Baskarel smells strong—sharp, pungent, earthy—when soaked in water. When ground and deep-fried upon mixing with gram flour, it’s crunchy, salty, a little spicy. Priyanka Bhadani reveals her younger self’s loathing—and now fondness—for the distinct flavours of bamboo shoot.
I dreaded those few weeks of monsoon almost every year. I loved the rain, always have. I also loved playing in puddles—jumping in them. Sometimes, I would take the longer route home when it rained because I wanted to get drenched. I would pack my school bag in the raincoat meant for me, tucking it into my bicycle’s carrier.
What I despised about the monsoon was the smell that would greet me upon returning home from school. Pungent, sour, and musty, it would waft through the corridors of my ancestral house in Gaya, a pilgrim city in southern Bihar, where 50 of my family members lived together. The smell would hit me right at the ground-floor entrance of the almost 8,000 square feet house, far away from the five kitchens in our home.
When I was in high school, there were days I would stop by my friend’s house, finish math tuition, and return home only late in the evening to avoid the smell of baskarel (bamboo shoots) soaking in the water.
To cook bamboo shoots—the cylindrical or conical stem encased in husky skin, tapering towards one end—it is essential to soak them for two to three days. This does away with the inherent bitterness and naturally occurring toxins in the fresh shoots, making them edible and safe to cook with. The plant that eventually matures into the woody bamboo plant is consumed as a seasonal vegetable in its young form. In India, 50 per cent of the bamboo resources are found in the Northeast and in West Bengal, others in the Western Ghats, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as per the State of Forest Report, 2021. In Bihar, they are largely harvested in the northern part of the state. In the southern part, unfavourable weather conditions and scarce cultivation efforts meant a lower yield of bamboo.
When I was in high school, there were days I would stop by my friend’s house, finish math tuition, and return home only late in the evening to avoid the smell of baskarel (bamboo shoots) soaking in the water.
Papa, a station manager with the Indian railways for 35 years, was posted in the hamlet of Gurpa, on the outskirts of Gaya, from 1988 to 2010. He would be the first one in the village to get his hands on fresh batches of the produce every monsoon. Family members would request him to bring back at least a kilo of the tender shoots as and when he came across them in the local hatiya (weekly village market) in Gurpa.
The villagers in Gurpa, most of them small farmers growing seasonal crops and vegetables, knew how much he looked forward to the harvest every monsoon. So, they would come to Papa with the first batch of produce they cultivated—for their ‘bada babu’ (a moniker for government officials in the village that is still used today) who helped them book train tickets and ensured a smooth journey to their destination every time they travelled. My father then returned home by train—an hour and a half away—a sackful of baskarel in tow.
He usually kept the sack in the middle of the circular courtyard of our more-than-a-century-old house. A dilapidating structure, it had patches both old and new in a condition so terrible, it put most of us younger family members to shame.
From my lived experience, Gaya had started urbanising before India’s economic liberalisation in 1991. It was no longer the sleepy town my elders spoke of, where they would run amok on the streets without a care in the world. It was not the rigid textbook urbanisation; there were no multi-storeyed structures, malls or extravagant shops and eateries, no well-maintained public toilets or public parks, not many good schools and colleges either. But the population and the number of vehicles were continuously growing, and open spaces were simultaneously shrinking.
Many in the adjoining villages within the Gaya district were abandoning farming and moving towards the main city in the hopes of earning a quick buck, thanks to the tourist spots of the Mangla Gauri and Vishnupad temples in Gaya and the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya. As a result, some of the cherished seasonal farm produce, including baskarel, were hard to find in the local markets. With little to no bamboo shoots available in the city markets, everyone looked forward to Papa’s scores from his jungle posting.
After reaching home, Papa would start calling out to his cousins, aunts, and sisters-in-law—Gudiya, Rajni, Gudli, Chaachi, Anita, Kanchan—in Magahi, the local dialect spoken in large parts of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, to come and fetch the baskarel, “Dekh kochi lailiyo he! Aake le jaahin…!”
Everyone would gather around, excited. Papa would return home with these local goodies multiple times in a year. In the monsoon, he brought back not just baskarel, but also jamun (Indian blackberry) and khaksa (spiny gourd), and tecnus or kukdi (varieties of mushrooms). After the monsoon, kudrum ka saag and phool (leaves and flowers of a yam-like plant, commonly known as air potato) and the nutty chiraunji (cuddapah almond) could also be found.
In the monsoon, he brought back not just baskarel, but also jamun (Indian blackberry) and khaksa (spiny gourd), and tecnus or kukdi (varieties of mushrooms).
In the winter, he brought bundles of leafy greens like sarson ka saag and bags full of amla (Indian gooseberry). In the spring, there were jholas weighed down by ber (Indian jujube). In summer, there was bel (stone apple) and achaari aam (a variety of small mangoes to make pickles). Summers were also about semal ka ruee (cotton from red silk cotton tree). In fact, for many years, everyone in the family stuffed pillows with the cotton Papa got from the jungles of Gurpa.
These gatherings in the courtyard brought with them a lot of laughter and banter, before everyone collected their share of the bounty. The baskarel shoots would then be treated to a tedious process—washed, sometimes peeled too (depending on the thickness of the upper layer), and cut into uniformly-sized pieces before soaking in a big steel bucket of water. Papa and Maa would carry out this routine together. He also packed a big bunch of whole and unsoaked baskarel to be sent to Maa’s maternal house on the neighbouring street.
Within the next three days, a musty smell would envelop the entire house. The soaked, softened shoots were then ground on a sil-batta (grinding stone), mixed with besan (sometimes chaurathha, or rice flour), chilli powder, and coriander leaves to form a soft dough, and deep-fried in a kadhai full of mustard oil.
I despised what everyone relished. It wasn’t just the smell of baskarel; I was also put off by its fibrous texture the few times Maa force-fed it to me. I looked for opportunities to escape from the house, and I mostly did manage to do so. “Pata nah kaisen ladki hai, kuch achhe na lagey hai ekra,” my grandmother groaned, even though I wasn’t a particularly picky eater. (“I don’t know what kind of girl she is; she doesn’t like anything.”)
Papa hasn’t been to Gaya in the last three-and-a-half years. He hasn’t eaten a lot of what he used to eagerly bring back for everyone for so many years. My parents moved to Delhi in 2017 for Maa’s treatment. Maa is no more. Papa isn’t very enthusiastic about going to his hometown where he spent almost his entire life, barring a few years when he lived in Mahua Milan in Palamu district, another jungle village, in present-day Jharkhand.
But he does visit the local sabzi market in our neighbourhood in Uttar Pradesh’s Indirapuram—a satellite town in Ghaziabad—every evening, sometimes lucky enough to find some of the produce he loves. He often finds khaksa. He once returned home with a sense of achievement when he found kudrum ke phool. But he hasn’t ever found baskarel. Sometimes, when a wave of nostalgia hits him, he talks of its taste and the elaborate cooking process it entails during the monsoon months.
Last August, I was in Gaya for an assignment. The city felt more crowded than ever. Pavements were lined with several vendors selling wares of all kinds, leaving little room to walk. It seems that the central government has taken notice of the region’s development—the 2024 Union Budget announced a plan to develop the Vishnupad and Mahabodhi Temples into major corridors, similar to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi.
Given it was the monsoon season, I found a few vendors sitting with baskets of baskarel. The stems were pristine—shinier and whiter than what I remembered. What Papa got back in the day used to be muddy, yellowish or brownish in hue, and required rounds of thorough washing. I bought two kilos to bring back home.
He didn't even wait for three days for the stems to soften. I woke up the next morning to the whirring of the mixer grinder. We don’t have a sil-batta here in our small apartment, so he made do. He was ardently prepping to make pakoras.
Papa’s reaction was almost childlike; I hadn’t seen him so happy in a long time. He got to work immediately—washing, chopping, and soaking the baskarel. He didn’t even wait for three days for the stems to soften. I woke up the next morning to the whirring of the mixer grinder. We don’t have a sil-batta here in our small apartment, so he made do. He was ardently prepping to make pakoras.
The smell had permeated every corner of the apartment. Strangely, I found it fragrant now—bachpan ki sugandh—laced with nostalgia. I took a chunky bite from the first batch of pakoras that emerged from the sizzling mustard oil. I liked them—crispy, salty, spicy, and with a grainy but comfortingly earthy texture that I think I had only imagined all along to be bad.
Priyanka Bhadani has spent over 13 years as a journalist, writing features and entertainment stories for news publications in Delhi and Mumbai. She now runs a boutique communications agency and is pursuing a postgraduate degree in Public Policy and Sustainable Development from TERI School of Advanced Studies, exploring how policy and culture intersect to shape society.
Find the recipe for baskarel pakora here.
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