KATRAN कतरन

 

LT COL NOEL ELLIS

 

31/III/2024

 

What comes to your mind if I say ‘कतरन’ (Cutrun)? Most of us won’t know what it means. Probably, people belonging to UP/MP might relate to it. It was a very commonly used term in the days of yore.

 

‘Katran’ means cutting, piece or shred. It is what is leftover, unwanted and unused. Mostly, in relation to cloth or paper.

 

In layman's terms कतरन were rags, waste cloth, especially leftovers with tailors, who after cutting the cloth to the measurements had shreds and fragments that were thrown away. Those cuttings were in a haphazard pattern but were bits of extra/wasted cloth during the garment stitching process.

 

There is another word called ‘Cut Piece’. That I shall discuss sometime else. Suffice to say, one can call it a sort of कतरन and it used to be a pre-measured cloth from which you could make a garment like a shirt or a pair of pants. Generally, the tailor would tell you that pants for a normal person could be made in ‘ek-bees’. All those who used the services of a tailor to get pants stitched would know.

 

One of my Mausi was an expert in utilising Katran. I remember her making a whole cover of a quilt out of it. Painstakingly stitching pieces of cloth one by one into a spread of more than a bedsheet size. Thereafter, joining them  into the shape of a cover of that quilt. This kept the quilt safe from dust plus added another layer of cloth to trap the warmth inside. It looked like today’s ‘designer wear’ and increased the life of the quilt at throw away prices.

 

Aunty would take us all to a कतरन market in Kanpur close to ‘Elgin Mills’. Cloth merchants were famous for keeping the last bits of their ‘Thaan’ (complete roll of cloth). Leftover pieces were sold dirt cheap and poor people or ‘shaukeen’ people like my aunt were their customers. Bargain was still done to further reduce prices as these remnants would go unsold and the cloth merchant would love to extract the last penny out of every centimetre of cloth.

 

Again, people might not remember a word called ‘Paiband’ पैबंद, which means a patch or piece of material to cover a hole or mend a tear. In the good old days, one used to see beggars with patches of different coloured cloth pieces stitched on their garments. Katran was also used for covering sheared and torn garments.

 

There used to be a very qualified person who could do ‘Rafoo’ रफ़ू, which means darning or mending. ‘Khota’ not the Punjabi word for a donkey, but ‘khota lag jana’, again this phrase I heard in UP and more so from my mom who used to get damn annoyed when we would nick our pants or shirts when it got stuck in a nail and a small tear could be seen. I wish I could send all people wearing torn clothes today to a darner. I just can’t stand people wearing shredded jeans.

 

Services of a ‘rafoogar’ were commonly used who would blend it with such expertise that to locate that shear needed a keen eye. Such people now are almost extinct. Ours would probably be the last generation to have utilised their facilities.

 

Why the idea of this article came to my mind was we have nicknamed one of our Hibiscus flowers as ‘Katran’.

 

It is a  red coloured hibiscus flower. Why we love it is because the edges of the flower seem to have been trimmed by a pair of scissors in a zig-zag pattern resembling Katran. Like we used to cut sides of paper in our craft class. It is flowering now. The plant appears to have so many Katran stuck on its green foliage.

 

My mom, being from UP used these words often. Today, through this flower, I remembered her and her sis so fondly. God bless their souls.

 

These days people are recycling leftover pieces of cloth and converting them into items of daily use. It is good to see things being recycled and reused. In the good old days, clothes were never thrown away. They were handed over from generation to generation. In case, due to a mishap, the garment took a shear, it was repaired and reused till sold to a person who would exchange clothing items with utensils.

 

Katran is doing well in our garden. Thanks to it, I was reminded of so many words which made me drift into nostalgia. I remember vividly, when we would get a small patch of leather stitched to the sides of our OP/PT shoes from a cobbler due to overuse of shoes when the sides got perforated. We had only one pair those days.

 

Would that piece also qualify as Katran? I wonder!!!!!!!

 

JAI HIND

©® NOEL ELLIS