An excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Haat” goes-

“Kumor paarar gorur gadi
Bojhai kora kolshi hari”

This roughly translates to –

“The potter’s bullock cart on the bumpy road,
carries many pots and vessels, I’m told.”

Hari is a terracotta pot, common in rural Indian households. So what’s in these pots? Well, in a misty winter morning, a ten-year-old me wondered the same while walking on the kuccha road that leads out of the village, towards the paddy fields. Accompanying me were my cousins and aunt. The sun was still waking up, and dense fog made it hard to see beyond a couple of hundred meters. I distinctly remember that this fog smelled like water and petrichor. A smell I haven’t encountered in long, living in cities where dense pungent fog have caressed the inner walls of my airways.

The path was damp and cold from the morning dew. Droplets had pearled on grass. I was walking, not knowing where we were going. Through chattering teeth, we were appreciating the previous night’s feast.

After a few minutes of walking through the dense fog, we came across the hut of a shuli or date palm tree tapper. Wispy smoke was emanating from an iron kadhai on an unoon (clay oven) fired with dried dung cakes or ghutey. He explained, this was a fresh batch of date palm tree sap or raw jaggery or gur, cooking slowly. A few earthen pots were kept nearby, filled with older batches cooling. The shuli, a farmer by day, was smoking a bidi in the cold. I was too young to recall his name, but what I do recall is the taste of freshly brewed jaggery. And you know it’s fresh because he got it out of one of the earthen pots kept aside. It was pure, unadulterated jaggery. The kind of pure that makes your throat sting as it goes down.

Being a Bengali, my heart beats faster as the month of Poush comes to an end. Poush Parbon is a festival we all eagerly await, celebrating the sun’s journey into Capricorn as per the Hindu astrology. It is an occasion where we express gratitude for the harvest season and relish the sweets that are prepared with seasonal ingredients like gur. In Bengal, where agriculture has always been the lifeline of the people, this festival holds a special place in our hearts. As the day approaches, our homes are filled with the fragrant aroma of nolen gur, which we buy from local grocery stores and sweet shops.

Pithe, a delicacy made of rice flour filled with coconut soaked in nolen gur, is passed around among family, friends, and neighbours. We savor patishapta, a thin crêpe made of rice flour and filled with coconut and nolen gur. Gur, has been used in Bengal for ages and probably even predates cane sugar in the region. When I was a child, the only thing that made me look forward to the biting cold winters was nolen gurer roshogolla, a spongy, melt-in-your-mouth dessert soaked in nolen gur syrup.

Nowadays, these sweets are available throughout the year, and gur is often found in a more basic form, mixed with sugar and turned into crumbly powder. So when I take a few teaspoons of this powder and mix it in my morning coffee, I don’t really find that familiar jaggery flavour any more. The moments are rather bittersweet.