Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (9 page)

When I went out for my mission, I always left the front door slightly ajar, barely noticeable to the passing eye, so I could easily sneak back in. It almost always worked. Once, though, Aunt Bhanu caught me upon my return as the door squeaked open. “Eh?! What were you doing outside in the sun?” She seemed really mad, as if I’d stolen from her purse. Just then my grandfather cleared his throat loudly and called out for her to bring him tea.

“Pads just came in from somewhere, Tha-Tha!” she tattled. “She’s left the door open and gone without telling anyone. Now she has something in her hands and all!”

“It’s fine, Bhanu, I asked her to fetch me a stamp from All-In-One.” Perhaps the
only
thing All-In-One did not sell was stamps. “I told her to
get a little something for herself. Send her here, I’ll deal with the child. And bring me my chai please, my throat is bothering.”

Bhanu knew my grandfather was never short of stamps, given his weekly trips to the post office for his pension checks, but she also knew never to cross her father-in-law. I slid sheepishly past her and into the bedroom. The commotion of course had roused my grandmother, lying in the bed. As soon as we put wooden spoon to paper cup, she said, without moving or even opening her eyes, “Will you please stop putting that child up to no good!”

Rajima kept a low profile and rarely contradicted her husband outside of the bedroom. But in the privacy of that room, from our place on the floor, Neela and I heard her speak her mind. We learned who really held the seat of power in our family.

I wouldn’t understand until years later why my errand caused such a row between two loving and mild-mannered people. KCK was diabetic.
Severely
so. And he was afflicted with a mighty sweet tooth. He’d need one to love the vast array of saccharine Indian sweets, which he did but which I decidedly do not. He adored
ladoos
and
jalebis
and
payasams
laced with cardamom and cashews in thick, sweet milk.
Payasams
I didn’t mind, but only as an adult have I come to like
ladoos,
tiny balls of deep-fried chickpea-flour batter mixed with nuts and raisins and bound by syrup into large balls. I still feel sick after eating the traffic-cone-orange
jalebis,
sugary dough extruded into hot, saffron-spiked oil.

Fortunately for me, he didn’t stop at these traditional confections. He also kept a sleeve of Marie biscuits hidden behind the volumes on his bookshelf. He’d snack on them, I’m sure, but he’d also dole them out as treats for us kids. Occasionally, when a burst of affection for us overtook him or when one of his students did well on a quiz, he’d produce a biscuit, as if out of nowhere, as a reward.

KCK taught me to make the first dessert I ever even considered
replicating myself: a simple cold
payasam
of mashed bananas, milk, sugar, and cinnamon or cardamom. I have always preferred salty, tangy, crunchy things to sweets, especially the aggressively sugary Indian sweets, but for him I would have eaten all the
ladoos
and
jalebis
in Madras. My grandmother allowed me to make banana
payasam
for the
prasadam
that accompanied the religious ceremonies we marked at home.

The flavors I loved most were the tart, sour notes in things like green mango and tamarind. Before school, my new best friends—P., K., and C.—and I would sit under a tamarind tree on the campus of St. Michael’s Academy. From its shade, we’d watch Mrs. Balagopal, my plump, smiling third-grade teacher, arrive on her scooter, her colorful, wildly printed sari fluttering behind her like a superhero’s cape. I’d look for D., a boy who lived in my neighborhood. He was taller than the others and a great cricket player to boot.

Every so often, as a strong breeze shook the boughs of the tamarind trees, we’d hear a rustling and pods would tumble through the lacy leaves and fall to the ground. Sometimes they would hit us as they fell. When they’re brown and ripe, the papery pods contain sweet, tangy flesh clinging to stone-like seeds, but as kids we’d also eat them when they were still green. My grandmother loved these young pods, still seedless, crisp and tart like green mango. “
Kanna,
there are some nice
imli
pods at your school,” she’d remind me. “Knock a few down and bring them back in your school bag.” If none fell on their own, I’d chuck stones at the tree.

The silky rustling of tamarind leaves always reminded me of the rustling of my grandmother’s sari. Women in my family keep their bodies hidden, their breasts and bellies concealed even from their children and husbands. Only after my grandmother had cleaned up with Bhanu, turned off the lights, and put everyone to sleep would she dare creep through the bedroom, past me and Neela, to change her sari. I’d hear her unwrapping herself from six yards of fabric, the colorful silk and the folds of her body
invisible in the darkness. I’d hear her searching her sari for the rupees that she kept tied in a small bundle of fabric at the end, a sort of makeshift pocket. Indian women hide many things in their saris: keys, extra safety pins, loose change, gemstones. In the seventies, some women, though certainly not Jima, even hid hashish to be smuggled through customs in a compartment sewn into the bottom hem. Sometimes as she undressed and shook out her sari a secret bundle would strike me or Neela, just like those falling tamarind pods. We would try to stifle our giggles. We knew that, even though we couldn’t see it, she was exposed. At the time our only response to this advanced screening of womanhood was laughter.

In that room late at night, I’d also sometimes hear an urgent murmuring that I never quite understood to be what I know now it was: the quiet pleas of my grandfather, trying to get frisky in the dark. The forced proximity of our lives meant an intense physical closeness. When I was scared by a nightmare, I’d find my whimpering soothed by the arm of my grandfather reaching down to envelop me from his bed.

I was still a girl, unaware of the real meanings and intimacies of adulthood. Yet I did know where the answers to many of those mysteries were kept: inside the Godrej. Godrej was the brand of armoire we and nearly everyone else had, and just as the word “Kleenex” stands in for tissue, “Godrej” came to refer to the armoire itself. Technically, the house had four Godrejs. Yet only one mattered: the one in my grandparents’ room. Narrow and made of heavy steel, it looked like a locker with two doors, one with a squeaky handle above a keyhole and the other with a long mirror. If we kids heard a jangling of keys or the creaking of a metal door, we’d all come running, hoping to get a glimpse inside. Occasionally I’d loiter near the Godrej, like a cat beneath the dinner table, waiting for my chance. From my sporadic peeks into its interior, I pieced together a map of its contents. I knew the shelves were lined with old newspaper. On those shelves were piles of my grandfather’s
bush shirts, buttoned-down, four-pocketed garments in plaid, simple prints, and polished cotton. He had about fifty and wore about three. His Rolleiflex camera was there, along with the black-and-white photos he took with it. The Godrej also contained my grandmother’s wedding sari, an ornately brocaded blue-and-black Benares silk, heavy with gold-threaded embroidery at the hem. My favorite of all her saris was a florid Technicolor blue-and-purple double-shaded thick silk with gold embroidery threaded throughout the body as well as the border.

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.