A pot of muskeni dal

“The green tender leaves of muskeni taste sweeter after the rains. In the sun [summer], the leaves get scorched and become tough,” says Kaushalya. She is in her kitchen, an open area in the verandah of their two-room pucca house. As she talks, she adds washed lentils (arhar dal) to a pressure cooker, along with muskeni, a couple of green chilies, turmeric powder and salt.

“Muskeni bhaji [leaves] goes well with arhar [pigeon pea] and chana dal [bengal gram],” Kaushalya continues, happy to share a variety of recipes with us around muskeni leaves – a plant that grows wild in Chhattisgarh, and is often paired with lentils. While she waits for three or four whistles to blow, she preps whole garlic cloves, tomato, onion and a few dried red chillies for tempering the dal, using a paniki – a blade attached to a wooden base – used in traditional homes for cutting vegetables.

“In my village, there are so many jungli bhajis [wild greens]. My mother knows which to pick in which season. Although many of these bhajis grow all year round, it tastes the best in certain seasons,” Kaushalya explains. In Amanaka where she lives now, June to August sees a generous growth of tihri phuttu (a local variety of mushrooms) that just needs to sauteed with some onion, tomato and chillies for a tasty meal. “I take home handfuls of it. It tastes like meat,” she says.

Kaushalya Gidlehri is from Jhalap in Mahasamund district close to the mountainous forest ranges of Barnawapara. As a child she saw her mother forage and cook wild greens. She moved to Raipur after she was married in 2008 and now lives in Amanaka – a Dalit basti. “Nobody else [in the family] gathers things,” she says, and adds that her husband won’t even buy groceries. “He says green vegetables cost so much money we would rather not have any vegetables.”

Thirty-four-year-old Kaushalya works in the garden of the private residential school in Raipur, Chhattisgarh's capital. Here, like her mother, she too searches for wild leafy greens, a staple in kitchens across the state. As she walks around she points to different shrubs, creepers and bushes, and adds in a quick recipe for each: “Ullah bhaji with garlic and chillies. And bohar bhaji is best prepared with tamarind. All these bhajis grow in the paddy fields or by the canal]. Nobody cultivates them.”

For the festival of Kamarchhath, Kaushalya says, “I collect seven-eight kinds of leaves from here [inside the school campus].” This festival, observed by women in Chhattisgarh in the month of Bhado (August-September) is observed with a day-long fast praying for safe childbirth, a healthy child, and reproductive health.

“My mother sends pasahar chawal [wild red rice] gathered from our land, so I hardly buy anything for the fast,” she adds. When they break the fast, women consume vegetables, fruits and rice untouched by the plough and out of the system of commercial cultivation.

Kaushalya’s husband Jeetu, in his early forties, works as a daily wage labourer and earns around Rs. 2,000–2,500 a week while she gets a monthly salary of Rs.8,000. Their three children – a son and twins (a boy and a girl) – enjoy eating bhaji, Kaushalya smiles and says, “bhajis are so simple to prepare, even my eleven-year-old daughter knows how to make it. Just a simple tempering of chilies, garlic and tomatoes and any bhaji will taste great.”

“People who know what is what will take and eat it, others will think it is kachra [trash],” she continues, “if they did not put weedicide onto the fields, we would have wild greens up till our waists.” As she speaks, the pressure cooker sounds its final whistle. The meal is now ready.