Love, Loss, and What We Ate Read online

  My grandfather kept the keys to the Godrej—a set of five, each with a different number written on its bow—in his breast pocket. When he napped in the afternoon, he’d slip the set under his pillow. Occasionally, I noticed my grandmother extract a set from under her sari. I was never sure whether there were two sets or one. When you asked one of them, the other one had the keys. Or they weren’t sure where they were. This might have been deliberate, a sleight of hand.

  I did know that there was one key that only my grandmother possessed. Because within this chamber of secrets was another, a drawer to which my grandmother alone had access. This key hung on her thali, a sort of necklace that Hindu husbands tie around the necks of their wives to mark the marriage. They can be elaborate and bejeweled or as simple as a cord or string with an ornament attached. I admired my grandmother’s, a braided gold rope, as thick as a haricot vert, with gold beads and two flat, square charms with forked bottoms and an insignia welded into the center of each. Yet part of me can’t help but see the thali as a way to claim property, a beautiful dog collar. You almost expect that if you were to look closely, you’d find in small print, “If found, please return to . . .” I suppose you could say the same of a wedding ring, though both spouses wear those.

  As they did with many aspects of the female South Indian uniform, women found ways to employ the thali for quotidian convenience. Some kept safety pins on their thalis, in case someone lost a button or a young girl needed help fastening her sari. Like the contents of the Godrej, the keys and the ornaments of the thali were often invisible to me, hidden as they were in my grandmother’s cavernous cleavage or tucked between her sari and blouse.

  I’m not sure even my grandfather knew what was in that drawer. And I’m not sure he cared. But I did. From my prowling, I knew that it contained her good jewelry, my grandfather’s watches, his beloved tortoiseshell fountain pen, and our passports, along with other important documents. There were letters, too, from dead relatives, or aerogrammes from my mother in America, detailing her life and other things she observed in her new culture that I had yet to face. I was not allowed to read them, but my mom’s letters were read to me often. The drawer also contained all the beauty-related goodies, from powder puffs to perfume, that I’d ferried from the U.S. in my suitcase. These had to be kept from me and Neela, otherwise we’d burn through them during our Kabuki-appropriate grooming sessions. My grandmother wore very little makeup. Most days, she swiped the rim of each eye with a paste of homemade black kohl, rubbing any excess into her hair. If I was lucky enough to be nearby when she opened the drawer on the day of an occasion worthy of a little more primping, I might get more than a peek. She’d sometimes call me over as she applied her powder, and I’d stand at her knees while the powder fell around me like snow.

  The birth of my cousin Rohit, Rajni’s brother and the spawn of Aunt Bhanu and Uncle Vichu, did little to weaken the female stranglehold on our home. We vastly outnumbered the men. The main activity of the women in my household was cooking or preparing to cook. We’d all gather on the floor of the dining room or kitchen while the men sat reading the paper on the veranda at the end of the day. My grandmother sat hunched over an old wood coconut grater, an aruvamanai, steadying the wooden block with her knee as she scraped the fruit against its perpendicular blade and white shavings fell onto a plate underneath. My aunts trimmed, peeled, and sliced potatoes—always in their palms, not on a cutting board. I sat transfixed, more so by the display than the food. While these quietly focused women bent over to do their work, the ends, or pallus, of their saris dipped down and the world was revealed to me. Indian women were extremely demure and rarely showed any skin. To get a glimpse of their mysterious cleavage was very unusual. It meant they had their guard down, or that they had accepted you into their female coven. One day, I watched the same ritual of cutting vegetables before the cooking started at my great-aunt Chinnu’s house. Her housekeeper, Kalyani, was a dark-skinned, thickly built woman (today she’d be considered a brick house), and that day as she chopped, I caught a glimpse of her breasts jiggling as the sharp smell of green chilies tickled my nose. I remember feeling a quiver in my stomach, an almost sexual thrill. Later, when Kalyani had her first child, she would let me watch as she breast-fed in the storeroom.

  In the kitchen, my grandmother wielded a large iron ladle, blackened over time and permanently greasy at the base of its long handle, which she used for frying (for some reason called “tempering” in Indian recipes) black mustard seeds and other spices. First, she poured oil into the ladle, then held it over the stovetop flame. When the oil was good and hot, she added mustard seeds, dried red chilies, then curry leaves and a pounded, powdered resin called asafoetida. The distinct smell of mustard seeds and asafoetida frying, along with that of curry leaves, is what distinguishes southern from northern Indian food to me. The popping seeds also act as a sort of low-tech timer to tell you when the spices are sufficiently roasted. At the first crackle and pop, my grandmother would whisk the ladle away and add the oil mixture to whatever dish she was making. We all knew to stay clear of that scalding-hot ladle, with its contents smoking. If we were particularly hungry and stalking her like vultures, we’d cut a wide path around her until she delivered those spices to a pot of food. The familiar hushed sizzle, like the sound of a hot pan placed in a sink full of water, meant it was about time to eat.

  This ritual would immediately precede the serving of many dishes, such as rasam, a thin soup made with tamarind; sambar, a soupy lentil stew; or, my favorite, thayir sadam, a cool, savory porridge of salted yogurt and rice. Thayir sadam is the ultimate South Indian comfort food. The anytime treat costs pennies to make and fills you up, thanks to a healthy combo of protein and carbs. It would be ladled into our lunch boxes during the winter months. In the hot season, it would be dinner, eaten after we returned home, sweaty from playing down the lane.

  Every housewife had her own special concoction that she mixed into yogurt rice. My mom fried freshly minced ginger and green chilies; my aunt added fresh pomegranate seeds and chopped cilantro; and others served it plain with just a spoonful of fiery Indian pickles made from green mango, sorrel, or lime. Few versions were anything but comforting and delightful, though my grandmother had the magic touch. With the contents of her iron ladle—mustard seeds and the like, plus perhaps crunchy fried lentils or even pieces of lotus root cured with spices, dried in the sun, and brought over from my grandfather’s village, Palghat, in Kerala—she would turn rice and yogurt into a meal that half a dozen kids would greedily lick from their cupped fingers. You’d smell the spices frying or hear the mustard seeds popping and know: T-minus a few minutes to thayir sadam. When there was plenty of yogurt, the dish was creamy and thick. When there wasn’t and she stretched the yogurt with milk and water, it was liquid and thin.

  In India, yogurt is almost always homemade. It’s easy, really. My aunts would boil milk (raw and unhomogenized), let it cool to room temperature, and add a bit of yesterday’s yogurt, the starter reserved for this purpose. They’d cover the mixture and let it sit overnight, until the cultures did their work and the milk soured and thickened. Because each batch of new yogurt contains some of yesterday’s yogurt, and because this process happens daily for many years, “yesterday” is sort of a misnomer. The yogurt used to start each new batch is, in essence, many years old itself and becomes a kind of family property. Young brides, for instance, will take a spoonful of their mother’s yogurt to their marital home.

  My grandmother would set her yogurt in a “quiet” part of the kitchen. As my culinary universe expanded, I assumed that this “quiet” suggested some delicate process at work, one similar to the rising of a soufflé, which French chefs semi-jokingly request that you not disturb by talking while it is in the oven. Yet now I’m sure she meant “quiet,” as in a place where none of us kids would disturb it with our jostling and shoving. I was the worst, she tells me. I would routinely knock over the yogurt as I climbed up to reach for the pickle jar
s above the counter. To keep it safe, she moved it farther back, into the darker part of the kitchen counter. I assumed that the darkness also somehow assisted in the yogurt-making process. But it was really just about keeping the yogurt safe. You see, there were lizards lurking in the dark and I was scared of them. Or, as my grandmother says, “The lizards were quietly guarding the curds for me.”

  Her strategy might have kept me away from the yogurt, but I still spent plenty of time in the kitchen and the attached storeroom where larger amounts of surplus pickles were kept. On the top pantry shelf, above the jute sacks of rice and lentils and drums of sliced dried lotus root, was a row of glass jars containing a deliriously tempting array of pickles. In the kitchen, there were just a few varieties, but here they taunted me with their number. There were green-mango pickles, lime pickles, and ginger pickles. There were pickles made from young jackfruit, sorrel, tamarind, gooseberry, and red chilies stuffed with cumin and fennel seeds. These Indian pickles were much more complex than the vinegary pickled vegetables in the West. They were pickled in mustard oil or sesame oil, with fenugreek and all sorts of spices mixed in a certain order in a certain proportion that changed with the whim and preference of my grandmother. When relatives came from Kerala or Tanjore or my uncle Ravi visited from Delhi, we were brought pickles from other regions my grandparents maintained a hankering for.

  yogurt rice

  Serves 8 to 10

  5 cups cooked white Basmati rice

  4 cups plain whole-milk yogurt

  1½ teaspoons salt

  2 cups peeled and diced English cucumbers or 2 cups fresh pomegranate seeds

  ¼ cup canola oil

  2 tablespoons white gram lentils (urad dal, found at Indian grocery stores)

  2 teaspoons black mustard seeds

  ½ teaspoon asafoetida powder (found at Indian grocery stores)

  1 to 2 medium serrano chilies with seeds, diced, or more to taste

  1 dozen fresh medium curry leaves, torn into small pieces

  In a large bowl, combine the rice, yogurt, and salt, kneading them together with your hands. Then stir in the cucumber (in spring and summer) or the pomegranate seeds (in fall and winter). Set aside.

  In a small sauté pan, heat the canola oil over medium heat. After a few minutes, when the oil is hot and shimmering, add in the lentils. When they’re just beginning to turn golden (after about 3 minutes), add in the mustard seeds and asafoetida powder. Stir briefly. You will hear a popping sound when the mustard seeds begin to cook.

  After just a minute, when the popping becomes more frequent, add in the chilies and curry leaves. Stir for 1 to 2 minutes, then remove the pan from heat.

  Pour the lentil-mustard oil over the rice mixture and stir well with a spoon.

  This dish should be served at room temperature or cold, and it’s great for a summer lunch or dinner. If you’re making it ahead, just stir in a bit of water to loosen it up before serving; it should have a porridge- or oatmeal-like consistency.

  I couldn’t resist their siren song and once, in the quiet of the afternoon, I set out to make them mine with disastrous results. I was a good climber, still too small to be burdened by my weight, so up I went, from shelf to shelf like a temple monkey. When I was close enough, I stretched to grab a jar and, slick with oil, it slipped from my grasp and shattered. Glass and turmeric-yellow oil were everywhere. Too afraid to call out and summon my angry aunt Bhanu, too afraid of the broken glass to descend, I froze there, hanging on to the ledge for what seemed like ten minutes before Neela opened the door and rescued me.

  In the summer, as long as the yogurt survived our rambunctiousness, we would often gather around Rajima on the cool green marble floor in a semicircle and she’d place in front of each of us a little steel bowl called a katori. She presided over a larger steel bowl filled with leftover rice from the big brass pot that was always on the stove. She would mix cool yogurt into the rice with her right hand while turning the bowl with her left. I can still hear its tinny scrape against the marble floor. Bhanu would bring the iron ladle, bend down, and pour in the oil mixture as Rajima continued to mix. She would then take turns dropping wet dollops of rice into our upturned and outstretched hands. If you hadn’t eaten your portion by the time she came around to you again, she’d place the next dollop in your bowl. If you let these pile up, the older kids like Neela or Vidya would snatch your bowl and empty it into their mouths right under your nose.

  As we ate, she told us stories and fables: the story of the sparrow and the king; tales of mischievous Lord Krishna, who, as a child, stole butter, pulled girls’ plaits, and bit every apple on a tree only once, wasting the fruit for everyone else; and, my favorite, the fable of the cunning myna bird, who laid its eggs in a crow’s nest while the crow was away hunting. Because myna eggs and crow eggs looked the same, the crow would be none the wiser. And while the poor crow sat dutifully on the eggs until they hatched, and then cared for the chicks, the myna enjoyed itself, flying in the moonlight and singing in the trees. Once the myna chicks were old enough to fly and be recognized as imposters, they’d leave and join their parents for a carefree life.

  In the courtyard of our complex, there was a big flat-leafed tabebuia tree with white trumpet flowers that shaded all the flats. From our veranda, Neela and Rajni and Rohit and I would gaze at the crows’ nests in the tree. Over the years, we watched many generations of crows hatch and grow. We watched many myna birds perch and sing. I’d often stake out one of the nests, waiting to catch a sneaky myna laying her eggs. Every summer when I returned from high school in the States, an amateur photography buff, I trained my telephoto lens on those little hungry open mouths, trying to identify the Trojan chicks. I wondered then if my grandmother had invented the story as a metaphor. Perhaps she, too, wished she could fly away, just for a while, to escape the relentless duties of family. Instead she was stuck nesting on the marble floor in front of her bowl, surrounded by so many little brown hands outstretched.

  Of the two of my aunts who lived in the house in Madras’s Besant Nagar neighborhood, my aunt Bhanu was older than Neela by several years, so she took on the maternal role of enforcer and delouser. It was Bhanu who enrolled me in St. Michael’s and poor Bhanu who was called into the head office to meet with Brother, the scowling headmaster who kept admonishing her to rein in her low-performing American niece.

  It was Bhanu who locked us together in her room until I mastered my lessons. It was Bhanu who treated us with the Indian equivalent of RID whenever we kids came back from school scratching our heads like mangy dogs. Once, I had both exams and lice. Again, Bhanu locked me away. Just beyond her door, I could hear the others laughing and Doordarshan blaring on our TV. The state-run network that was our only channel played clips of songs from Bollywood movies like music videos, all in a row. It was the equivalent of American kids gathering in front of the TV to watch American Bandstand or Soul Train on the weekends. Meanwhile I was trapped in Bhanu’s room, my head stinging and stinking as she meticulously scraped my scalp to raw dermis with a double-sided fine-tooth comb, while simultaneously drilling me on my multiplication tables.

  Without Bhanu, I would never have learned the Secret of the Nines (9, 18, 27, 36, 45 . . . the digits always add up to nine) or be able to balance my checkbook. As a kid, I thought I hated Bhanu. Now, I can only hope that I’m able to tame and care for my daughter the way Bhanu did me. More concerned with results than our affection, she was totally fine with her status as least favorite aunt. Today I am immensely grateful for what was clearly great love, but back then I resented her for what I saw as unnecessary punishment and arbitrary cruelty, and, even worse, for birthing Rajni, the only threat to my supreme reign as house cutie.

  While Aunt Bhanu played the role of stern authority figure, Neela—technically my aunt but only seven years my senior—played my sisterly conspirator. Neela and I were thick as thieves then. And after all these years, in health and sickness, through kids and divorce, we still are. Rather than medi
cating my scalp, like Bhanu, Neela braided my hair. Instead of wrestling me into uniforms, she dressed me in her colorful hand-me-downs. Neela and I acquired a nickname. Older relatives would often call both of us alangari, which in Tamil means one who likes to dress up or beautify herself. It was their way of chiding us for not paying the same close attention to our studies as we did to our appearance. We didn’t care. When I was really young, around three, Neela and her cousin Vidya used to dress me as a boy. They even drew a mustache on me with eyebrow pencil. From an early age, I got good at doing makeup. Neela was my first client. A few years later, I started plucking my mother’s eyebrows for allowance money. Even today my mother demands my services whenever I see her. She still offers my usual five-dollar fee.

  The only thing Neela and I loved more than making each other up was snacking. Near St. Michael’s was a stand that sold softball-sized potato-filled samosas, expertly fried and spiced. The samosa, of course, is India’s answer to the empanada or, as the former Lower East Sider in me must add, the knish. The outside of the samosa, however, is even flakier than those others, made as it is with plenty of ghee, or clarified butter. This makes the samosa even worse for you than its doughy Western counterparts and also even more delicious. Then there were kachori, another member of the stuffed-and-fried family. At home, we were more likely to eat aloo tikkis, which are sort of like samosas without the flaky jacket. Aunt Bhanu was the tikki master of Madras. For my eighth birthday, she deftly formed what seemed like hundreds of potato patties before breading and frying them in a shallow pool of oil. When I had my first McDonald’s hash brown, I thought to myself, This is a very poor aloo tikki.