It’s Deepavali today. 

I’ve been thinking about my mum for a while now. How excited she got at every Deepavali. It was her celebration. She said and reiterated how Deepavali was the main event in her life. Not Ponggal, Thaipusam or even her birthday. Nope, it was Deepavali. From childhood, all through her married life to her latter years, whether she was at centre stage as the master chef of her family or playing a supporting or advisory role, Deepavali was always her top festival.

And, it always started with green peas. Green peas, not Greenpeace. Buying them in huge quantities. I honestly don’t know how many kilogrammes she bought but they were a lot. They had to be shelled, washed, dried, and ground. The preparation was like a production. I’m not entirely sure if the process was difficult or it was the quantity that made it seem like a mammoth task. My mum never complained. If anything, she relished it as it marked the beginning of her festival.

I laugh as I write this. Almost every year, rain interrupted my mum’s strict green peas drying schedule. It got so bad that one year she front-loaded her drying to June-July. Outsmarting the rain😊. The thing is Deepavali falls between 15 October and 15 November, which is the rainy season in Malaysia. Agreed, climate change has altered the local weather patterns but it still seems to rain more in the last quarter of the year, particularly on the days my mum chose to dry her green peas.

Then came the grinding. In the old days, despite the industrial size quantity of green peas, my mum and my sisters ground it in-house. By hand, using an ‘aattukall,’ which translates to ‘machine for grinding flour on a stone grinder.’ The contraption comprised two round stone plates that had to be turned manually in a circle to grind the green peas into flour. Hmm.

Thankfully with the advent of more advanced kitchen appliances, my mum was able to use a Made-in-India, heavy-duty home grinder called Sumeet, to do the heavy lifting. I remember how the machine heated up every so often and had to be turned off to cool down. Again, it was the quantity of green peas that had to be pulverised that strained the machine. The whirring sounds of Sumeet went on for hours.

My mum had many versions of the Sumeet. She liked and collected kitchen appliances. She had different capacity idli pots, various sized pressure cookers, and a chapati/paratha press. Who knew I would use her pressure cooker to cook dhal, the idli pot to prepare the three-ingredient fluffy idlis that sister number 3 taught me to make, and warm-up ‘Kawan’ brand chapatis and parathas in her press, for her.

Many years after we moved to KL and as my mum became less young and able, the grinding of the green peas, still a hefty amount, was outsourced to Narayana Moorthy Flour Mill. Brother number 1 was the designated purveyor of the green peas. He collected from my mum, and delivered and collected back the ground green peas from the mill, located near The New Straits Times, the English-language daily newspaper that I used to work for. I remember being delegated the job on the very few occasions when he wasn’t able to collect the ground flour.

Two weeks ago, sister number 3 sent photos of herself shelling green peas to make ‘murukku’ and ‘nai orundu’ for Deepavali this year. Ambidextrous and a bit of a ‘supai’ or ‘superwoman,’ baking and cooking come naturally to her. She has made about 20 ‘palavaram’/cake each as her target audience in England is limited.

Unlike my mum, who made hundreds of ‘murukus’ and ‘achuans’ that had to be stored in commercial sized 3.5kg biscuit tins. Each ‘palavaram’/cake filled three to five large biscuit tins. And, of course, her signature ‘nai orundu’ that she counted, why… hmm… who knows, and carefully placed in large stainless-steel containers and airtight bottles. My mum was not known for making anything in small batches.

Back to sister number 3, my mum used to marvel at how adept her daughter was at shaping the ‘atharsam’ dough in the palm of her hand and frying them in oil. Unlike sister number 4, also her daughter, who made wonky ‘nai orundu’ and wasn’t invited back to help at Deepavali😊.

It was always sister number 3 whom my mum looked froward to having at Deepavali. Her co-collaborator. Besides the usual suspects, she would, without fail, magic more ‘palavaram’/cakes like carrot halwa, coconut candy, ’pulut kacau’/’wajik’ and even lemon flan as Deepavali drew closer. This always delighted my mum no end as she enjoyed a bountiful spread at any occasion.

Deepavali is no longer the same for me. That said, I’m happy reliving the wonderful memories of my mum at her special celebration.

Happy Deepavali.