Flavours of my childhood rekindled

It has been a long long time since I wrote something for just the sheer joy of writing. Of telling you stories, of giving you a peek into me, my life, my journey so far. When you live an earning as a writer and editor, the blog that does not serve any professional purpose suffers.

Talking of change, I think moving away from Kerala, my roots have made me cherish what I have left behind. Call it the ramblings of a Malayali slowly going senile away from the homeland (also a Malayali who knows she will go senile if she moves back to her hometown too) If only there were less of a love-hate tussle, if only there were fewer contradictions, less conflicted emotions about taking a decision of moving closer to my land of birth.

My tongue keeps reminding me that I am growing older. The flavours I crave are no longer those from across the world - I enjoy them, but I don't crave them the way I now try to recapture the smells and flavours that lingered in my grandmother's and now my Amma's kitchen. Just as I began writing this post, I realised that this blog is filled with similar posts of yearning, something that was unconscious for long. But I no longer try to deny the power it has over me.

In the many years that I have lived away from home, subsistence cooking was largely anything that was easy to cook and tasty too. And considering that I have lived in western India and abroad more than in the south, the choice of easy ingredients available to me defined the cuisine I cooked. So there I was, mastering rajma chawal and an assortment of paneer curries, rustling up chicken dishes adapted from north Indian recipes than the flavours I grew up with. I had the reasoning down pat too - who is going to spend time grating coconut? Not me! Who is going to meticulously choose all the ingredients that go into duplicating mom's dishes? Not me. Unlike north Indian dishes that are redeemable and salvageable at most stages of cooking, I often found Malayali cooking a difficult art to master - forget an ingredient or two and you know it doesn't taste authentic anymore! And if it doesn't hit the high notes that your mom's and grandmom's cooking hit, then you'd rather not play that music, but invent some of yours. The benchmark then can be set pretty low.

Since I moved to Delhi over four years back, I have been trying to bring bits of my mother's kitchen into mine. When you marry into a Punjabi family, you think they would be impressed with your love for roti over rice, your expertise in whipping up dals and chhole than an avial or a koottukari. Not the case for me! At every family gathering, there would be a demand for a dish from my kitchen - and you know by now which direction the cuisine suggestions would point!

So there I was, on the phone with Amma every other day asking for one recipe after another. Initially, the flavour profiles were baffling and the fear of failing to reproduce them faithfully a big stumbling block. When did that ever deter the new family from sweetly requesting more Madrassi dishes? From the dosa breakfast that I was pretty adept at turning out, I graduated to the appams and ishtu. The crowning moment perhaps was when Amma asked me for my recipe for making chicken ishtu (stew). At home, we have always stuck to the veggies version, but here, I went out and improvised my own version, which till date is one of my fail-proof signature dishes. And then buckling under pressure, I made a sadya for Onam of 14 dishes (you better believe it!) for about 20 people! Yes, I had help, but I was the only one who knew what I was cooking! (Perhaps that helped too, that I wasn't serving it to discerning elders who'd nitpick on ingredients being out of sync! Instead I was serving a family who made me feel like I'd just won the Masterchef competition)

These days, I have found myself craving dishes that I have stayed away from for the best part of my childhood. Avial has entered my list of all-time favourite dishes (I can hear Amma's evil laugh and I told you so!) Parippu dosas and an assortment of upmas are weekend treats at my place now.  The joy of trying out new dishes, opening the lid off the vessel on the stove and inhaling deep to be transported back into Amma's kitchen - that's the subtle nudge and power of nostalgia.

The cuisine that tingles your tongue is often one that lies dormant in your blood till one day you wake up - older and wiser - more appreciative of the wisdom in your Amma and Ammumma's cooking style, their precise measures and the unwillingness to experiment or tweak it too much lest the flavours they sought to recreate every time were irreparably tampered.

There was a time that I had laughed at the rigidity and promised myself never to be sucked into that. But even as I experiment and tweak recipes to suit my kitchen and convenience, I go back to trying to do it atleast once just like Amma does it - it makes me feel closer to her, smell the smells that surround her and to earn the delighted smileys she sends my way through Whatsapp when I tell her my dish tasted just like hers!

Malayaleeccentricities...Let's talk Food!!

I'm presently in the Kingdom of the Gods (of Malayalees), in the fiefdom of the Menons - we are meticulous book-keepers - or so I have learnt the ancestors were too in the service of the kings of Travancore-Cochin and Malabar. They were number jugglers, I don't fancy numbers at all - they juggle before my eyes. So I document words, practises and those things that make Malayalees uniquely Mallu - and sometimes only a Malayali can understand why it is strange. That's how we like it -little need to be said! And boo-yoo that we aren't much into experimenting with tradition, except when we are not in Kerala. Then we are game to try and re-mould our lives to suit any weather, palate or customs! :) So now for the time that I'm in Kerala, I'm going to attempt to write on Malayaleeccentricities

Our fascination with food, for instance, is not really all-encompassing. Yesterday I was making chicken curry, when Dad sauntered in into the kitchen. I believe I was making a Malayali-version of a simple chicken curry. However, in the absence of dry roasted coconut and a thick gravy, the snap assessment is that it is one of those experimental preparations! Sigh!!! Similarly, coriander leaves are as North Indian in garnish as curry leaves tempered in coconut oil are in this part of the world. Every time I chop a bit up for the fresh aromatic smell, I'm asking if I'm making a Mumbai dish!

Can you understand the lure of kappa (tapioca) boiled with just turmeric and salt with shallots and green chillies crushed in coconut oil again with a bit of salt? Even as I write this, there is a pool forming in my mouth - I have just put it on the list of must-ask-Mom-to-make! Its spicy, its bland, its tuber-y and its blah - ohhh but it is so Malayali. When friends well-versed with Malayali cooking rave about the kappa and meen curry (kappa with fish curry), I ask them if they have tried the humbler fare.

Similarly, in north Kerala, especially Thrissur - during Onam, there is a traditional breakfast made from steamed yellow plantains. Well, there is no recipe to share, because it is just ripe plantains -steamed till it nearly oozes out of the skin. It is steamed either as a whole or after chopping into bits. It is served with the skin on - what the blessed soul that gets to eat it has to do is use just two fingers artfully to peel off the steaming skin and then crush two huge pappadams( the Kerala variety, mind you, which is differently from the poppadums and the appalams and the Lijjat papads you might be used to) and make it into a mouth-wateringly maserated mess ( when I begin to alliterate that means the nostalgia is at its peak!) before popping into your salivating mouth. In several households, there is puttu (steamed rice cakes) kept on standby for the more snooty or fastidious! However, in my family, pazham and pappadam is the tradition - we would be crazy to try and experiment!

 I don't know if the reason it is only served during Onam is to keep some kinds of 'dishes' exclusively to herald Onam festivities. I cannot see the reason why it can't be convenience food for hassled mothers to dish up to their kids. But even on days when Amma was struggling to get us all ready and prepped to school before grabbing her bag to head to work, she never gave us the pleasure of savouring an out-of-turn pazham-pappadam!!

And then I think of our daily fare - not the glorious avials, kottukaris and the other sadya fare. The regular stuff made at home - the theeyals and the thorans and the mezhukkupurattis(this literally translates into vegetables sauteed in a bit of oil!) -the unglamourous, unlauded cousins - ask any Malayalee about their personal favourites and trust me, while they will be impressed by your knowledge of puttu-kadala and avial - they will secretly be craving their Amma's simple mathanga-pulingari or a vazhappindi or vazhakkoombu thoran (that's made from the different parts of the plantain - nothing goes to waste) or even the muringila thoran (drumsticks leaves)...That smell of hot hot coconut oil and curry leaves and mustard tempering in it is infinitely more blissful than the smell of jeera tempering in ghee!

Like there is a good name and a pet name that are distinctly different among Bengalis and 'good' clothes and 'home' clothes among most middle class Indians - Malayali food also has 'home' food and 'guest' food classifications. I'd say it is a distinctly discriminatory practice where we, the Malayalis decide what the non-Malayali will love and savour. The rest we pack it away to enjoy when there are no guests around our dining table. We discriminate and how - call it our Malayaleeccentricity!! :)

The Malayali Me - Stereotypes and More

The fact that my surname screams my Malayali roots loud and clear often means that people have pre-conceived notions about me and my preferences!

The standard dialogues I usually encounter are " How can you be a Malayali and not eat fish?", "What, you are allergic to prawns?? Ohh what a waste of a good Malayali life" and the most hilarious one is "What?? You don't eat rice?? Don't you people eat rice all the time with coconut in it? " The answer to all this used to be No, now it has been diplomatically amended to "I know, I'm pretty strange that way, aren't I"? Now it's not like my family is also a strange one, I'm the only aberration. The others enjoy their meat and their rice. My sister longs for home for a home-cooked meal while my cravings are for either specific dishes like the killer avial  or homemade dosas...Now a true blue Malayali won't be caught dead calling them dosas...We call it doshas..the way a south indian says dosa can help you narrow down whether he's from the coconutty land ( that is if he hasn't said college or simbly till then!) Well I told you this piece was about stereotypes...My friends fall over themselves every time they see a Mallu joke - which often centres around how a Mallu pronounces a certain word or their affinity to work in the Gelf where their ungle already is... To this too, I nod my head in jaded resignation!

Those who don't begin by asking me my name or talking to me in Hindi don't immediately take me for a Malayali...And my poker straight black hair has been pointed as the reason for it, other than my 'unaccented' Hindi...Did you know that all Malayalis are expected to have springy curly hair that is maintained shiny with coconut oil glistening through the strands and the traditional kulippinnu - which literally translates to how your hair is tied after you have had a shower. This is essentially a few strands of hair taken from both sides and braided into a thin line to keep the rest of the hair in place! For easy reference to all of the above - think Lolakutty of Channel V fame - the bane of my life - (there are certain North-Indian friends of mine who nicknamed me that half an hour after meeting me for the first time!!!) And as you would have correctly guessed by now, I'm a far cry from this stereotypical depiction.

However, after living for the first twenty years of my life in Kochi, I don't think of it as much of a compliment when people say "Ohhh I didn't realise you were a Malayali till you mentioned your name!" and the other smart-assed observation is "Are you a Menon or did you marry one?"...I have been thinking about the reason why there is a clear mould in most people's head about Malayalis. Moulds are often about South Indians in general and then if they are informed enough to know there are four different states among Madrassis where four distinctly different languages are spoken, then more specifically Malayalis! The moment you identify yourself as a South Indian, there are people who start speaking jibberish and tell me that's how I speak my language. Well, how come I haven't seen you pull that fast one on a Bengali or a Gujarati? Our script is likened to jalebis squeezed out in rounded shapes into a bubbling vat of oil. Hmmm, if I think about that, there could be some geometric similarity. But if you'd tried to decipher the script, you'd realise we have far more letters than you'd care to memorise!

Lampooning is alright, all communities need to learn to take a few jibes, but to think all Malayalis have a few nurses hidden in their family tree or that all the rich ones grew rich by robbing the Arabs of the Gulf are stretching the stereotype a bit far. Our surnames too are generic caste names. So if you know a Menon does not mean that I'm automatically related to that one..Kind of like expecting all the Singhs to have come from the same big family banyan-like tree!

Often I catch myself trying to justify that I'm not a stereotypical Malayali, perhaps because I'm sick and tired of the number of jibes or the subtle change in accent to match my lilting tones that follow. But as I grow older, I have come to wonder why am I defensive about who I am? Every community has its own quirks. The bane or in many sense the boon of being a Malayali is the ability to adapt oneself into any environment and flourish there ( so long as it is not one's own state - we reserve the lowest priority for Kerala!) Now here comes another quirk that few have observed enough to stereotype. Put two non-Keralite Malayalis in one room and they will crib about how Kerala will never see development like other states till the cows come home. But no one dares point that all the capable managers and enterprising youngsters flee the state at the first opportunity and return only when the call of home grows louder in the years closer to retirement! Take a Malayali out of Kerala and incentivise him to be a diligent, conscientious worker and you might have a good prospect on your hand. But leave him in his state and he will figure how to get a full month's salary out of you by citing Worker's Rights without working more than ten days of the thirty in all!

I have been a non-resident Keralite for over twelve years now and over the years I have realised I look for ways to connect with my home state and root for my Malayali brethren. I have come to realise that I instinctively look for indicators that could suggest the person I'm interacting with belongs to a place close to where I am from. This is not to say that I discriminate against people from elsewhere - my closest people are all from the non-coconutty lands. Need I add, I'm usually the butt of a lot many cliched, over-used and under-thought jokes! But I have realised and now must admit that as I grow older, the need to appreciate my heritage is growing stronger and along with it, ways and means to break a few stereotypes.

Like for instance,

• Men don't wear wrap-around skirts, they wear a mundu. And no, you can't call it a white lungi. We consider that sacrilege! 
• We don't eat, drink and wallow in coconut oil for every meal, snack and as a daily ritual. It is a practical livelihood choice, coming as we do from a land of bountiful coconut trees!
• Not all Malayalis have weird sounding names - many of us have pretty run-of-the-mill names, I pity the others, for they would have had scarring childhoods in Kerala or elsewhere! 
• Cows are not slaughtered every day in every household. Yes, we don't have a religious taboo on eating beef, but fish can be considered a more endangered specie were it to be an option alongside beef before a Malayali.
• Because we are known for our deep-rooted affinity to spirits, does not automatically translate to everyone having Herculean abilities to gulp down unlimited amounts of alcohol, those that do it are merely trying to prove they are self-destructive too! 
• We are not all prone to practising and performing Kathakali moves or instinctively understanding the glorious artform enough to hold discourses on it. With those that do, take it with a pinch of salt!
• and the last, for now, elephants are expensive acquisitions. Every house does not have one as a pet. In fact, those ancestral houses that boast of owning an elephant, talk of it, much the same way you'd boast if you had a Ferrari parked in your garage! 

Comprende?? 

Spring is in the Air!!

In India, especially in Kochi (where I grew up) and Mumbai (where I have worked most) there are essentially two seasons in a year - summer and monsoon... When the sweltering sun makes life muggy and your clothes stick to your skin, a collective prayer rises for relief...and by June or July, the monsoons stomp their way through India... My land, Kerala turns a very pretty shade of green in the monsoons...The rains bring with it lovely contrasts of green against the red soil that cool the eye....and there's this particular smell that rises from the parched earth when the first drops of rain re-seal the dry cracked surface of the earth... Catching the first drops of rain remains a fascination for me...though I must confess, the mad Mumbaikars take this craze to a totally different level... From being soaked in your sweat to standing drenched to the bone in the monsoons, sipping chai or biting into corn cobs, liberally sprinkled with lime and masalas...those were my seasons, those were what I looked forward to... I came to Brighton in autumn and immediately decided this was the prettiest season...Many warned me about spring stealing autumn's thunder...I refused to budge....But after braving a rather harsh Winter and the unprecedented snow it brought along for the visit this time, this sight that greeted me earlier this week brought a smile on.... The Sun shines more these days, that's not to say that Winter is ready to give way so easily....the nights are still brrrrr- cold and in the morning, the grass seems frosty white....but these bulbs daring the winter chill tell me its Spring Time...Beware: The Sun is deceptive, if you leave your sweaters behind at home, miscalculating the meagre warmth on a bright sunny day, then you can cuss yourself blue as you walk back frozen to the bone...But then after the bland wintry landscape, its time for a riot of colours... In the time span when India's coastal climate progressed from relatively mild to warm to hot and muggy weather, I moved from autumn to winter to spring....Now I know my seasons...They aren't just what was taught in Geography classes and understood by internalising Byron and Keats' description...Now I have my sights and my words to share...There's a spring in my step too these days as I head for the final classes of this term, and Spring is in the Air!!! ( P.S The pretty pictures of rain in Kerala: Courtesy my brother Anand's wonderful eye for photography. Prettier pictures of English Spring shall follow..These ones are to just herald the arrival of Spring!!! )

IN DAD'S OWN COUNTRY....GOD'S TOO :)

A trip through Kerala....to Malabar, my dad's land and a stop by in Triprayar...my mother's little dot on the map...seen through my Kodak lens.. Just testing my camera.... first pointed towards the sky...then downwards... The hyacinths floating across the river....painting even the river green, they hurry along with the currents but the glide is oh- so- beautiful....and when the purple flowers make an appearance, its prettier... You know you have reached Triprayar when you cross 'This little bridge over our own little Kwai' and across you see the majestic Triprayar temple....I sat on the steps of the temple, feeding the fishes....its called Meen oottu...one of my favourite rituals unique to the temple here.

When I was a child, I had fond memories of fishes... that came to nibble on the rice being dropped....Tiny little squiggles they were then...then you could stand on the lowest step and feel the fishes nibble on your feet as you dropped the little bits of rice...Now they are huge fat little monsters and there is even a little bar that prevents you from walking till the last steps....I couldn't capture the fishes but see the rumble of the waters as they flap their fins... And then I got distracted by the view across the river.....My dad dreams of building a little house by the river here...Now so do I...nestled among the coconut groves...with the gentle breeze and sunny skies...And the break over....our car chugs on....destination: Arakkuparambu in Perinthalmanna in the picturesque and forest covered Malappuram district of Kerala..Along the way...at all the temples visited, I once again saw an art, they say is dying...typically Kerala - the temple art is practised by trained local artists who used only vegetable dyes to produce this....in most temples, the centuries old art lies mold ridden and ruined...neglected..unfortunately photography is not allowed inside the sanctum sanctorum where I have seen some of the best works... The journey continues, northwards....Malabar is a blur as we speed along...But the greens change hue...its deeper, the contrasts starker...the terrain gets hilly...and as we climb up one and go down the others, I realise why this is God's favourite nook in the whole universe...his own land....

The Sunlight streams through foliage, painting some green, yet others greener..while the thickets embrace darkness.... Thats a little abode created for snake gods...another kerala touch...the sarpakkavu at Dad's tharavadu temple.. Behind the sarppakavu are rubber trees....where little drops of white rubber go drip drip into little coconut shells all year long... The little green lane...off the oft trodden track.. Anywhere you turn and press the shutter, you find a frame... Red bricks....the little building blocks of memories for any true blue Mallu... after incessant rains, the ground had turned slippery....the green of the moss in stark contrast to the weather-stained red bricks... And just as I turned the corner...there far below, nearly half a hill down lay a pond...Even as my feet tickled to dip my feet into it, came my father's nostalgic description....'When I was a child these steps used to lead to the coldest pond in the whole universe...' That little child is now 63 years old, but the enthusiasm in his voice - ageless. It was my first trip to dad's land....discovering a little patch of the soil...lush, steeped in history..