Monsoon Diary (22 page)

Then Nalla-ma heard that breakfast was included with the cost of the room. She couldn’t bear the thought of three free breakfasts going to waste and insisted that we go down to the hotel’s dining room for breakfast.

Ram and I would help ourselves to the cereal, bagels, and coffee from the buffet. Nalla-ma would sit discreetly in a corner and eat the glutinous rice porridge that she’d brought with her. She’d hide the container on her lap because she thought that the management would throw her out for bringing her own food. Periodically, a spoon would emerge from under the table and transport the food into her mouth. Whenever a waiter passed by, Nalla-ma would stop chewing, take a sip of water, and smile brightly.

Nalla-ma usually filled a tray for herself from the breakfast buffet as a ploy to distract the waiters. When nobody was watching, she would quickly pack the bread and dry cereal into a Ziploc bag “just in case one of you wants to eat it for lunch.” When she discovered that she couldn’t get Ram or me to eat the cold bagel or cereal, she was in a quandary. She couldn’t bear to throw the food away, but she didn’t want to leave the bagel and cereal behind. “After all, we are paying for the breakfast,” she said judiciously.

At lunchtime Nalla-ma would graciously offer the bagel to one of my students. If they refused, she would carry the bagel and cereal all the way back home in the hope that I would eat them during the week. Sometimes I did, just to put her mind at rest, and sometimes I threw the bagel away when Nalla-ma wasn’t looking.

Lunch and dinner in Edison were more relaxed. In fact, they were scrumptious compared with our previous forays to the local pizza parlor. Nalla-ma would spread a newspaper on the bed and lay out a series of yogurt containers. Inside were spicy vegetable curries, rice,
rasam,
pongal,
and pickles. She took great pleasure in rationing the food with the precision of a military general so that the last morsel was finished by the time we were ready to drive back home on Sunday evening.

It was our annual cross-country trip that caused Nalla-ma to finally eat food prepared by others. We started in New York and New Jersey and then drove to Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles. The whole trip took ten days.

When Nalla-ma realized that there was no way she could cook and carry her rations for the duration of the trip, she refused to go with us. But Ram wouldn’t hear of her staying home.

“You must come,” he said. “This is a great chance for you to see the country.”

“Why should I see the country, old woman that I am?” Nalla-ma said. “Why don’t you youngsters go along, unencumbered by old people like me? I’ll stay back and watch the house.”

“The house doesn’t need watching, and I don’t need to be worrying about you all alone at home,” Ram said. “You are going with us and that’s final. If you are worried about food, we can work something out.”

After much research and inquiry, we reached a solution. Nalla-ma would take her rice cooker, a bag of rice, and a tall bottle containing the spicy tamarind relish (
puli-kaachal
) that she had concocted. She would cook her own rice in the rice cooker and subsist on that and the
puli-kaachal
during the trip. That was the plan, anyway.

The upheaval happened when we reached Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Nalla-ma discovered that she had left the rice cooker at home. After that, it was pandemonium. She was almost in tears, begging us to turn back or at least drop her at a train station where she could take a train back to New York. I tried to pacify her by saying that I would buy her a new rice cooker in Chicago. She got mad because I was thinking of waiting until Chicago to buy it. What was she supposed to eat in the meantime? Then Ram had an idea.

“Why not buy rice at a Chinese restaurant?” he suggested. “After all, they sell plain rice as a side order.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Nalla-ma sniffed her annoyance. “I’ll starve.”

“Come on, Nalla-ma!” I said impatiently. “How will you manage on tamarind chutney alone? Why don’t you eat some fruit at least? It hasn’t been cooked or anything. How much purer can food get? And what about drinking some milk, huh? After all, our scriptures call it the holiest of foods.”

Nalla-ma examined the milk bottle that I handed her. “What does
pasteurized
mean?” she asked finally.

“It means that they have boiled it so that all the germs have been killed,” I said.

In Du Bois, Pennsylvania, Nalla-ma accompanied me to a grocery store. After much deliberation, she picked out a carton of 2 percent milk and some fruits.

In Cleveland she tasted strawberry yogurt for the first time and decided that she liked it. We went to the Kroger’s and stood in the dairy aisle for fifteen minutes. I read the labels of the various-flavored yogurts to make sure they didn’t contain lard or any other questionable substance.

In South Bend, Indiana, Nalla-ma declared that Dunkin’ Donuts coffee tasted just like the filter coffee back home. For the rest of the trip we had to stop every time we saw a Dunkin’ Donuts so that Nalla-ma could have a large coffee accompanied by a French cruller, which, according to her, tasted just like
jilebi.
By the time we reached Chicago, Nalla-ma was eating rice from Chinese restaurants.

Every night we stopped briefly at a Chinese restaurant. I went in and asked for two servings of plain rice. Then we went to the local Italian restaurant, since Ram and I loved Italian food. While we ate our pastas or pizzas, Nalla-ma mixed the Chinese rice with her tamarind relish and ate it for dinner. “My grandmother can’t eat Italian food,” I told the waitress. “It’s against her religion.”

Once, the waitress at a Mexican restaurant offered to bring some potato chips for Nalla-ma when she saw the rice mixture she was eating. Too polite to refuse, Nalla-ma tried some potato chips with her meal. The next time we were at a grocery store, I read her the potato chip labels. We consulted with the store manager, who assured us that yeast wasn’t an animal product. Satisfied, Nalla-ma decided to patronize Wise and began with a packet of lightly salted potato chips.

She started eating ice cream while driving in the blistering heat of Texas. She wouldn’t eat Häagen-Dazs, since it contained egg, but favored Edy’s No Sugar Added ice cream. That phrase gave her the license to eat as much of the stuff as she wanted without having to worry about gaining weight or worsening her diabetes.

In Albuquerque, while I was buying a sandwich at Wendy’s, Nalla-ma discovered that mixing their ketchup with hot water gave her a fluid that tasted like Indian
rasam.
When she learned that the ketchup packets were free, she took about twenty of them, which lasted her until Los Angeles, where we went to Wendy’s again.

I became an expert at quizzing waiters about what their food contained. I would begin with meat, the big no-no. Once I made sure that the food didn’t contain any meat, fish, chicken, lard, or garlic (denigrated by yogis), I got to her likes and dislikes. She disliked mushrooms—“too slimy”—and artichokes—“too tart. What is it anyway? A flower, fruit, or vegetable?” She would take salad without the dressing, pasta without the garlic, Mexican food without the cheese, and Thai food without the lemongrass. Once a week she insisted on Indian food, particularly
pongal,
her favorite dish. But at least she ate “outside” food. We had come a long way.

PONGAL

I usually make
pongal
when we return from vacation, since it’s a one-dish dinner that is easy to prepare. Besides, after a week of eating at restaurants, I like to serve my family a wholesome, cleansing food that is light on the stomach. My daughter eats this
pongal
with brown sugar, while my husband favors lime pickles as an accompaniment. I eat it piping hot and plain, with a dash of ghee on top.

SERVES 4

1 cup split
mung
dal
1 cup white rice
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns
1 tablespoon ghee or canola oil
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 cup roasted cashews

Roast the split
mung
dal, then mix it with the white rice in a pressure cooker or a heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, and cover with 5 cups water. Add the salt and cook until the rice is soft and squishy.

Using a mortar and pestle, coarsely grind the peppercorns and set aside. In a sauté pan, heat the ghee and add the cumin seeds. When they start popping, add the cashews and sauté until golden. Add the pepper, then pour in the semisolid, cooked
pongal
from the pressure cooker and mix well. Top with a dollop of ghee.

Nalla-ma’s visit signaled that we were ready to receive other guests, and slowly our cousins, friends, and relatives began dropping in on us. After waiting a respectable two years, my in-laws told us that they were planning a trip to America and “might” spend a couple of weeks with us. We told them that of course they should come and began to prepare for their arrival.

Ram and I shared an instinctive if unstated understanding that we would do our best to get along with each other’s families. They were “precious relationships,” as Shyam said. I was determined to treat his parents no differently than my own. Still, making up one’s mind was one thing. Actually doing it was another. I knew that I liked my in-laws but was nervous about living with them. To ease the transition, I called them Amma and Appa, Tamil words for Mom and Dad, which is what Ram called them.

Both my in-laws were strong personalities with very particular sensibilities. My mother-in-law, for instance, was a self-described “exercise fiend” who began her day by prostrating herself before the gods in our
puja
room in a yoga-cum
-puja
routine that bestowed the benefits of exercise and gained her some good karma in the process. She liked her coffee piping hot and her yogurt perfectly fermented, neither too sweet nor too tart. “Three things are dear to a South Indian’s heart,” she said. “Hot coffee, good yogurt, and pickles.”

My father-in-law, on the other hand, didn’t care about accessories like pickles and chutneys. He liked simple foods that were lightly cooked and spiced. He had a refined palate and an aesthetic that was almost Japanese in its love of order. He enjoyed a neatly set table with starched linen, pretty serving bowls, forks and spoons that lined up precisely, and fresh flowers in the center. He was happy to eat just one piece of toast for breakfast as long as it was prepared and served well, neither too crisp nor too soft. Every morning he would take his place at the head of the table, bathed, powdered, and dressed in neatly ironed clothes, ready to face the day.

Perspiring and breathless from her exercise, my mother-in-law would serve him his toast and coffee and sit down for her own breakfast, surrounded by newspaper clippings, magazines, glasses of the different fruit juices she loved to try, water to dilute the juices, foods of varied vintage, including the previous day’s leftovers that she couldn’t bear to throw out, towels to wipe off sweat, and a “to-read” pile that grew every time she went out for a walk and picked up free brochures.

My father-in-law would come up behind her and quietly stack the newspapers, line up her paper clippings, put away used utensils, and arrange stray pens in neatly organized piles. “One day you are going to tidy me away,” my mother-in-law would complain. Her husband’s meticulousness alarmed her, and her vociferous protests slowed him down but didn’t stop him entirely. When she spread her things in a haphazard manner, he couldn’t help himself. So he tidied up stealthily and secretly, behind her back or when she was busy elsewhere.

In many ways I was like my mother-in-law, lending credence to the saying that sons marry women who resemble their mothers. We both loved books and writing. We both trained in classical Carnatic music. She was a superb cook who loved mixing flavors and textures in unorthodox ways. One of her favorite foods was mango
mor-kuzhambu,
which combined the sweetness of mangoes, the tartness of buttermilk, and the fiery heat of green chiles. Both her husband and son disliked this dish and made disparaging remarks about fusion cuisine when she offered it to them.

“But it tastes so good,” my mother-in-law would say. “Doesn’t it, Shoba?”

I would nod stoutly, in complete agreement.

MY FATHER-IN-LAW WAS a reluctant courier. An elegant, dapper man who loved the fine things in life, he dreamed of traveling without succumbing to what he called “the bulging-box syndrome.” However, a lifetime of living with my mother-in-law and her sisters had resigned him to the fact that he would never travel with just a rolling Vuitton duffel bag like he wanted to. My mother-in-law’s love of fresh fruit and produce put him at a terrible crossroads: whether to indulge his wife or stick to his principles. He indulged his wife.

When Appa went for a meeting to Delhi, Amma would beg him to bring back a case of Shimla apples. When he went to Rome, he wanted to bring her a leather handbag; she wanted Roma tomatoes. When they traveled together to Indonesia, he looked for carved masks; she looked for
mangosteen
and
rambutan
fruits.