Festivals, traditions, memories, nostalgia…and the modak mold

Ganapati Bappa Morya! Today is Ganesh Chaturthi. I decide to make modak. I look everywhere for the modak mold. I cannot find it. I bought it many years ago. I have never used it. I remember why.

The first time I make modak with my kid, she squeals, “Modak dough is just like Playdoh”. And much to the disapproval of an older grandmother somewhere, surfboards, flowers, animals, and other shapes are made. Some may or may not have been stuffed with the sweet coconut filling and then steamed.

Ganesh Chaturthi is often towards the end of summer break. My kid and I spend hours shaping the modak by hand. We never use the mold.

Discussions and negotiations may have ensued as to why only the modak-shaped-modaks are put before Ganesha. I tell her that while I may not be particularly religious, I don’t want to stretch it too far. Those disapproving grandmothers somewhere may haunt me in my sleep. That is how things are supposed to be, I say. She asks why. I don’t have the best answer. Tradition, I suppose. She contemplates and then shrugs.

It is a tradition, our tradition, and now a distant memory. Hours spent in the kitchen molding the sticky dough into modak and other shapes. The pure white dough oftentimes no longer staying pure white, the modak often gangly and awkward looking, leaning this way, or that way, too fat, or too thin, a mouth occasionally open. Again, surely not what some grandmother somewhere will want to hear of. 

And in their imperfection, is a lot of laughter and a lot of sticky mess. I may not have taught my girl how to make perfect modak, but I know that she will someday have similar, even if imperfect traditions with her family and friends. Of modak, or other things.

Things change. Things move. Memories are sweet little nuggets in time. Sweet little nuggets that are fun and effervescent. And it may be best to let them remain so – in the past.

Nostalgia is fun. Nostalgia can also make today seem heavy. Best to move away from the nostalgia, I decide. I decide to search again for the modak mold.

And if I don’t find it, I will buy a new one next time I go to India. I may never watch my kid make skateboards out of modak dough again (the disapproving grandmothers somewhere can heave a sigh of relief), and that’s quite okay.

Instead, I will get a new modak mold and make way fewer modak than we did and appreciate the simplicity and the new way of doing things. Of change and of different stages of life.

In that maybe I will learn to acknowledge that change is simply that - change. It need not be loss, and there’s nothing to recover. For with change comes the new as well. And that may be welcome too.