really matter. This is the story of displaced people everywhere in the world. There are people making these decisions right now in the face of looming threats; for some it is the jaws of a JCB, for others, the fire rained down on them by “the most humane army in the world”.
In a refugee family there are stories we grow up listening to—stories of loss, resentment, friendships, hope, horror, courage, camaraderie, and anger. For us children of displaced people, family heirlooms are rare. What we inherit in abundance are stories, second-hand memories and trauma alike. Like our foremothers, we too must make a decision. At some point in our adult lives, we must look into our souls and choose: Which of these stories do we carry with us in life? And which ones do we leave behind? Do we move forward with their courage, resilience, generosity and kindness, or do we hold on to the prejudices and brooding anger?
In those hours before they left home for the last time, standing in front of everything they were leaving behind, someone, maybe it was my great-grandmother, chose to slip the taal-shiri, an object whose singular use is extracting the pulp of taal, into the luggage. In the new life she was travelling to, even as everything else was falling apart, she wanted the familiarity of taaler bora for her children and, maybe, even for herself.
Saptarshi Chakraborty is a front-end engineer and co-founder of Bong Eats.