Kanjake, Girl Power!
Children should be seen and not heard. I never knew or believed in this concept. As a young girl, my single, working mom (read: perpetually exhausted) never muffled my opinion. Even when she told my sister and me to sit quietly while she took a short cat nap in the evening after walking home from her job and before dinner prep, we knew the talking ban was temporary.
One occasion that centered, even exalted girls, was a festival called Kanjak or Kanjake. Wikipedia tells me it is a Hindu ritual where young girls are worshipped as incarnations of the Goddess Durga. I didn’t know the religious meaning of the day. For me, Kanjake meant a special day full of celebration and food.
The day would start with me and my sister taking our bucket baths early. Then, we would wear our fancy clothes, our mom would neatly braid our hair, and we would wait patiently for her to put finishing touches on the special meal. Mom would have been up very early making kale chane, sweet suji halwa roasted in desi ghee, and deep-fried pooris. Kale chane are smaller and darker than regular chickpeas and the traditional festival preparation involved boiling the chana, letting them simmer until the water evaporates, and then dry-roasting the softened chanas with spices. A thick scoop of the spicy chana and smaller spoonful of sweet halwa glistening with melted ghee would be nestled into small, round, freshly-fried pooris. Shining on top of each chana, halwa, poori parcel was a silver rupee coin.
By late morning, the young girls from neighboring homes would start arriving at our apartment door. They would remove their slippers or shoes at the door, and we all sat cross-legged, single file, on the freshly-mopped cool cement floor. We would wait excitedly for our “offering.” Mom would walk down the line tying a red string on our left wrists and handing out the edible parcels, topped with coins. As the hosts, my sister and I would sit at the end of the line and had to wait the longest to get our chana/halwa/poori parcel and pocket our coin.
We devoured the sweet, salty, fatty festival food in minutes, probably seconds. Maybe there were other parts of the ritual - did my mom chant a prayer or light incense? I don’t really remember. My focus waned after the pooja food was served and consumed. I was already thinking ahead to the other homes we’d be visiting next. Our procession of girls would go door to door throughout the afternoon, where all the moms had prepared similar food parcels. We ate our way down our residential street, pocketing our growing heap of coins. [Reema]