Every winter, right after the sun sets, the pitha seller of Qismat Square arrives at her spot.
Nobody knows her name or age. She is “khala” or “nani” to those who like her, and “hag” or “old bat” to those who don’t. She doesn’t mind either. She’s nobody’s aunt, nobody’s granny. She’s just a gaunt old woman who sells steamed cakes to whoever desires, to whoever pays. Merchants and their bibliophile customers from the nearby secondhand bookshops. The almost penniless potters and their dying craft on the pavement behind her. Rich people and their spoiled pets from the veterinary clinic on the other side of the square. Sometimes, even the cops from the station across the road.
They all know her as the pitha seller of Qismat Square. Nothing else. That doesn’t mean no one gets curious. Whenever someone asks for her name, she gives a toothy smile and mumbles, “What use is my name to you?” If the person who asked is persistent, she simply hands them a plate of freshly steamed pitha. No one can resist them, no matter how hard they try.
Tonight, she arrives at her usual spot in front of the rickety potter stalls, right by the pavement. Not far from her, several other vendors have settled down. Roasted corn straight from the cob. Crispy balls of fuchka stuffed with spicy chickpea mash and topped with a tangy tamarind sauce. One tea seller sits with his giant flask of hot chai and plastic cups. In two clear plastic bags, he carries toast biscuits and oily buns. Everyone is busy with their customers, who are busy eating and chatting.
Tonight’s menu is Patishapta pitha. The old woman stands stooped over her four little earthen stoves. She feeds the fire one chopped wood after another. With her other hand, she carefully pours the thin rice flour batter on the flat tawa. She expertly rotates it with the handle until the batter has spread to all corners of the frying pan. Once she’s happy with the flame, she smears a dollop of thick, creamy kheer and folds the crêpe-thin pitha in half.
“That looks tasty, khala,” says a rough voice.
The pitha seller doesn’t look up but the corner of her lips lifts slightly. She folds the pitha one more time, then serves it on a plate. “Here you go, sir,” she says. Fake reverence drips from her voice.
The customer is almost double her size, both in height and status. His dark uniform and leather gun holster keep the others away, lest they offend a cop. The officer smiles after one bite into the piping hot pitha. “Delicious, just as always,” he says. “This is why I come to you, the only vendor who makes Patishapta pitha. No one else makes them. Says the milk to make the kheer fillings is too expensive.”
Of course they do, thinks the pitha seller. We give you a cake, we get demands for fillings.
The wizened woman quickly makes more pitha. The officer gobbles them up. That keeps him busy and quiet. The sooner he’s done, the quicker he’ll leave, and the faster the other customers will order. Nobody dares to come near the cop who’s just beaten and dragged a peanut vendor to the station across the road. That guy will spend the night in a cell. How dare he not comply when a cop demands one thousand taka from him.
How dare indeed, thinks the pitha seller.
The cop is finally done. Six Patishapta pithas in half an hour. He’s never eaten so many in one go before. The beating must’ve made him hungry. The pitha seller doesn’t meet his eyes as he wipes his lips with a handkerchief. She does catch him pocketing the cloth and not bringing out his wallet. He walks away, away, back to his station.
The pitha seller tucks away one fifty-taka and one ten-taka note in the pouch around her waist. By the time she zips it up, the cop has disappeared inside the station gate. He hasn’t yet noticed the two notes missing from his wallet.
Afterwards, three other customers visit her cart. They ask for the same thing: crêpe-thin Patishapta pitha with light brown kheer fillings.
The pitha seller gets back to work. So enraptured by her food, nobody notices her reversed feet, with the toes at the back while the heels face the front, covered up with her saree’s hem.
One night, the pitha seller finds herself being shadowed after she’s done for the night. She’s never once looked back, but she knows. Her follower, an overly curious hijra woman, is cautious, keeping her distance. The transwoman even pretends to look elsewhere when the pitha seller stops to cross the road. But once they reach Rangan Road, an elite shopping avenue, the hijra woman loses her target. She searches every place the pitha seller could have gone, but it’s all in vain.
The next night, the hijra woman hesitantly returns. Embarrassment warms her face like her homespun clothes warm up the rest of her, but she’s craving some pitha now. Tonight’s menu is Bhapa pitha, the best winter night snack there can ever be. She orders two.
The pitha seller fills an earthen mold cup halfway with finely ground rice flour. From a small pot, she scoops up some dark brown jaggery fillings, tops it off with one more layer of rice flour, followed by some coconut shavings, then wraps the uncooked pitha and its mold cup with a white muslin cloth.
“That cup looks so fine,” the hijra woman says, “especially the patterns on the outside, like water waves.”
“Wanna know a secret?” The pitha seller moves her crooked finger in a “come hither” gesture. When the younger woman gets closer, the pitha seller whispers, “It’s a Tatini cup. Anything hot you put in it, the taste soaks into the inner wall, giving you the rich taste of soil after rain.”
“What?! How? Didn’t the Brits destroy that pottery trade hundreds of years ago?”
“Trade secret.”
The hijra woman pouts. “Fine, you old bat, keep your secrets. I bet you stole it from some museum.”
If only you knew, the old woman thinks. Two hundred years is nothing to an old bat like me.
She quietly puts the wrapped cup of pitha on an earthen Tatini lid, fashioned to hold four cups at a time. It sits on top of her largest pot. Inside, water bubbles away, while its steam gently cooks the Bhapa pitha. The old woman covers the earthen lid with a metal one. In a minute, she wraps up one more Bhapa pitha and steams it to perfection. She serves the two rice cakes on a plate to her patient customer.
The Bhapa pitha crumbles as soon as it is bitten. Against the lightly salted rice flour, the sweet jaggery and the crunchy coconut create the best combination. In an instant, the homely pitha erases the day’s woes from the mind of the hijra woman, until the pitha seller asks about it.
The younger woman crumbles like her favorite winter night snack. “Oh, you know, the typical toils, not much earning. I feel like a beggar.”
“Sadly, dearie, all of you are.”
“Not on purpose. Nobody wants to hire us. Have to live off of other people’s goodwill.” And what goodwill? Only ten or twenty taka, and that’s from those who are feeling a little charitable. The rest shoo them away as if they were gnats. Their leader always wants a share of their earnings as well, in exchange for shelter, community, and protection. “What else can we do? If we ask for more money, they hit us, humiliate us, and the cops have a field day.”
The pitha seller nods. Her young customer eats in silence. When she’s done, she brings out the payment from her blue cardigan. “Here you go.”
The pitha seller smooths up the crumpled note. “Is my pitha so good that you reward me with a week’s money for groceries, child?”
“What?”
The old woman holds up the paper note. “I don’t have any change for one thousand taka, dearie.”
The hijra woman snatches it. “But…” She blinks with her mouth open. How did she have a one-thousand taka note? She almost never makes one thousand in a day. She tries to remember who had given it to her. That rich woman in a car heading to a wedding? Or that group of youngsters in a jeep going for a hiking trip? She can’t remember. Whoever it was hadn’t said anything. Typically, when people give a large sum of alms, they like to gloat. But everyone she met today was either disgusted or indifferent. Maybe it was a mistake?
“Keep it, girl,” the pitha seller says. “Just give me my due if you have it.”
The hijra woman finds two ten-taka notes, checks them to make sure they’re actually ten-taka notes, and hands them over. She folds and tucks the one-thousand taka note in her blouse under the cardigan. Her precious money. Her lifeline for a week, almost. She heads straight home and doesn’t come back to the square until next Friday.
Behind her, the pitha seller attends to her other customers.
No one notices when she lifts the metal lid, no mittens or rags to hold them, her flesh as unscathed as ever.
It’s been a full hour since the cops dragged the hijra woman away for daring to refuse the officer’s demand that she strip in public to prove her gender. Despite the distance, the pitha seller can hear the cries and screams the younger woman lets out from her cell. The officer must be hell-bent tonight.
A few minutes later, the officer arrives for his nightly treat of pitha. He wipes his face with his handkerchief and bends to inspect the front of the cart. Though its sides are boarded up with brown, worn pieces of wood, a glass shelf sits at the front. It proudly displays the twenty types of bharta, achar, and chutneys the old woman serves with her Chitui pitha, tonight’s menu. Though a worn board at the front says, “No egg Chitui” in chalk, the officer orders four of them with one dollop of the twenty mashes and pickles on display. His special request: smear one dollop of bharta and achar on each pitha, five smears on each. No two pitha will have the same mash or pickle. He wants to try out everything.
The pitha seller gets to work. From one of the three pots in the middle, she ladles out thin, white batter for the Chitui pitha.
“That looks like milk,” the officer comments. “What is it?”
“Rice flour, water, and a pinch of salt.” She pours the batter, cracks an egg on top of the white batter pooled at the bottom of the deep pan, then puts on the lid. “How is the girl?” she asks.
He grunts. “Don’t ask.”
After a few minutes, the first pitha is done. A steamed, sunny-side-up egg sits primly on top of the fluffy white pancake. She puts it on a plate and, as instructed, smears each of the bharta and achar on the pitha’s edges. She repeats the process three more times and serves him four plates of pitha.
As the officer eats, he doesn’t notice the old woman making an extra egg Chitui. She serves it on a plate and puts it aside. By the time the cop is done with his meal, the extra plate of pitha is gone.
“Delicious as always, khala.” Once again, he leaves without a backward glance, unaware that his wallet is now as empty as a politician’s heart. Once again, the pitha seller folds up four one-thousand taka notes in her pouch, much more than the Chitui pitha’s ten-taka price. She clears away the five dirty plates and tends to her other customers. Nobody else orders the egg option. They’ve missed her cooking the exception minutes ago, the same way the officer always misses her payment method.
Two hours pass by. The officer has long since gone home. Just as the pitha seller is making her twentieth eggless Chitui, two rickshaws appear at the station gate.
While the people around her have long since forgotten about the woman, her fellow hijras haven’t. Their leader has come with a few influential people. Four hijra women help the pitha seller’s young customer through the gate and onto one of the rickshaws. The onlookers gawp at her. How has she been released so quickly? How come she bears no sign of the beatings she must have gone through? The rickshaws cross the road and stop before the pitha cart. The hijras’ leader pays the elderly vendor with a ten-taka note.
“Thanks for the pitha,” her young customer says. “I thought you didn’t make egg Chitui, Nani.”
“I don’t,” the old woman mumbles.
The next day, the officer doesn’t come to the station. He’s been hospitalized after waking up in the morning with injuries and broken bones, twenty spots in total, almost as if someone had beaten him black and blue in his sleep. By the time he recovers and returns to his post, his bank balance has gone down significantly.
He still limps his way across the road. Under a lit lamp post, the pitha seller of Qismat Square welcomes him with a plate of freshly steamed pitha and no shadow of her own.
Maria Hossain (she/her) is a writer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her work has previously appeared in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge.
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