A culinary road to Myanmar via Chennai’s Vyasarpadi

The Burmese repatriates offer a range of traditional healthy breakfast made of black rice

We walk through the narrow lanes of Burma Colony in search of black rice for breakfast. We are in Chennai’s Sastri Nagar, on 16th street to be precise, at 8am, and the lanes are busy with small restaurants and stalls dishing up dosa, idlis and puris.

Between shouts from vendors, unloading bags of vegetables for the market, Selvi David hums her favorite Tamil song. She is seated in front of a wooden table where, from 7am, she sells a traditional, black rice-based Burmese breakfast.

While the Burmese atho, bejo and mohinga are fairly well-known in the city, thanks to vendors who have been selling plates of these noodles, stuffed eggs and fish-based broth, at George Town for decades, what Selvi makes is more difficult to find. “This is an authentic Burmese breakfast made with karuppu kavuni rice,” she says. “My mother M Muniyamma taught me all these recipes. My father M Maayalagan used to run a Burmese grocery shop in this colony. He would travel to Moreh, Manipur (on the Myanmar border), to bring Burmese products as early as in 1973,” she says, adding that her parents returned from Myanmar in 1971.

Breakfast here is competitively priced between ₹15 and ₹30 per item. Selvi’s menu offers mopeto, which is a black or white rice flour dough stuffed with grated coconut and country sugar, then wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. Then there is black sticky rice, which is pressure-cooked with lobia beans and served with a topping of grated coconut and country sugar; kavuni rice porridge and babio, which consists of white peas soaked overnight, then cooked with salt.

Since 1992, Selvi and her husband, M David have been running a Burmese grocery shop stocking kavuni rice, Burmese green tea, cane hand fans, chinlone (cane balls), velvet slippers and more. In 2019, Selvi started offering a Burmese breakfast as well. Her day begins at 5.30am when she pressure cooks black rice that has been soaked overnight. She then steams white Burmese rice in an idli pot and makes black rice porridge. Demand is high, and she usually sells out in an hour.

David makes monthly trips to Moreh to restock his shop. “We source organic black kavuni rice and also white sticky rice at a cheaper price, which is why are able to sell our breakfast items at ₹20 and ₹30,” says Selvi. She is in an especially good mood today as she is getting ready to travel to Myanmar for the Sri Pelikan Muneeswaran Temple annual festival in Kyauktan, Yangon, Myanmar.

“It is a very important festival for all the Tamils of Myanmar and the repatriates. Every year, the diaspora congregates at Kyauktan. People get to know each other, network and interact during this 10-day festival. “This year I am excited to be going there for the first time, though my husband has been to that event many times,” she says.