Food on the Fast Track

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi hammered that point in characteristically. “When you were sitting on fast in Delhi,same time,I too was fasting on the occasion of Navratri,” Modi wrote ingratiatingly to Hazare. The big-name bhavans of Central Delhi were quiet during Vasant Navratri,or Ramnavami as the rest of us know it; I hear you could have gotten a seat at Andhra Bhavan,not too far from the big YSR portrait,without even having to wait.

And fasts are bookended,always,by feasts. During Ramzan,Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods of Delhi and Lucknow come alive after sunset,buzzing with activity,with stalls and wooden benches everywhere,and kabab and halwa and haleem makers beavering away under the glow of naked sodium-vapour bulbs. The Latin “festa” is the root of both festival and feast,and nowhere that I have walked is as festive in both senses as is Hauz Qazi near Lal Kuan as people come out to break their fasts; it feels more than a few kilometres away from the giant,protocol-ridden iftar parties of Lutyens’ Delhi.

But Ramnavami,I have discovered,doesn’t have quite as straightforward an effect on what people eat. The restrictions are,of course,hardly uniform; some cut out salt,some eat no spices beyond haldi and a bit of chilli. The occasional pricey restaurant offers the serious faster a vrat thali,though what a serious faster is doing at a pricey restaurant is beyond me.

It is always intriguing to me how dietary restrictions can be worked around to produce food that manages to feel special and festive; but even more appealing is how some of the specialities seem to so perfectly mark the end of spring and the onset of summer. Yes,I know,they’re also cooked around the time that I associate with Durga Puja,and which in Gujarat they would call Maha Navratri. But look at how interestingly overprocessed starches are cut out,and yet you’re given great festive stuff.

You’re supposed to avoid ordinary flour; so you use buckwheat,amaranth (rajgira),tapioca (sabudana) and,fascinatingly,singhara or water chestnut. For me,singharas are the taste of early summer; and to have them packed into delicious singhare-ki-burfi,as is done by a couple of little sweetshops in the narrow lanes of Kotla Mubarakpur,a short walk from where I live,marks the end of spring. Puris made of kuttu — buckwheat — or sabudana are well worth trying,too. We have too few alternative starches in our diet.

Yet while I now live a short walk from a man with a pan who makes four kinds of puris during Ramnavami,I grew up in Calcutta,and the post-fast feasts at this time of year resonate to the rhythms of distant continents. You will read this on Palm Sunday,with one week of Lent left; bakers in cubbyholes off Free School Street and in New Market will be mixing dough with spices,and digging out the raisins and candied fruit that people want for their hot cross buns. On the counters of Flurys and of smaller patisseries,sugared,frosted,chocolated eggs will appear,some of them in hand-woven bamboo baskets.

Eggs,we know,represent the beginning of a year in calendars more attuned to the seasons than the one we’ve inherited from the Roman Catholic Church,and that’s what Eastertide is supposed to be,too — as well as coming at the end of 40 days of fasting. I’ve eaten New Year meals at Parsi households (Nowruz occurred recently) where the table has been decorated with hand-painted eggs,a tradition more than two millennia old. In Nahoum’s,Calcutta,the treat of choice to end Lent and mark the change of the seasons was a quite ordinary egg — except it was miraculously filled with dark chocolate.

Of course,you have to earn it. When I was younger,I tried giving up stuff for Lent a couple of times; deep-fried stuff one year,which,to my surprise,I managed quite easily. The year I gave up cut onions,however,I cried,and realised that fasting wasn’t for me. Feasting,on the other hand,is.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com