Ah for those memories, smells and sounds of New Years then!
It’s the time for kavun and other favourites
The Aluth Avurudu season has arrived for the koha to raucously announce its time for celebration. In reality, though, it is his mating call. Incidentally, his call is still not loud and persistent although we are very close to the festive season. Has the dengue mosquito chasing man with his evil smelling emission-gun decimated the beady-eyed bird? Or the more intense heat this year sapped him of his energy? Poor chappie. But crows beware! Soon enough you will be warming another’s eggs in your untidy nests for our Common Koel and to give him his grand name – Eudynamys scolopaceus – imitates the British cuckoo in this cunning habit of conveniently passing the burden of egg-hatching to another bird.
Commercially there is activity ranging from the textile shops through tailors to grocers and sweets outlets to the humble roadside clayware sellers of kale gedis, mutti and athili. Paint shops which seem to advertise aggressively with many competing brands, have made good sales. Long ago, walls were painted over with a solution of plain lime (hunu) or new mud was applied so it stuck; and floors freshly cowdunged.
There are complaints and grouses about the cost of things – just ordinary commodities like flour. People say Avurudu will be bleak this year. But mark my words issuing from experience, as we get closer to April 12, the frenzy will start. New clothes are de rigueur and presents given and accepted are mainly clothes with cash included. People will flock to shops and pavements to buy sarongs, shirts, skirts, sarees and other items of apparel for themselves, extended family members and those working for them.
Housewives will run hither and thither among grocery stores to buy treacle and jaggery. Houses will be spring cleaned; a new pot bought for boiling milk at the auspicious time. The sewing machine whirls; the smell of hot oil and kavun and kokis fills the air. These and other delicacies were all homemade then. Beginning around two decades ago, shops started displaying mounds of kavun and other sweets and once sales were assured they boldly constructed cadjan huts to sell their ware. Lakpahana and Perera & Sons started their avurudu sales of traditional sweets to be followed by Cargills gedera yana gaman.
Celebrations remembered
An April New Year memory that assails this writer’s mind and even her sense of smell and hearing is the making of unduvel in her home in Kandy. Laisa and Samanmalie, village women of a certain caste, would arrive to take over this business starting from the pounding of rice grain. Seated on a kolomba by a wood burning fireplace on which is a pan of boiling oil, Laisa would squeeze into the pan the dough of undu and rice flour from a cloth pouch in which a buttonhole had been sewn. Once the cleverly twisted coils had danced in the boiling oil and turned a rich brown, the woman would take the unduvel out with a piece of ekel one by one and drop them in a pot of treacle. Ooooh! What a sizzle and a hiss. The treacle would infiltrate the innards of the coils, so that when eaten, the pani would ooze out filling the mouth with ambrosial sweetness.
The kurini petti, those fat bellied cylindrical rattan containers, would be filled to capacity with delicious sweets made of the best rice flour and kitul treacle home-produced from the tapped sap of the inflorescence of the palm in the compound. A sturdy swing would be strung on a strong branch of a mango tree for the young ones of the extended family who gathered for the festivities. The threshing floor or kamatha was cleared of its piles of straw after the harvest of the Maha crop and a huge kathuru onchillawa constructed by the young men of the village. The coir rope tied strips of arecanut made a contraption that looked frail and dangerous but functioned with muscled men turning a handle to send it around. It was not quite a Ferris wheel with seats rotating vertically, but the intrepid stood on planks placed at intervals and swung slowly up and down and around.
The jambu trees flaunted their bright red juicy fruit while the taller pini jambu splashed a carpet of pink flower droppings with their white fruit hidden among the leaves. The stark red erabadu blossoms tossed their heads to the beat of the rabana as the village women competed with each other to get music from the heated drum with their dexterous fingers and palms. Games were a must. Women sat indoors playing panchabello with six shells, tossing them in the air and catching then and moving an ittha across a board; or olinda kelenawa on a squat, short legged wooden bench with holes made for the red and black seeds to be moved around. The men played chuck gudu and cricket; while the more sedentary sat around playing card games while gulping toddy. Children ran around, swung on swings and of course gorged themselves on fruit and sweets. There were no organized, regimented avurudu uthsava then; celebrations were village based and spontaneous.
Changed customs and habits
The Sinhala and Tamil New Year is basically a celebration of family togetherness. Children come home to parents just before or on parana avurudhu day and stay on till the oil anointing ceremony is over and the astrologers’ dictated time for departure for employment. Thus the exodus from cities to villages and homes far away.
Customs were followed to the letter. Not so now, though most Sinhalese homes cook kiribath at the auspicious time identified by astrologers. The first meal will be cooked at the correct time facing the correct direction and prepared as prescribed. It will be partaken of, very often the mother giving each member a piece of kiribath starting with her husband. Children will bow to elders; and ganu denu will take place, exchanging coins and notes wrapped in betel. Banks are doing it now, but Mother invariably went to Suppiah Pillai’s in Kandy to get a bit more than she gave the most prosperous textile merchant in town. The temple will be visited, for the second time since during the nonagathe period of inauspiciousness between the old and the new year, only religious activities are permitted.
Mercifully these nonagathe periods where no cooking is done, no proper meal consumed, no work undertaken, even study, are shortened and astrologer-prescribed for convenience. I well remember how during my childhood this transitional period when the sun moved from the House of Pisces to that of Aries, stretched through the major part of the day. A hearth was made with three bricks in the garden and water was boiled for tea for adults and milk warmed for kids. You breakfasted or lunched on sweets and sat around satiated like a python who’d swallowed an entire goat!
Austerity, pseudo-sophistication, lack of servants and insular living where neighbours don’t know each other has struck the death knell of that delightful sight of trays of goodies under lace covers being carried from this house to that and vice versa. But thank goodness, there remain neighbourhoods which continue this fine habit of co-living and shared friendship. Let me now go and nibble a kavun with a kondé raised with an ekel and hot oil splashed on it expertly. No mould-made kavuns for me please! I end this piece wishing all you readers of the Sunday Times a very happy, prosperous and hope-renewing New Year which the Sinhalese and Tamils share so companiably.