Cooking Instructions

dedicated to my mother-in-law who died 26 years ago in december

On that sultry August afternoon in Madras I sat next to her on our blue rexine sofa and tried to capture on paper the recipes that were only in her head; recipes of the food that my husband had grown up with that she made so well; recipes of the simple masala curry and the complex boondi ladoo and everyone’s favourite, the paal paayasam.

Roast the coriander powder till the raw smell disappears, she said, and I wrote it down not knowing what it really meant till I tried making the masala curry in a graduate student apartment in Iowa City with the unfamiliar pots and pans that I had picked up at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. The fragrance of roasted coriander soon started traveling around town with me on the second-hand parka that also came from the Salvation Army store.

Boil the sugar syrup till frog eyes pop, she told me but I never picked up enough enthusiasm to attempt the ladoo on my own, let alone hunt for the rimmed multi-holed ladle that is such an essential utensil to make boondis for the ladoo. I resigned myself to dreaming about the soft sugary delight that was the boondi ladoo; this particular version was becoming a lost art even in Madras.

The paal paayasam I did perfect and not just on the stovetop. I created an adaptation of the recipe to make in the high-end microwave oven that my husband brought home one day from the Sears in Gainesville as a surprise. We had, by then, started accumulating our material possessions because he had a job and we had already taken care of the necessities like the music system and a Sony TV.

The high-end microwave oven served us well for twelve years before it lost its mind - the computer chip that Sears couldn't replace because nobody used such complex microwave ovens any more. But my handwritten notes on yellowing paper have survived. I still use them to make paal payasam when our married daughter comes home. One day these scribbled short-hand notes will be hers to decipher.

Water

[I recently found out that March 22 was World Water Day and that this week is generally celebrated as World Water Week: http://water.org/world-water-day. So posted this piece that I had written in August 2009.]


It is easy to use a gallon of water to wash my coffee mug but some memories come in the way, sometimes.

At boarding school in Jaipur in winter, we were each given half a bucket of hot water that we filled up to one bucket with cold water to bathe with.

In Madras water is always in short supply. In the fifties and sixties you had to wake up at 3 am and fill every large receptacle with water for the day because that was the only time water was released from the corporation.

In years that the rains fail the reservoirs dry up and to this day you have to buy water from vendors in trucks if you can afford to, and carry them up three flights of stairs if that’s where you live. It is a daily routine in most houses to boil water to make it fit for drinking even if it is what comes through the corporation water supply.

In Kerala, where water was plentiful especially after the rains, it still didn’t flow out of a faucet with a flick of the wrist. All the water for domestic use had to be drawn by hand, pail by pail, on a rope and pulley system. While we were fortunate to have help to do that, I could never bring myself to using endless scoops of water either to bathe with or wash up. This was because I would often hang out in the back yard and watch the effort it took Chinna or her mother Neeli to fill the two large bins in the bathroom. As for the toilet, they had to draw the water from the well, fill up a large pot and make several trips to the outhouse at the edge of the property to fill the bin there, pot by pot.

Such memories make me pause a bit.

Water now readily flows out of the faucet in my house in the Midwest. Any amount I want and fully potable, as long as I pay for what I use. While memories linger, sometimes I find myself letting the shower run a little longer than needed. And occasionally using a gallon of water to wash my coffee mug.

Kitchen windows - then and now:

The Name Experiment

I tried an experiment today.
It didn’t start out as one.
It just ended up as an experiment.

It happened at the Washtenaw Panera.
I ordered my lunch and responded ‘for here’.
I thought I would get one of those big blue beepers.

Instead, the man at the counter asked me my name.
I said ‘Lakshmi’ wondering whether to spell it out as usual.
I didn’t. I noticed he typed some letters on the keyboard regardless.

He told me to step to the end of the counter and my name would be called soon. Now I was curious. There was only one person ahead of me and she soon left.
Within a minute, the Asian girl at the counter looked up at me to give me my order.

Oh, I thought, that was easy. Nobody had to say anything.
Except that she did. Before I took my tray, she said, ‘Lashmi?”
Now that was pretty good for not having given any lessons to either of them.

I am grateful to NPR for hiring Lakshmi Singh.
It has made ‘Lakshmi’ almost as familiar as ‘Michelle’.
I didn’t think the man at the counter listened to NPR. Maybe he does.

Place and People Rhyme

Jorge’s in Norway
Sporting stubble bearded hair
Meeru’s in Peru
Tossing apples everywhere

Naina’s in China
Reading folk and fairy tales
Sapan’s in Japan
Stuffing octopus in quails

Ram’s in Vietnam
Planting rows of paddy shoots
Joe’s in Mexico
Climbing stairs in yak hide boots

Kapil’s in Brazil
Singing save the forest songs
Ria’s in Mongolia
Scooping sand with silver tongs

Thor’s in Equador
Mating mosquitoes and mice
Vanya’s in Tanzania
Eating mounds of ants and rice

This song must continue
With place and people names
So move these four lines down
And add your nonsense rhymes...

Poetry Slams and Processing Stations

I learnt a lot this past week.

I went to two of the three semifinals of the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam.

There I learnt that our teens understand abusive relationships and racial tensions and homophobia much more than I do.
They talk about noisy families and loner uncles and dead grandmothers.
They worry about war.
They personify new socks and caterpillars and pet rocks.
They write cheesy love poems and I-failed-math poems.
I watched and listened to these young women and men in awe - exploring their inner selves and expressing their views of life.
I admired the inspiring teachers who encouraged and guided these young adults to share their hearts with the world.

I spent a day at the Military Entrance Processing Station in Lansing.

There I learnt that there are young adults who care about counter-terrorism and world politics.
One young man is a junior in college who has decided to join the Army Reserve. I admired the patience and courtesy of the recruitment officer as he talked with the young man and answered the many questions his mother had.
I noticed that the young men and women who walked in and out of that building that day came in all colors and sizes. Some were getting sworn in, some were there for their test and others were shippers – getting shipped to their basic training.
I increased my vocabulary in military jargon and acronyms.
I wondered how many buttons were on the uniforms of the top brass – I counted twenty shiny ones on that of the recruiting officer for the Marines.
I realized that college basketball can be a topic of discussion on ESPN for the entire day.
And who knew that Taco Bell did not serve coffee?
I shared the excitement of a young man still a senior in high school as he showed all of us strangers his new military id that said ‘Future Soldier of the United States Army’.
Most of all I was humbled by the simple oath taking ceremony where the new recruit stood in a small windowless room lined with important flags and repeated heavy words of commitment after the officer in army fatigues while his mother stood and watched with tears and mixed emotions.

28 March 2009

The December London Trip

I have to teach a program in England for the Tatas, says MP in early fall.

I’d love to go with you, I said. It would be fun to wander around London – we haven’t been there in more than ten years and that last time was just in transit.

When I heard that he could only go for two days, I balked at the thought of spending on such a short trip. But encouraged by both MP and Jenie, I swapped some frequent flier miles for my ticket.

I started making plans for London. I was especially excited about Tate Modern that Jenie had told me not to miss. It didn’t exist the last time we were in London.

Except, MP soon found out that the program was going to be in Birmingham and not in London.

No matter. I noticed that Birmingham was really close and well connected by trains to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Coventry Cathedral and the Warwick Castle. So there was plenty to do.

I also found that Birmingham was a town worth exploring in itself. I noted a few restaurants that we could try on the two days that we’d be there.

Finally, three days before our trip, MP remembered to send me the details of the arrangements that were made for our stay in Birmingham.

Turns out that the program was not being taught in Birmingham either but at Ashorne Hill – an old English manor set in rural Warwickshire, about twenty five kilometers south of Birmingham airport.


Never mind. How often does one get to stay in a historic 12th century manor that was originally a part of the even older Manor of Newbold that is mentioned in the Domesday Book?


The ownership of the manor has passed through several hands over the centuries including the Earl of Warwick in the 18th century and a Chicago millionaire in the late 1890’s. In its current form, it is a training facility and conference center set on thirty five acres with the remaining almost three hundred acres rented to local farmers for grazing. A lot of the interior from the 1890’s has been preserved as have been some of the blue bricks in the centre front of the building from even before that time.

After a relaxed day and a half at the remote, rural, historic site, I did get to spend a day in London where I did get to see Tate Modern and catch a play before meeting MP at the airport for dinner. We caught the early morning flight back the next day.

Some Things

There’s something about walking through the woods to my yoga class -
The fragrance of dry leaves, the fungus growth on the fallen trunk, the path that reveals itself with each step I take -
That reminds me of when I would follow my grandmother into the teak forest on the north side of the family home in Ottapalam.
You had to walk to the edge of the common property before you got to the teak forest that was planted by my grandparents
The path was hardly marked so you just had to trust your internal compass to get you there and back.
My grandmother had a good internal compass. I have a fairly reliable one of my own.

Whenever I cut a guava that’s just the right rawness
The green fragrance takes me back to the guava trees I loved as a child.
Guava trees are good trees to climb because the bark is smooth and the slope is gentle.
The one I climbed a lot was in the yard of our rented house in Kakinada. When no one was around, I would even follow its dangerously narrowing trunk to the roof over the verandah, climb on to the terrace and make my way down the steps.
There was one in Ottapalam too, on the way to the outhouse. This one I remember because of the fruit it bore.
I followed the progress of each guava from a dull white delicate flower to a small bulge at the end of the stem which then developed into the fruit. It had to be plucked at just the right time – too early would compromise the sweetness but a little too late and you were competing with the birds – mostly parrots - that loved them too.

There’s something about snipping comic strips from the newspaper and pasting them in a scrapbook that transports me to my other grandmother’s house in the village near Kuttipuram.
This village didn’t have electricity till the seventies so as children we spent our summer evenings reading Curly Wee in the light of an oil lamp. The comic strip Curly Wee was published in The Madras Mail and my grandmother had cut and pasted entire series of them in books made from scrap paper.
I cut my favourite comic strips from The Ann Arbor News and save them in a shoebox as a future scrapbook project.

Sometimes I think I do some of these things because there is something about them…