by Sudha Murty
By now she had allowed the window to be opened. I peeped in and saw the tired but joyous face of Peerambi and a tiny, chubby version of Mohammed Saab, Hussain’s father, asleep on the cane tray. The neem leaves were hanging, the cactus was kept in a corner and the fragrance of the lobana had filled the entire room. Ajji also looked tired and there was sweat on her forehead. But she was cleaning her accessories vigorously in the hot water and wiping them before placing them carefully back in her wooden box.
Just as we were about to leave, Hussain bent down and touched Ajji’s feet. In a choked voice he said, ‘Ambakka Aai, I do not know how to thank you. We are poor and cannot give you anything. But I can thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart. You are a mother of a hundred children. You have blessed my son by bringing him into this world. He will never stray from the correct path.’
Ajji touched him on his shoulder and pulled him up. There were tears in her eyes too. She wiped them and said, ‘Hussain, God only wants us to help each other in difficult times. Peerambi is after all like another Akkavva to me.’
By now the sun was up and I followed Ajji back home without stumbling. Dyamappa was strolling lazily far behind us. One doubt was worrying me and I had to clear it. ‘Ajji, you have given birth only to ten children. Why did Hussain say you are a mother of hundred?’
Ajji smiled and adjusting the pallu that was slipping off her head because of her brisk walk, she said, ‘Yes. I have given birth only to ten children but these hands have brought out a hundred children in our village. Akkavva, I will pray that you become the mother of a hundred children, irrespective of the number you yourself give birth to.’
17
Food for Thought
Rekha is a very dear friend and our families have known each other for generations. Since I hadn’t seen her for a long time, I decided to visit her. I picked up the phone and dialled her number.
Her father, Rao, who is like a father to me, picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’
We exchanged greetings and I said, ‘Uncle, I am coming to your house for lunch tomorrow.’
Her father, a botanist, was very happy. ‘Please do. Tomorrow is a Sunday and we can relax a little bit. Don’t run off quickly!’ he replied.
In a city such as Bengaluru, going from Jayanagar to Malleswaram on a weekday usually takes a minimum of two hours. Travelling on a Sunday is much easier because it takes only half the time. When I reached her home the next day, I could smell that lunch was almost ready, and yet the aromas wafting in from the kitchen indicated to me that the day’s menu would somehow be different. None of the typical Karnataka dishes were laid out on the table, and the cuisine was, in fact, quite bland for my taste.
‘I may wear a simple sari but I am a foodie, Rekha! Is the lunch specially arranged so that I don’t come again?’ I joked, as one can with an old friend who will not misunderstand and take offence.
Rekha’s father laughed heartily. ‘Well.’ He sighed. ‘Today is my mother’s shraddha or death anniversary. On this day, we always prepare a meal from indigenous vegetables.’
‘What do you mean by indigenous?’ I was perplexed. ‘Aren’t all the vegetables available in our country indigenous, except perhaps ones like cauliflower, cabbage and potato?’
‘Oh my God! You have just brought up the wrong topic on the wrong day with the wrong person!’ exclaimed Rekha in mock dismay. ‘After lunch, I think I should just leave you with my father and join you both later in the evening. This will take at least four hours of your time.’
I knew that Rekha’s father was a botanist, but it was then that I realized that he was passionate about this subject. Though I had known him for a really long time, I had never seen this facet of his personality before. Probably, he had been too busy during his working years while we had been too busy playing and fooling around.
‘Is this really true, Uncle?’ I asked.
He nodded.
Since I come from a farmer’s family on my paternal side, I have always had a fascination for vegetables. I knew vaguely about the things we could grow, the seasons to grow them in and the ones that we could not grow, including the reasons why. However, whenever I broached the subject with friends interested in agriculture and farming, I never really received a proper answer. Finally, here was a man more than willing to share his knowledge with me! I couldn’t resist.
‘You know, Rekha,’ I said, ‘it is difficult to get knowledgeable people to spend time explaining their subject matter to others. Today, Google is like my grandmother. I log on to the website any time I require an explanation of something I don’t understand or want to learn about.’
‘Right now, you are logging on to an encyclopedia,’ Rekha smiled and glanced at her father affectionately.
The conversation drifted to other subjects as we ate lunch. The meal constituted of rice, sambar without chillies, dal with black pepper and not chillies, gorikayi (cluster beans), methi saag, cucumber raita and rice payasam. It was accompanied by udin vada with black pepper. There was pickle and some plain yogurt on the side too. After we had eaten this lunch, well-suited for someone recovering in a hospital, Rekha’s father said, ‘Come, let’s go to the garden.’
Rekha’s family owned an old house on the corner of a street. Her grandfather had been in the British railways and was lucky enough to buy the corner plot at a low price and had built a small home with a large garden there. In a city like Bengaluru, filled with apartments and small spaces, the garden was something of a privilege and a luxury.
Uncle and I walked to the garden while Rekha took a nap. He settled himself on a bench, while I looked around. It was a miniature forest with a large kitchen garden of carrots, okra, fenugreek and spinach—each segregated neatly into sections. A few sugar-cane stalks shone brightly in front of us while a dwarf papaya tree heavy with fruit stood in a corner. On the other end was a line of maize as well as flowering trees such as the parijata (the Indian coral tree), and roses of varying colours.
‘Uncle and Aunty must be spending a lot of time here making this place beautiful,’ I thought. ‘All the trees and plants seem healthy—almost as if they are happy to be here!’
‘Do you think that all the vegetables we have around us are from India? Or are they from other countries?’ he asked out of the blue.
I felt as if I was back in school in front of my teacher. But I wasn’t scared. Even if I gave him a wrong answer, it wasn’t going to affect my progress report. ‘Of course, Uncle! India has the largest population of vegetarians. So, in time, we have learnt to make different kinds of vegetarian dishes. Even people who eat meat avoid it during traditional events such as festivals, weddings, death anniversaries and the month of Shravana.’
‘I agree with your assessment of everything, except that most vegetables are grown in India. The truth is that the majority of our vegetables are not ours at all. They have come from different countries.’
I stared at him in disbelief.
He pointed to a tomato plant—a creeper with multiple fruits, tied to a firm bamboo stick. ‘Look at this! Is this an Indian vegetable?’
I thought of tomato soup, tomato rasam, tomato bhat (tomato-flavoured rice), sandwiches and chutney. ‘Of course it is. We use it every single day. It is an integral part of Indian cuisine.’
Uncle smiled. ‘Well, the tomato did not originate in India, but in Mexico. It made its way to Europe in 1554. Since nobody ate tomatoes over there at the time, they became ornamental plants because of the beautiful deep-red colour. At some point, there was a belief in Europe that it was good for curing infertility, while some thought that it was poisonous. The contradicting perspectives made it difficult for this fruit to be incorporated into the local diet for a long time. Its lack of value must have been a real push for initiating Spain’s tomato festival, where millions of tomatoes are used every year to this day. A story goes that one business-savvy European surrounded his tomato plants with a sturdy, thick fence to show his neighbours that the fruits were not poisono
us, but rather valuable and thus desirable. Gradually, the fruits reached India and began to be used as a commercial crop, thanks to its tempting colour and taste. It must have come to us during the reign of the British. But today, we cannot think of cooking without tomatoes.’
‘Wow!’ I thought. Out loud, I said, ‘Uncle, tell me about an essential item that is used in our cooking but isn’t ours.’
‘Come on, try and guess. We simply cannot cook without this particular vegetable.’
I closed my eyes and thought of sambar, that essential south Indian dish, and the mutter-paneer typical of the north Indian cuisine. It took me a while to think of a common ingredient—the chilli. I brushed my thought away. ‘No, there’s no way that the chilli can be an imported vegetable. There can be no Indian food without it,’ I thought.
Uncle looked at me. ‘You are right. It is the chilli!’ he exclaimed almost as if he had read my mind.
‘How did you know?’
‘Because people never fail to be shocked when they think of the possibility that chilli could be from another country. I can see it clearly on their faces when the wheels turn inside their head.’
My disbelief was obvious. How could we cook without chillies? It is as important as salt in Indian cooking.
‘There are many stories and multiple theories about chillies,’ Uncle said. ‘When Vasco da Gama came to India, he came from Portugal via Brazil and brought many seeds with him. Later, Marco Polo and the British came to India. Thus, many more plant seeds arrived. The truth is that what we call “indigenous” isn’t really ours. Think of chillies, capsicum, corn, groundnut, cashews, beans, potato, papaya, pineapple, custard apple, guava and sapodilla—they are all from South America. Over time, we indigenized them and learnt how to cook them. Some say that the chilli came from the country of the same name, while some others say it came from Mexico. According to a theory, black pepper was the ingredient traditionally used in India to make our food hot and spicy. Some scholars believe that the sole goal of the East India Company was to acquire a monopoly over India’s pepper trade, which later ended in India’s colonization. But when we began using chillies, we found that it tasted better than black pepper. To give you an example, we refer to black pepper as kalu menasu in Kannada. We gave a similar name to the chilli and called it menasin kai. In Hindi, it is frequently referred to as mirchi. In the war between black pepper and chilli, the former lost and chilli established itself as the new prince and continues to rule the Indian food industry even today. North Karnataka is famous for its red chillies now.’
‘That much I do know, Uncle!’ I closed my eyes and had a vision of my younger days. ‘I remember seeing acres and acres of red-chilli plants during my childhood. The harvest used to take place during the Diwali season. I remember that Badgi district was dedicated to the sale of chillies. I had gone with my uncle one day and was amazed by the mountains of red-chillies I saw there.’
‘Oh yes, you are right! Those red chillies are bright red in colour but they aren’t really hot or spicy. On the contrary, chillies that grow in the state of Andhra Pradesh in the area of Guntur are extremely spicy. They are a little rounded in shape, not as deep red in colour and are called Guntur chillies. A good cook uses a combination of different kinds of chillies to make the dish delicious and attractive. Now that’s what I call indigenous.’
‘There were also two other kinds of chillies in our farm—one was a chilli called Gandhar or Ravana chilli that grows upside down and the other one, of course, was capsicum.’
Uncle nodded. ‘Capsicum in India is nothing but green or red bell pepper in the West. But if you eat one tiny Ravana chilli, you will have to sit in the bathroom with your backside in pain and drink many bottles of water for a long, long time! Or you will have to eat five hundred grams of candies, sweets or chocolates.’
We both laughed.
Hearing the laughter, Rekha’s mother came and joined us. ‘Are you folks joking about today’s menu? I’m sorry that there wasn’t much variety. When I heard that you were coming for lunch, I told Uncle to inform you that today’s food was going to be bland and that you could come another Sunday, but he said that you are like family and wouldn’t mind at all,’ she said to me.
That sparked my interest. ‘Tell me the reason for the bland food, Aunty!’
‘We have a method to the madness, I guess. During death anniversaries, we do not use vegetables or spices that have come from other countries. Hence, we use ingredients like fenugreek, black pepper and cucumber, among others. Our ancestors were scared of using new vegetables and named these imports Vishwamitra srishti.’
This was the first time that I had heard of such a thing. ‘What does that mean?’
Aunty settled into a makeshift chair under the guava tree. ‘The story goes that there was a king called Trishanku who wanted to go to heaven along with his physical body. With his strong penance and powers, the sage Vishwamitra was able to send him to heaven, but the gods pushed him back because they were worried that it would set a precedent for people to come in with their physical bodies. That was not to be allowed. Vishwamitra tried to push Trishanku upwards but the gods pushed him down, like a game of tug of war. In the end, Vishwamitra created a new world for Trishanku and called it Trishanku Swarga. He even created vegetables that belonged neither to the earth nor heaven. So vegetables like eggplant and cauliflower are the creations of Vishwamitra, which must not be used at a time such as a dear one’s death anniversary.’
Silence fell between us and I pondered over Aunty’s story. After a few minutes, I saw Rekha coming towards us with some bananas and oranges and a box of what seemed to be dessert.
‘Come,’ she said to me, ‘have something. The banana is from our garden and the dessert is made from home-grown ingredients too! You must be …’
Uncle interrupted, ‘Do you know that we make so many desserts in India that aren’t original to our country?’
‘Appa, tell her the story of the guava and the banana. I really like that one,’ Rekha said. She smiled as she handed me a banana.
Uncle grinned, pleased to impart some more knowledge. ‘The seeds of guava came from Goa,’ he said. ‘So some people say that’s how it was named. In Kannada, we call it perala hannu because we believe that it originated in Peru, South America. Let me tell you a story.
‘Durvasa was a famed short-tempered sage in our ancient epics. He cursed anyone who dared to rouse his anger. The sage was married to a woman named Kandali. One day, she said to him, “O sage, people are terribly afraid of you while I have lived with you for such a long time. Don’t you think I deserve a great boon from you?”
‘Though Durvasa was upset at her words, he did not curse her. He thought seriously about what she had said and decided that she was right. “I will give you a boon. But only one. So think carefully,” he said.
‘After some thought, she replied, “Create a fruit for me that is unique and blessed with beautiful colours. The tree should grow not in heaven but on earth. It should have the ability to grow easily everywhere in our country. It must give fruits in bunches and for the whole year. The fruit must not have any seeds and must not create a mess when we eat it. When it is not ripe, we should be able to use it as a vegetable and once it is ripe, we should use it while performing pujas. We must be able to use all parts of the tree.”
‘Durvasa was surprised and impressed at the number of specifications his wife was giving him. He was used to giving curses in anger and then figuring out their solutions once he had calmed down, but this seemingly simple request was a test of his intelligence. “No wonder women are cleverer. Men like me get upset quickly and act before fully thinking of the consequences,” he thought.
‘The sage prayed to Goddess Saraswati to give him the knowledge with which he could satisfy his wife’s demand. After a few minutes, he realized that he would be able to fulfil his wife’s desire. Thus he created the banana tree, which is found all over India today. Every part of the tree—the leaf, the
bark, the stem, the flowers and its fruits are used daily. Raw banana can be cooked while the ripe banana can be eaten easily by peeling off its skin. It is also an essential part of worship to the gods. The fruit is seedless and presents itself as a bunch. A mature tree lives for a year and smaller saplings are found around it.
‘Kandali was ecstatic and named the plant kandari. She announced, “Whoever eats this fruit will not get upset, despite the fact that it was created by my short-tempered husband.”
‘Over a period of time, people started using the banana extensively and loved it. Slowly the name kandari changed to kadali and the banana came to be known as kadali phala in Sanskrit.’ Uncle took a deep breath at the end of his story.
I smiled, amused at the story that seemed to result from fertile imagination. I had a strong urge to grab a banana and took one from the plate in front of me. ‘You may have given me bland food today,’ I said, ‘but I really want some dessert.’
Rekha opened the box. It was filled with different varieties of sweets. I saw gulab jamuns, jhangri (a deep-fried flour-based dessert) and gulkand (a rose petal–based preserve). I can’t resist gulab jamuns, so I immediately picked one up and popped it into my drooling mouth. It was soft and sweet. ‘What a dessert!’ I remarked, amazed at how delicious it was! ‘Nobody can beat us Indians when it comes to desserts. I don’t know how people can live in other countries without gulab jamuns.’
‘Wait a minute, don’t make such sweeping statements,’ said Rekha. ‘Gulab jamun is not from India.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said, not convinced at all. Before she could stop me, I grabbed another gulab jamun and gulped it down.
‘I’m serious. A language scholar once came to speak in our college. He told us that apart from English, we use multiple Persian, Arabic and Portuguese words that we aren’t even aware of. Gulab jamun is a Persian word and is a dish prepared in Iran. It became popular in India during the Mughal reign because the court language was Persian. The same is true for jhangri, which is a kind of ornament worn on the wrist and the jhangri design resembles it.’