Monsoon Diary Read online

  Ghee keeps at room temperature for about two months, longer in the winter. It should be used like a condiment, in small quantities. Indians typically brush ghee on their breads, spoon it into rice, or stir it into their soups.

  MAKES ABOUT 1/2 CUP

  2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces

  Bring butter to a boil in a small heavy saucepan over medium heat.

  Once foam completely covers the butter, reduce the heat to very low. Cook, stirring occasionally, until a thin crust begins to form on the surface and milky white solids fall to the bottom of the pan, about 8 minutes.

  Continue to cook, watching constantly and stirring occasionally to prevent burning, until the solids turn light brown and the butter deepens to golden and turns translucent and fragrant, about 3 minutes.

  When the ghee stops bubbling, you can safely assume that it’s done. Remove it from the heat, let it cool, and pour it into a jar.

  TWO

  Baby Brother Arrives

  WHEN I WAS fourteen months old, my mother and I went to stay with my maternal grandparents. In India pregnant women go to their parents’ home to deliver babies, a civilized and convenient arrangement if the involved parties can get along. Eight months pregnant with her second child, my mother was in no mood or shape to assert her independence from her parents. She moved into her old room, dropped her bags, flopped on the bed, and held out her arms for sympathy and pampering.

  Every morning, my grandmother gave her milk spiked with saffron, ground almonds, and jaggery or cane sugar, which provided iron and calcium for my mother’s growing body. In the evening, relatives and friends brought her favorite foods, spurred by the notion that feeding a pregnant woman was akin to feeding God. Hindu custom dictated that anyone who satisfied a pregnant woman’s cravings would not only make her happy but get some karmic credit in the process. So my mother ate, drank, and napped, secure in the knowledge that the household would run without her help and that her toddler was well taken care of.

  My mother is an only daughter, with four brothers, two of whom were married at that time. As it turned out, several of my uncles and aunts were staying with my grandparents when my brother was born. One was on vacation, another was between jobs, and the third lived nearby. I am sure that this kind of enforced camaraderie was tough on the adults. Not all of my aunts got along; my grandmother was a difficult, stubborn mother-in-law; money was short; steely wills clashed and people walked out in a huff. But I knew none of this as a child. I felt like I was the center of their universe. And perhaps I was.

  Two of my aunts were pregnant, and they viewed me as someone on whom they could practice their maternal skills. One aunt bathed me, another rocked me to sleep, the third took me out to the terrace and pointed to the moon and stars while feeding me dinner. My unmarried uncles took me out on motorbike rides, while the married ones bought me presents. The result was—as my brother often says with a touch of bitterness—that I was spoiled rotten. I say that being spoiled early in life does not reflect a person’s future character, and point to my current stoicism as an example. To that, my brother says, “Ha!”

  MY GRANDPARENTS LIVED in Coimbatore, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Mountains where the climate was more temperate than in the state capital, Madras (now called Chennai), where my father worked as a college professor. My grandfather was a government doctor who combined his professional knowledge of allopathic medicine with his personal regard for ayurveda, India’s indigenous medical system.

  A confluence of such seemingly disparate interests was not unusual in India, where rational scientists consulted astrological charts on a daily basis and businesses accommodated religious rituals during working hours. My grandfather, for instance, never failed to do his tharpanam (ancestor worship) every new-moon day. His clinic simply didn’t schedule patients that morning.

  After a hectic week of seeing patients, my grandfather would become one himself. On Sundays my grandmother boiled sesame oil with fresh-ground pepper, orange peels, and fenugreek into a fragrant decoction. An ayurvedic practitioner—a wizened old man with the arms of a wrestler—would come to our home, massage my grandfather briskly, swaddle him in banana leaves, which drew toxins out of the body, and let him lie in the sun. An hour later my grandfather would carefully ingest a spoonful of castor oil, a mild laxative, and indulge in a light lunch of pongal and steamed greens.

  My grandmother always made pongal when the seasons changed. Only later did I learn that this simple dish—a combination of rice and split mung dal cooked with ginger, pepper, and turmeric—was a complete balanced food, at the core of ayurvedic nutrition.

  Pongal is a hearty dish; it is also a harvest festival, the South Indian equivalent of Thanksgiving. In mid-January of each year, villagers celebrate the harvest and give thanks to the sun. They build a bonfire and burn old, useless things to start afresh for the new year. The women draw kolam designs with colored powder on their courtyards and adorn them with yellow pumpkin flowers. They fill mud pots with just-harvested rice and tie fresh turmeric, ginger saplings, and tender mango leaves around the neck of the pot. Young boys scrub and decorate their cows with embroidered blankets, gilt streamers, rose garlands, and bells. They parade through the town, shouting “ Pongal-oh-Pongal.” The whole atmosphere is like a carnival. As the sun rises, the entire family gathers and offers sweet and savory pongal, along with sugarcane on banana leaves. Later in the day they go sightseeing, hold cattle races and bullfights. And they eat pongal on picnics.

  Sweet pongal is made with jaggery, cardamom, and cashews. The savory version, called venn pongal, is fairly bland, and gains its flavor from the fresh-ground pepper and the roasted cashews. Its neutral taste makes it a perfect foil for tart, spicy accompaniments. North Indians call this dish khichadi and may include grated carrots, chopped tomatoes, cilantro, and other vegetables with it. Khichadi also uses other spices like coriander powder, cinnamon, cloves, and bay leaves.

  AFTER DELIVERING my brother, my mother was quarantined in her bedroom, where she sat like an Eastern potentate, surrounded by pillows, cloth diapers, and baby paraphernalia, eating, nursing, and napping with the baby.

  I had little interest in my baby brother, surrounded as I was by a house full of distractions. I periodically ran into my mother’s room for a cuddle before running out again to watch the lizards, which hung upside down on the ceiling, flicking their tails and staring balefully at ditsy wasps before gulping them down with a quick lunge. Sometimes I would slip surreptitiously into my grandfather’s musty closet, sit on the medical books amidst his white doctor’s coats, and play with syringes, bandages, and tubes of ointment until someone opened the door and dragged me out. If all else failed, I would follow the maid, Maari, around as she meandered through her chores, bathing the baby, washing the diaper cloths, and carrying plates of special food for my mother.

  My mother was put on a strict, unvarying diet, the purpose of which was to prevent gas from forming in her body and giving the breast-feeding infant colic. Mostly it consisted of a type of spinach called agathi keerai (rich with vitamins and minerals), rice with a lot of ghee to give her energy, vatrals, which were dried vegetables and therefore noncruciferous, garlic rasam to increase her breast milk, and betel leaves to chew on as a digestive.

  After lunch all the women in the household—pregnant and otherwise—gathered on a bamboo mat under the lazily swirling ceiling fan to chew betel. The curtains were drawn to keep the hot sun off the cool mosaic floor. Someone brought the chella potti, a perforated silver box containing stacks of betel leaves surrounded by a fragrant assortment of spices: betel nuts, fennel, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, gulkand (rose paste), slaked lime, and coconut flakes.

  The women took the tender green betel leaves, brushed them lightly with white slaked lime, placed the betel nuts, fennel, and other spices in the center, wrapped the leaves into a triangle “the shape of a woman’s vagina,” as one of my more raunchy aunts said, and popped the opiate com
bination into their mouths. As they chewed and their lips and tongue became stained red, their jokes became more risqué, their gossip more personal, their bodies more horizontal. Soon the room was full of shrieking, laughing, swaying, red-toothed women whom I hardly recognized as the harassed housewives of the morning. I was convinced that betel leaves contained narcotics because the adults wouldn’t let me eat them, though of course they don’t. “Your tongue will thicken,” my mother said as she stuffed her mouth full of the green leaves.

  I would rest my head on my grandmother’s squishy abdomen as she lay on the floor, and feel her soft flesh rumble as she belly-laughed her way to tears. Although I didn’t know it at that time, it was the closest I would come to feeling totally at peace with the world.

  “Your mother was pushed into the buttermilk when she stole betel,” my grandmother began, jumping into the middle of a story as usual. “It was at a wedding at our ancestral home in Kerala, and the backyard was like a battlefield with large brass vats filled with rice, gravy, buttermilk, porridge, and cumin water. Right in the middle of the ceremony, your mother quietly crept up to the betel tray, grabbed a couple of betel leaves, and went out to the back where the cooks were cooking lunch. She hid between the vats and began to chew her stolen betel. It was there that your young uncle Ravi found her. He grabbed her long braids and began taunting her. He would tell everyone about the stolen betel, he said. Well, what does your mother do? She pulls Ravi’s spectacles off his face and stomps on them. No halfway measures for that girl. Ravi is standing there, almost crying with anger—he can hardly see. He chases her around the vats. Your mother rushes up a ladder, silly girl. Ravi rocks the ladder, and your mother falls, plop, right into a vat of buttermilk. Thank God it was buttermilk. Can you imagine if it had been some boiling water, or even curried sambar? Now, these vats are huge, like I said. Tall, about twice your mother’s height. And the girl can’t swim. So she sinks into the buttermilk, rises up, gurgles like a toad, and goes down again. Ravi is petrified by now. He climbs up the ladder and tries to reach for her. Your mother, of course, grabs Ravi and pulls him down with her. It was your great-aunt Gita who found them, two slithering masses, soaked with the white buttermilk. She grabbed your mother by her long braids and pulled Ravi out by his ears. That’s why your uncle Ravi’s ears are pointed. Because Aunt Gita grabbed them when he was a kid and yanked him out of a vat of buttermilk.”

  What my grandmother did best was tell stories. She had a phenomenal memory that stored colors, textures, sounds, and smells, and a gift for shaping them into spellbinding narratives. With a few words, she painted a vivid portrait of her parents and grandparents, volatile and passionate in temperament, who drank “loads of ghee and lived to be ninety”; about their life under the British rule when they were not admitted into British clubs; about her years as a child bride when she feared her father-in-law and wouldn’t even stand in front of him; and about my antics as a baby. She was my umbilical cord to my past.

  THREE MONTHS AFTER my brother, Shyam, was born, my mother, fortified by the care she had received from her parents, decided to return to Madras with my infant brother. My father arrived to take them back home, an overnight train journey from Coimbatore, where my grandparents lived.

  My grandparents, however, insisted that I be left behind. They weren’t sure if my mother could cope with two young children, and truth be told, my parents weren’t sure how they would manage either. So I happily stayed on in Coimbatore, while my parents returned to Madras with my infant brother. What began as a temporary measure stretched into four years, an arrangement that wholly suited me.

  In the morning I would sit in my grandmother’s warm kitchen, nursing a cup of Ovaltine and watching her combine spices and vegetables with dizzying aplomb. Carrots with ghee for growth, potatoes with ginger to soothe, beans with garlic to rejuvenate, onions or asafetida to balance. Meals were a pageant of colors and flavors, all combed together with an array of spices. Cumin and coriander were the backbone, supported by black mustard seeds and fenugreek, while fennel provided the top note.

  Like her mother and grandmother before her, my grandmother would not light the stove until she had taken a bath. The early-morning hours were for prep work: cutting vegetables, grating coconut, and measuring out spices. After her bath my grandmother lit the lamp in the puja room (prayer room), recited a few Sanskrit prayers, and then lit the stove to cook breakfast for my grandfather.

  A proud, passionate cook, my grandmother took no advice and brooked no questions. Once she upturned a container of rock salt into sweet halwa because someone dared question her choice of sweet for a particular occasion. “You want something salty? There! Eat salt,” she growled as she stirred white specks of salt into the creamy, cardamom-scented halwa. She terrorized her daughters-in-law with rapidly hurled insults, most of which had to do with food. “Why are you so bitter? Like dried-up okra,” or “Her conversation is like watered-down congee [rice gruel].”

  With her grandchildren, unlike with the rest of the world, my grandmother was tender and gentle. My mother often wondered aloud how her incredibly strict mother had turned into such an indulgent grandmother. To that, she replied, “You children were mine. My grandchildren, on the other hand, are on loan; I have to treat them as precious objects.”

  I was firmly convinced that among all her grandchildren, I was her favorite. I was her first grandchild, and she took great pleasure in bathing me, dressing me up, perfuming and powdering me, kissing me silly, and telling me stories to make me laugh. There is a Tamil word, paasam, which refers to bonds of blood that are nurtured by time into an irrational, all-consuming love. That is what I felt for my grandmother, an attachment that began when I was a baby and was strengthened by her affection for me.

  My grandfather called my grandmother Ponnu, which is akin to calling someone Goldie. The name alluded to her fair skin, unusual in South India. My grandfather was tall, bald, and dark, his color contrasting starkly with the white clothes he always wore. When my grandparents walked together, they looked like salt and pepper.

  I called my grandmother Nalla-ma, which means “good mother,” and my grandfather Nalla-pa. I’m not sure how I came up with those names, but I think of them now as a measure of how happy I was with my grandparents.

  MY GRANDFATHER DOTED on me too. I saw little of him, since he was busy at the clinic with his patients. But he came home for lunch, a light meal of rice, rasam, and a couple of vegetable curries. I would sit in his lap and watch him eat, begging for choice morsels with upturned chin and eager smile. He always yielded, giving me sips of rasam and pieces of fried papadam, in spite of my grandmother’s admonition that these were not suitable for a toddler.

  The author with her grandmother, Nalla-ma.

  Like all Indians, my grandfather ate with his right hand, using his fingers to mash the rice with the rasam into an oatmeal-like mixture. Then he mixed the vegetable curry with the rasam rice before popping the whole thing into his mouth.

  As I got older, I began to appreciate eating with my hands, which allowed me to savor the warm food through pliant fingers rather than a cold, hard fork or spoon. In fact, Indians believe that hands add flavor to food. When an Indian wants to compliment a person’s culinary skills, he doesn’t simply say “She is a good cook.” He says that “she has good scent in her hands.” Just as a green thumb raises healthy plants, scented hands cook tasty meals.

  My grandfather invariably ended his lunch with yogurt and rice mixed together, to which he would add a little vegetable curry. Then he did something I thought curious. He would pick out the black mustard seeds, cumin, fenugreek, and other spices that specked the white landscape of yogurt, hold them between his thumb and middle finger, and flick them deftly from his plate. Why he objected to these spices, I don’t know and didn’t think to ask. Perhaps they interfered with the antiseptic whiteness of pure yogurt, perhaps his tolerance for spices was low, or perhaps he was merely following his father’s or grandfather’s exampl
e. Whatever the reason, a colony of spices would encircle my grandfather’s plate after each meal.

  Nalla-pa would lean back in his chair, belch heartily, and tweak my cheek. In spite of himself, his eyes would return to the small circular vessel containing my grandmother’s rasam. As a doctor, he didn’t want to overeat, but as a husband he couldn’t resist his wife’s food. Suppressing a smile, my grandmother would ladle some more rasam into a tumbler and hand it to him.

  “It’s a chilly day,” she would say to make him feel better. “Much better to end the meal with warm rasam instead of cold yogurt.”

  Nodding gratefully, my grandfather would tilt the tumbler and empty the rasam into his mouth. Not once did the tumbler touch his lips. Indians of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation never sipped—they thought it unsanitary to be spreading germs by sipping cups, even if the dishes were washed afterward. Instead they used tumblers with rims to pour coffee, tea, water, or rasam down their throat.

  I would watch my grandfather’s Adam’s apple bob as he aimed the rasam into his mouth and swallowed continuously without closing his lips. Glug, glug, glug.

  My grandmother made spectacular rasam: a mild yellow lentil broth enlivened by tangy tomatoes and fragrant cilantro. While rasam is typically made with tomatoes, other ingredients can be substituted as well. After my brother was born, my mother was given rasam with mashed garlic to increase the flow of her breast milk. Anyone who got a cold was fed rasam with fresh-ground pepper to open the sinuses. When the monsoon ravaged the red earth of Coimbatore and sent streams of water shivering down the drain, my grandmother puréed rice with rasam and topped it with a dollop of warm ghee. I would sit by the windowsill and watch the swaying trees arch under sheets of rain while my aunt spooned the rasam-rice mixture into my mouth.