Banana Stem Meditations

Bombay usually energises me but this time I was just exhausted. I left as I arrived - with a headache. In between there were more people than I thought I'd meet though there was less conversation than I imagined.

I have been sleeping. I have been postponing the yoga with an odd kind of guilt I have not felt in years. Like I have a duty to the time and to the pose - whichever one it is that has caught my fancy.

I cut banana stem for my mother who says it's hard on her fingers. This replaces for me, for today, the meditation of holding a pose. I slice one circle off, pull the fiber around a finger and then slip it off like a ring. Knife, slice, wind, ring, pick up knife again. The bowl of buttermilk is clear on the top. I swirl a finger in it, drown the slices so they don't get brown.

Peace in repetition, in knowing this is a pose - yes, pose - with a clear end in sight. When these four lengths of stem are cut. Steadily beating heart, no particular thought that needs handholding. I must insist on being the one to cut the banana stem. Like I have claimed for myself the task of grating coconut. These domesticities are where I feel at home.

Not even a humble brag

Today's lunch was avarakkai curry and vazhai thandu mor kootu.

The beans, the banana stem and the coconut all came from our garden.

That is all.

Food is where the heart is

A week or so before I was to leave for Iowa, a lot of my mother's veteran families-in-the-US friends asked me if I was going to take pickles, podis and things. I laughed and said I'd be fine. In my head, I thought, I can adapt to the food; I don't need to have sambar and rasam and find the nearest temple for food from home.

I'm still not going to be looking for a temple any time soon, but one week in and it's become clear that all of us are suffering from some sort of food homesickness. We have a microwave, a mini fridge and a coffee maker in our room. For those who need tea, the coffee maker is useless and the microwave a travesty.

We bought an electric kettle and we have that in our common room for anyone to heat water for their tea.

But what to do about rice, about actual hot, cooked food? (Leave rotis out of the equation entirely. This is not going to happen.)

Before coming here, I checked out how to make rice in the microwave. I have never owned or used a microwave so it was always going to be a challenge. But for the last two days, I've been thinking of spices, of oil, of soaking the rice, cooking times.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. It was warm but with a cooling breeze and the promise of a sharper bite in the days to come. There were pretty, puffy clouds in the sky and a green river to sit by. I lay down on a bench and read, looked at the clouds and had a brief nap.

There was so much contentment in that: in not having to worry about who will look at me while I'm pretending the entire outdoors is my own private domain. There was so much freedom in the ability take that nap under the patchwork clouds and sun.

Later that afternoon, after the first Prarie Lights readings featuring IWP writers, I felt restless. The day had to have a different end than an indifferently consumed meal at a pub. We got talking about cooking and a few of us decided to pick up some supplies and head back to my room, where I had a menu shaping in my head: pulau, cucumber raita and salad.

It wasn't that hard. Not having a cutting board slowed things up a bit, but we did it. There was no nimbu for the salad but we squeezed tomatoes. Erez made a mean dessert with berries, mascarpone and dark chocolate.

Here is the evidence.

Pulau, Raita, Salad

All the sinfulness!

And here's the river and the sky.

Plug for Pâticheri

My friend Deepa Reddy has long tortured her friends on Facebook with photos of food. It was a pleasant sort of torture, for the most part, and I sort of missed seeing those photos of desserts and gorgeous plates.

Her pet project - a long time in the making - was to combine her love for food with her training as an anthropologist, and Pâticheri is the result.

Now that winter, such as it is, is nipping at Hyderabad's heels, I am seriously considering making some of those delicately-hued marshmallows. Chances are, though, that between reading Pâticheri and watching Masterchef Australia, all my aesthetic food cravings will be satisfied and I can go back to making a quick gothumai dosa.

Two Minutes Older: Eating for Shiva*

The year began, not with festivities, but with a festival. Every year my mother announces Thiruvathirai, and every year I stop myself from asking, ‘What’s that?” This time, to remind myself what the festival was about, I said to my mother, “Why don’t you tell the kid the story?”

So she told my son the story of Nandanar: how the 8^th century outcaste farmer wanted to see Shiva at the Chidambaram temple in the month of Margazhi (Dec-Jan); how he was told he couldn’t go until all the work in the field was done; how he managed to go despite all the work and as he stood outside the temple – being a dalit – he could see nothing because of the Nandi blocking his view of the lord.

The story goes that Nandanar was in tears at being unable to see Shiva. In Gopalakrishna Bharati’s Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, Nandanar says,

Are you not the ever compassionate Lord?

Untouchable as I am, may I not serve you?

To be there to witness your dance of supreme bliss

may I not come to you?

Shiva, touched by the man’s bhakti, asks Nandi to move so that he is visible to his devotee.

The high-born folk are abashed and awed in equal measure, and Nandanar’s fame precedes him everywhere. (I don’t know if this meant that he thereafter had help tilling the field or if those things remained status quo – because stories like these end with the arrival of the god, who invariably remains strong and silent on such matters)**.

To celebrate this, we eat kali and kootu.

I have to say that this story annoys me. Setting aside the politics of turning a story of injustice into one of spirituality, I resent having to eat a dish that is half sweet, half savoury and wholly an ordeal on the palate. For one thing, there’s the taste of gud and coconut in the kali. It isn’t as sweet as sakkaraipongal but it isn’t like regular pongal either. In the kootu, the taste of sweet potatoes battles with the beans and the peas with the pumpkins. Brought together, they make the tongue shiver and produce in me as many conflicting emotions as the story of Nandanar and the Arudra Darsanam at Chidambaram.

Everyone knows that festivals are an excuse to eat things that are seasonal, hard to make and digest and that keep women in the kitchen for most of the day. Usually the things we eat on these occasions are passed off as the favourite food of this or that god: butter, sheedai, kozhakattai and such. Someone please tell me whose favourite food this is: Shiva’s? Nandanar’s? Or Nandi’s?

I have a theory that Thiruvathirai kali and kootu are meant to reflect the complexity of the story. After all, it is not a simple story of faith and reward. Mixed up in it is the question of boundaries, of who is kept out and who does the keeping out; and of who ‘deserves’ the favour of god. Show me a dalit who celebrates Thiruvathirai as a triumph against established order. Depending on where you’re coming from, Nandanar has either circumvented an unjust convention to directly commune with his god or he has been tricked into thinking that the barriers have been removed, when really he’s still standing where he’s been ordered to.

The dish is equally complex and disturbing to the taste. What it produces is not comfort or pleasure. There are too many different tastes and textures, too many conflicting sensations, too many ingredients that don’t get along with each other. It requires a sophistication that I don’t yet have to transform this discomfort into something that I see as not just palatable but enjoyable. It is an uneasy dish that celebrates a disturbing story.

Every year, I try my best to like it and every year I fail better at it. For now, I have decided to live with the taste. In fact, I think I might even experiment with it: I wonder what would happen if, next year, we added karela to the kootu? I think it might add the one taste that was missing.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

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* I will retain my own titles to these pieces; I'm not too sure about the ones they think up for the paper.

** In Sekizhar's version, the Nandi doesn't move at all. What happens is, Nandanar comes into Chidambaram hesitantly, doubting his own worthiness to see Shiva. Shiva arranges for Nandanar to be 'purified' by a fire and becomes resplendently Brahmin before he gets to be one with his god. See.