Mitsep, Morton and more....

We inherit not only values, customs and rituals, but also appellations from our friends, neighbours, cousins, parents and grandparents. The specific words for mundane household items and experiences become a part of our everyday lives, and even when we get to know the correct words, we continue using the ones which were imbibed onto us since birth.

Take the word 'mitsep'. The not-so-high wooden cupboard with cover of wire gauze was a part of every household around two decades back, and some continue to grace dining rooms and kitchens of Assamese homes even today. Unable to find the meaning of this oft-heard word 'mitsep' in any dictionary that I came across, I consoled myself by cooking up the word "mid shelf" for this familiar piece of furniture. I even hammered this into the brain of my brother, who in turn imparted this gem of knowledge to his wife.  So it was "mid shelf", though I never contemplated why it was not "high shelf" or "low shelf". Years later, my brother excitedly messaged me from Melbourne, where he now lives, that at last he knows the correct name of ‘mitsep’; it was actually the mutated version of  "meat safe",  a ventilated cupboard (that explains the wire gauze cover) used to keep meat away from flies and other pests.

‘Mitsep’ memories are abundant among the Assamese who are in their forties now. At my ancestral home in Lahoal, Dibrugarh, we had a 'mitsep' in the kitchen, right near the earthen fire stove (souka). I doubt if it was used for storing meat; as far as I remember, it was used as a crockery unit to store breakable glass and bone-china utensils. It was also the place where ‘cream-biscuits’ were kept hidden behind a white teapot. My spouse recalls the days when his mother used to keep fried fish inside the 'mitsep' during his childhood, thereby doing something right to justify the name ‘meat safe’. This familiar yet unremarkable piece of furniture, taken for granted and placed at any available space in the vicinity of the kitchen, is an epitome of the fact that we never realize the value of something in our life until it becomes a memory. Alas! Today’s modular kitchens within the confines of high-rise apartments have no place for and have no use of this token of nostalgia.

Then there is the ‘gilas’. We have had the opportunity to attend schools which laid immense emphasis on diction, grammar and pronunciation. In our times (here I go again, talking of ‘ our good old days’!), we also read a lot of English classics and children’s books (Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to name a few). Yet, in our everyday life, we drink water in a ‘gilas’ (which is usually made of steel, the glass ones being reserved for guests) and never in a ‘glass’.

Adi Godrej will be an immensely happy man to know that every almirah (from Hindi almārī, via Portuguese from Latin armarium ‘closet, chest’.), irrespective of the make, is called "Godrej" in Assam. It's always been the "old Godrej", "keys of the Godrej" ; it's an alien feeling to hear someone talk of the "almirah that was gifted to the bride on her wedding", it's always the "Godrej".

Then there's the game ‘ice-pies’. I know that it’s an almost extinct entity now, the game. The guessing game gained a level of sophistication when my neighbour Ivy shouted ‘ice-pies’ at the top of her voice in her Assam-type house’s campus decades back.  I try to rectify my memory with the proper ‘I Spy’, but I miserably fail to do so. ‘Ice-pies’ rings familiar, feels like home.

There was a time when we did not eat chocolates or candies. It was always ‘morton’. All candies, chocolates and other sweet treats came under the common category called ‘morton’. We got a ‘morton’ when we got good marks in exams, and guests used to come with eagerly awaited morton-treats for the kids. It was ages later when Google became the one-stop solution for everything in life that I searched and found that the Allahabad Canning Ltd manufactures and markets a huge range of products under the brand name ‘MORTON’, which includes ready to eat matar paneer and mango jam. ‘Morton’ is also the name of a village in Illinois, USA.

Reminiscing is a good hobby. I have realized that the older I grow, the more nostalgic I become. Midway into this colourful and profound journey called life, I have understood that the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around me to challenge my account of things and events as I remember them, to remind me that my life is not my life, but it is merely the story I have told about my life - told to others, and most importantly, to myself. As Haruki Murakami had so correctly said, “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”