Swale, Pakori And More: The Diwali Food Staples In My Garhwali Home

Every morning of Diwali, we were woken up against our will, all in the name of becoming brand new human beings. Wear new clothes, clean the house once more, and then simply wait for the evening aarti. 

I was never into theatrics. Rangolis were beyond me. Still, I made the paper torans, drew a rangoli from the leftover Holi colours, and even lit the diyas. Remember those diya pictures people would take with their phone cameras to post? That is a Diwali core memory.

For most households in Delhi, this would be an ordinary ritual. But for the Uttarakhandi community living here, the festival had a different protagonist - the food. My mumma would spend hours in the kitchen, with my papa helping her make swalas, pakoris, and potato crisps. This was our dinner, and our breakfast the next morning. 

Coming Home To Garhwali Cuisine

I remember growing up with a quiet disdain for most pahadi food. I had strong feelings against jhangora, that tiny millet-like rice, arsa, a traditional sweet dish with a wild fan following, and outright hatred for kaphali, a saag made from spinach. My parents loved these dishes; I couldn’t stand them. For them, it was a way to embrace their mountains in the harsh loneliness of a metro city. For me, it was an alien concept. Recently, at a tasting at Loya, The Taj Mahal Palace, I came face to face with a menu that celebrated my roots. The pisyun loon paneer was simply out of this world, and it made me think of all those times I turned away from food that carried so much history, care, and love.

It was only when I moved to Dehradun for my higher studies that I truly came closer to Garhwali cuisine, and, in many ways, to myself. I would spend weekends at my Tai's home, eating everything from chainsu to gahat ki dal, and go on trips across Uttarakhand. I once stayed at my Bua’s house, where she introduced me to a superior version of the swala. It was fluffier, more flavourful, and served with ghee made from the milk of her own cows.

On my visits to our home in Baagi, I would watch my brothers and the men of the house take the reins when mutton or chicken gravy was being cooked. What a sight that was! A group of men gathered around an angithi under the stars, some tending to the fire, others chopping and prepping, while the meat simmered in a large pot. The ingredients often came from just behind the house. It was a meal that was made to nourish the soul and remove the burdens of the day.

One thing about Garhwali food is that it isn’t dramatic. You won’t find many complex dishes that take days to make. What you will find, though, are recipes designed for the rhythm of mountain life. Meals that can be made when you have a hungry child waiting, while you work the fields and survive the hardships of the mountains. That’s where the subtle beauty of pisyun loon comes from. It’s something you can eat with leftover rotis while your mother toils in the fields and your father is away, a migrant in some big city, making ends meet.

The mountain people so often romanticise great suffering in their laps, but I won’t talk about that today. Today I will talk about the finer things in life, the privilege of being home, and the love I feel for the food I enjoy every year. As I sit in the comfort of my home, having travelled many a mile on a Saturday night from Mumbai, typing away, all I can imagine is the smell of urad dal being ground into that smushy batter, and the ghee melting over my swala on Diwali night.

The Ritual of Swalas And Pakoris

If you want to understand how important these swalas and pakoris are to us, let me paint you a picture. If there’s any auspicious event in the family, you can bet these two dishes will make an appearance. Even the process of making a dal pakori is a ritual. Urad dal is washed, soaked overnight, and then comes the heavy lifting. It’s ground into a coarse yet smooth batter on a silbatta, the lifeline of Uttarakhandi cooking. We make pisyun loon on it, grind all our chutneys on it, and once upon a time, men and women would spend entire afternoons bent over that stone slab.

Now, of course, there are machines. But I’ve seen the process in a few weddings. Once, on a whim, I even tried it myself and had a sore arm the next day. The dal pakoris are shaped like tiny doughnuts, with black or white sesame seeds pressed in intervals before being fried till golden and crisp. Every year, my parents grind the dal, swearing they’ll make only enough for our home. Yet somehow, every year, we end up making enough to feed the whole neighbourhood. So do our neighbours. The funny part? After all that effort, we simply exchange plates with one another. I barely get to eat three pakoris from our own batch, but I make up for it with the ones our relatives and neighbours send over. You see, pahadis are not hard to find in East Delhi.

And then comes the swala; the humble yet divine swala. It’s a puffed paratha stuffed with a potato filling, but instead of being cooked on a tawa, it’s fried in a kadhai. You can pair it with dahi, ghee, or chutney and personally, I love it with lots of ghee. One bite, and you’re in food heaven. There’s even a sweeter version, filled with sugar instead of potatoes, and it’s the kind of comfort that lingers in the soul.

Somewhere between growing up in Delhi and moving to Mumbai, I have realised that Diwali isn’t complete without the familiar sounds and scents of home, the hum of conversation, the clatter from the kitchen, and a few fights between us siblings. The swala may very well be the reason I track flights and trains to make advance tickets for Diwali. The older I get, the more I understand that these small, ordinary things (which can sometimes be food) are what anchor us. Maybe that’s what festivals really are, a way of carrying fragments of where we come from, of holding on to love and memory in their simplest forms, of finding home not in a place, but in moments that follow us wherever we go.