Toddy is a kind of country liquor made out of juice extracted from tall palm trees. Being an organic substance, healthwise it is harmless. A harness is made of rope about two feet long, at the two ends of which is a loop into which a person puts his feet. With the harness and the pitcher at his back, he climbs to the top where he fixes his harness to the tree and perches on the harness to free both his hands. He then makes a cut in the trunk of the tree from which the juice will flow into the pitcher that is secured with the rope.
In the morning, you climb up the tree and bring down the pitcher full of juice. It tastes just like coconut milk early in the morning. Through the day, it, however, gets fermented and sold as country liquor. Kick-wise, it is effective, and the effect lasts for quite some time. Any old dose beyond this point, the man might make a nuisance of himself at his own peril. Early in the morning, the juice is boiled to make a concentrate which ultimately turns into Jaggery (Gur). The one made from the date palm is brown and the other one, made from a normal palm, is off-white. Both have their distinct taste and flavor. A famous Hindi movie named Saudagar was made in which Amitabh Bachchan and Nutan played the lead roles along with debutant Padma Khanna. It is a story of a woman who used to make gur out of date palms.
The 1st lot of pictures are of tad tadi (taal tari in Bengali). Its season in Bengal is from April to June. After boiling the juice becomes concentrated and then it is poured on a flat plate. When it becomes cool then turns hard like peda sweet. Tar gur is tasty but delicate. It requires bringing down the juice before sunrise from the tree, which is hung by last evening. And if one wants to make to tadi, have to keep it hanging on the tree up until 10-11 am to get transformed into tadi. To make it stronger, they mix some herbal juice with the palm juice.
Khejur season is from mid-November to the end of Feb. If Bengal winter lingers then it may last up to the middle of March.
There is another type of palm which is coconut palm. In India, it grows in abundance in coastal areas, in particular in the south where its cultivation is quite extensive. Coconut oil all over the country is a popular hair oil that is used by women. In the south, however, it is also a popular cooking medium that is as costly as the Desi Ghee. Who can forget the fresh coconut milk which is more popular than Coke and other bottled cold drinks? Coconut milk is also sold separately in cans and is used generally in making Chinese dishes, in particular mayonnaise sauce which is an important ingredient of such dishes.
We all know about palm oil as a very popular cooking medium, the world over. Malaysia and Indonesia are the major producers of palm oil. The price of cooking medium suddenly shot up some years back in India as the government had banned imports from Malaysia for political reasons. Thereafter, the prices never came down. To maintain its distance from palm oil the price of Desi Ghee also shot up by about 25%-30%.
Talking of Toddy I am reminded of a person named Baqar Mian of Katihar who is a great connoisseur of Toddy. His Toddy parties in the evenings were quite popular and attended by his close friends and business contacts. Elaborate snacks also formed part of such parties to go along with the Toddy. His Toddy was specially prepared with additives of selected herbs that gave a distinct taste and flavor to the drink. Otherwise, by itself, the Toddy can be quite bland and smelly but high in its kick value. Being cheaper it was popular among the poor.
Baqar Mian was our landlord in Katihar where we lived in a rented house. Dressed in a white kurta with a colorful lungi and kharaun as footwear (wooden slippers with a strap made of a used car tire or leather), he was supposed to be immaculately dressed by those days’ standards. Kharaun was a common footwear in those days with a lot of variation in design to make wearing a comfort. In some, the bottom of the sole would have a curvature so that stepping was easy while walking. Then there used to be one without a strap with a stud sticking out that was held between the big toe and the adjacent finger as they show in the Ramayana TV Serial. In some, the wooden sole would be lined with a thin rubber sheet to muffle the clanking sound it made while walking.
With a French-cut beard, Baqar Mian had an impressive personality. He was middle pass as far as education is concerned. Middle class meant 7th standard which used to be a board exam in those days. The teaching of Arithmetic as a subject, used to finish in the 7th class those days. A middle pass person was considered an educated one and entitled to a government job like a postman or a peon in an office. However, to be a clerk, the qualification was ‘matriculate’, which is 10th class. Unlike these days when even highly qualified people find it difficult to get a job, things were different in those days as the level of literacy in the country, was quite low. Getting a job, therefore, was not difficult for a middle pass or a matriculate person for that matter.
It is not as if Baqar Mian was always dressed in lungi and kurta. He also used to wear Western dress according to the occasion. For going to a government office, he would wear a shirt and trousers with shining shoes. He also had a horse which he used to ride when visiting his farm in a nearby village. The horse had an ornamental and decorated headgear with normal leather reins. The saddle was a quilt type that was tied around the body of the horse but no stirrups that left his feet dangling in the air. We would wonder how he managed to balance himself seated like that, but he seemed quite comfortable. When Baqar Main was not riding, the horse was used to pull a cart like a tonga, for the conveyance of the family.
People would pronounce his name as Baker Sb as the letter Q would sound like K when they took his name. He used to deal in the sale of livestock, mainly goats. People are generally known by their profession or the place they belong to also, like Batliwala or Poonawala and so on. Baqar Mian thus became a Baker, which became bakrewala with the passage of time according to his profession. He was thus known as Bakrewala to his clients, who were the local meat shop owners. He was their main source of supply as he gave them goats on credit. He owned a substantive piece of land that was being cultivated regularly. Moneywise, therefore, he was quite comfortable and that allowed him to indulge in luxuries that were available then.
Baqar Mian had a son named Jaffar, who was my age. Over the years we all grew up and so did Jaffar but the man in him did not grow. His mannerism was anything but masculine. Perhaps, he was differently abled in that department and was more comfortable with girls, who did not seem to mind his company, considering him to be a harmless person. Baqar Mian was a very enterprising person and never used to miss hot food and a warm bed at night, whenever his wife went away to her parent’s place with Jaffar always in tow. He had a standby arrangement for such occasions with a different person every time.
Sometimes during my growing up days in Katihar in those days, I remember I would often find myself wearing one shoe and carrying the other one in my hand as the upper and the sole had separated leaving its mouth wide open. Ammi would wonder how I managed to do this as the wear and tear of the shoe on both feet are normally even. The quality of footwear used to be quite poor those days and hence the damage would be passed on as a manufacturing defect. The mystery was however solved one day when someone told Ammi that my favorite pastime was playing football with stone pebbles while walking on the road. Nothing happened to the stone pebbles, but my shoe gave way. Being a right footer, the one on the right foot took all the pounding! Bata was a popular brand those days too, but their shoes were quite costly. To attract customers, their pricing was always just short of a whole rupee. Instead of saying 6 rupees, it would be shown as Rs 5.95 to give a false impression of it being cheap. 6 rupees was not a small sum of money in those days.
The front of our house was adjacent to one another with a common wall between two houses. The backyard was a large compound with a boundary wall all around. It had fruit trees like mangos, guava, bananas, and berries. It was a popular place to spend time, but the afternoons were reserved for womenfolk. They gathered there for their gossip sessions, during which they washed clothes and bathed too. They would be mostly semi-clad or wearing nothing, much to the delight of the peeping toms. There was no dearth of them in those days too!
One day, we heard that Jaffar was getting married. All of us were quite surprised to hear this and Jaffar blushingly admitted that the news was correct. The marriage was solemnized with great pomp and show but this did not change his daily routine. Earlier, he used to sleep with his mother, and this continued even after his marriage. His father on the other hand, now got an additional option. The girl married to Jaffer was very pretty looking but had always had a sad look on her face. Every time I passed by their house, she would signal me and ask me to get her some stuff like postage stationary and other sundry items for personal use. Sweets and toffees would invariably be one of the items she always wanted and happily shared with me too. Money wise she was quite comfortable as every month she would receive a money order of rupees 100 as her pocket money from her parents. 100 rupees was a large sum of money in those days. One day she asked me to meet her in the afternoon when she would be alone as others were going away somewhere.
It was a simple request; she wanted my help to run away to her parent’s place. I was totally nonplused on what to do. I told her to let me think and figure a way out. Finally, I discussed the girl’s ordeal with a close friend, and he agreed to help. He was familiar with the place where she belonged too. It was an overnight journey by train which left Katihar around 7 pm. It was decided that we would meet him at the station, and I was to escort her and hand her over to my friend. In the Eastern part of India, the sun sets early, and at 6 pm or so, it is dark. She came out of the house from the rear door, and we walked the distance to the railway station, about a km away. She only carried her purse and nothing else. By 7 pm, I was back to our house. After two days, my friend was back having accomplished the escape mission and a few days later, I got a letter from her to say that she reached her home safely.
Meanwhile, at Baqar Mian’s house, there was a commotion at the sudden disappearance of their daughter-in-law. Inquiries were conducted at various friend’s house if she had gone there. People looked at me with suspicion as they were aware that she used to chat with me at times. I told them that she only got her postage stamps and other stuff for personal use once in a while and gave me letters that were to be posted. I was asked when was the last letter sent, and I said about a week back. Was it an envelope or a postcard? It was a postcard I said. Another query, did I glance through the postcard to get a general idea of its contents? My answer was again in the negative. Everyone in their households was very unhappy but not so Jaffer. He confided in me to say that he was happy that she had gone away as it was good for her.
A few months later, we got the news that her parents had got ‘khula’, a kind of divorce and she was married off to a widower who had a two-year-old child.
The house we lived in, was not very comfortable with multifarious problems to deal with. The main one is the leaking roof during the rainy season. We had several pans placed on the floor in our room under places from where the leakage was. At times, there would be more pans and pots in the room than in the kitchen. That was the time when Ammi started asserting herself. She met several senior officers of the railways and got a living quarter allotted to us. That marked the end of our contact with Amla Toli, the name of the area we lived in. With the passage of time, we lost contact with Baqar Mian’s family too.