Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (10 page)

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 jars 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.

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 medicating 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 eye
brow 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.

Only on special occasions did my family make these types of treats at home, because the process made the entire house smell like frying oil and because they took a houseful of laborers to make. For instance, when we made the crunchy snacks called
murukku,
the women of my family would gather at Chinnu’s house and converge on an old bedsheet in the hall. With oil on our hands, we’d handle the rice and lentil flour dough, simultaneously twisting the dough with our fingers as we formed spirals on the sheet. (For both the helix created by the twisting and the resulting shape, we called this all-day operation “spinning
murukku.
”) Then we laid each spiral on the sheet to dry before Bhanu fried them all. Before we started the spinning, of course, we always molded a knob of dough into a rudimentary figure, dabbed near the head with red vermillion powder,
meant to represent Lord Ganesh, the gluttonous god who adored snacking. I’m no expert on the standards and practices of Hinduism, but my guess is that this figure served as a talisman, ensuring that the
murukku
would turn out well.

At home, Neela and I conducted many experiments to clone the pleasure of
ampapads
—a sort of fruit leather made from mango that can only be found in the north. Though
ampapads
can be sour (
khatta
) or sweet (
meeta
), both Neela and I liked the sour ones most. Whenever my beloved uncle Ravi visited from New Delhi, he’d bring what seemed like suitcases full of
ampapads.
We’d suck wads of the stuff all day, like ballplayers with chew, at least until my grandmother or Aunt Bhanu caught us and insisted we stop lest we get stomachaches. Our attempts at producing homemade
ampapads
were destined to fail, of course, because making
ampapads
at home would be like replicating Fruit Roll-Ups in your kitchen without a dehydrator. Still, we’d smash and press and finally, tired of wasting good fruit, give up, instead simply dousing the fruit with salt, chili powder, and lime juice. Often we’d bring bowls of our concoctions to eat on the veranda, our bare legs splayed on the marble, cold from the shade of the big tree.

We also loved
churan,
intensely flavored powders or tiny balls, especially
jeera goli
(spheres made from ingredients like black salt and cumin) and our favorite,
anar dana
(made from dried pomegranate seeds and spices). There were many kinds of
churan,
which are mostly used to settle the stomach after a heavy meal. They are bracingly sour and salty with a touch of sweetness, and so intense they make the sides of your mouth twinge with expectation at first sight, let alone first bite. They are meant to be eaten in small doses, but Neela and I often made whole meals of
churan,
popping
golis
into our mouths like Raisinets.