Moulding a ‘modak’ over memories of Ganesha

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When I asked my mother about her memories of modak, she narrated a story so vivid that I felt like I was there—in a chawl in the central Mumbai neighbourhood of Dadar, watching the ladies of her family expertly turning out thin dumplings stuffed with jaggery and coconut, gossiping and arguing as they did. These dramas seemed appropriate because Lord Ganesha, the pot-bellied, elephant-headed god dear to millions, was himself born amidst celestial theatrics.

His favourite offering, seen on a carving as old as 600 CE, is closely intertwined with my family’s history. In the chawl—tenements along a long balcony with communal bathrooms at their ends—my mother’s frail kaki or aunt kept ready a dough made of rice flour and grated more than 20 coconuts, when the women trooped in. It was a two-room tenement housing the couple, and their five children (later, even the eldest son’s privacy seeking wife, who caused a scandal when she moved out with her husband).

One aunt fought with her daughter-in-law, banging her own head on the floor before Ganesha, as the modaks rolled out. “Ata me marte (now I die)," my mother recalls the aunt wailing. She remembers her 6ft-tall uncle, always selected to do the visarjan, the immersion of Ganesha, since he could walk out furthest into the sea.

The children wailed when they could no longer see him. “Mama mela (uncle is dead)," they would weep. One year, the uncle told his father he really would drown himself during visarjan, unless he was allowed to marry the woman he met at the ration shop (he got his way).