In God's Own Kitchen (Part III)

A picture is worth a thousand words 

And there is a story always peeking around a corner.

It stands behind the curtains waiting for an audience

It hides in dark rooms waiting to be rescued

And it creeps through long corridors on stormy nights 

To ambush me and you. 

My stories have pictures

My pictures tell stories

Of a God that resides in coconut trees

And is sometimes benevolent and sometimes not.

Of a fisherman's songs

That match the ebb and flow of the tides

Of men with red and green faces whose dance

Chases away the hobgoblins of my nightmares.

Of food that makes you weep

With its aroma of love, loss and longing.

Of food that makes you love

And the memories that it evokes

Of a thousand tinkling laughs in a thousand glass bottles.

And so begins my story often meandering and often tall

Dear reader, do not judge me, for I might just trip and fall.

They twirled in a frenzy of skirts and swords
They bickered, they twittered, they growled, they jousted
They loved, they hated
They were men who played with dolls
They were men who fenced with papier mache sabres
They were the gods and demons from dusty old books
Brought to life by your grandmother's rusty voice
On hot summer afternoons
Cooled by bamboo curtains sprayed with scented water.
Stabbed, bruised and burnt, he collapses into a colourful heap of red, white and gold.
He dies with his eyebrows puckered in surprise.

The Chinese went in two by two...hunting for the fish that had vanished from their own seas.
They built giant creaking contraptions like the machines of Mordor. Sprinkled with fairy dust, the eye of a newt and the ancient songs of the sea, these nets were the scourge of the sea as well as the boon for starving fisherman.

In Fort Kochi, every time you see the sign which says Catch of the Day, its probably found its way to your plate through the Chinese Fishing Net. Every time you feast on the perfectly grilled fresh red snapper, think about how many hours ago it flopped to the floor with a last dying sigh after being caught in a Chinese Fishing Net? Every little crab that you ever ate around these parts walked sideways into a Chinese Fishing Net before appearing on your plate in a healthy shade of tomato red.

I always wondered why we never had gingerbread men in our country.I also wondered about the nomenclature of certain foods and why the only 'bread' in the little gingerbread man was in its name. I was more fascinated by the confection than the fairytale itself where the ginger bread man came to life. Through my travails, in the kitchen, I have peeled endless sticks of ginger. I have smelled ginger powder, eaten ginger candy, gorged on ginger biscuits, julienned ginger into elegant strips and consumed nearly a ton of ginger paste.

However, I have never ever seen a ginger bread man. And as the smells of this dried ginger factory percolated through my olfactory nerves, my heart filled with this unrequited desire to meet and eat a gingerbread man.

All Spice Market was home to the wonderful allspice, a miniature globe containing the whole world within its circumference. the Gods decreed that all the spices would drop their essence into this tiny, innocuous, mud-coloured ball and rolled it off the heavenly plates into the dense forests of kerala. With a plop it fell into the Brahmin's bowl of morning milk
And the rest as they say is all history

Thousands of years later I haggle, I shed tears and I swore like a fishwife to get my precious share of the queen of exotic spices - Mistress Allspice.

Avial, a simple, steamed vegetable dish transformed with freshly ground coconut and tempered with just a hint of mustard seeds and curry leaves. It is highly recommended that you eat avial while listening to Avial's (the Malayalee rock band) earthy rendition of Nada Nada complete with clanging guitars and metal tinged grunts and screams.

Uruli, the light of my kitchen, the fire of my stove, my faithful sidekick, my cauldron of delight. Oo-ru-Lee...the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Oo. Ru. Lee.

Hidden away in a freezer far from prying eyes and known only to a select group of die hard carnivores, beef is a rare (excuse the pun) commodity in Delhi. "beef" is also a dirty word in Delhi. Gau Mata would be a more appropriate title for this half goddess-half beast of burden. Our Gau Mata however, spends a large part of her time negotiating city traffic, scavenging rubbish heaps and languishing on the narrow dividers on arterial roads.

It is a strange journey from drinking cow urine to increase one's longevity (a practice made popular by Hindu nationalists) to eating the most succulent chunks of roast beef cooked in a mild coconut gravy and topped with a layer of crispy potato slices and fried onions. A strange journey indeed!

The red fire burned in his belly.  He clutched his sides in pain. It was an hour too late. He keeled over and collapsed in a heap.
The red, hot curry was always a dangerous idea. It had the seductive charm of a praying mantis attracting her mate. It would pull both skeptics and believers into its fiery pot of deceit.

"I told you not to mess with me," she said.
"I told you not to make me angry when I cook," she continued and patted him gently on his head.
"And I told you that you'd burn in hell, my love," she concluded with a sweet smile.

Postscript:
Just for a moment, I shall stop playing the fool
Only to say that the red fish curry is all about dreams of drool

Rub a dub dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker.
Turn them out, knaves all three.

The nursery rhyme that always came to mind, the song that fluttered on my lips and the image that floated before my eyes, like black spots appearing before a perforated retina every time I saw a bakery.

A strange three-headed monster or divine avatar
A freakish mutant or a lesser God
Gave birth to a hundred coconuts
That went forth and conquered the world.

A hundred coconuts sunning themselves in the sun by the sea.
A hundred coconuts oozing their sweet milk over the land.
A hundred coconuts nourishing the soil with its succulent flesh.
A hundred coconuts dropped out of nowhere.
Just like a hundred fallen moons from some distant galaxy.
A hundred coconuts were reborn as the quintessence of fish curries, pot roasts and custards.

A hundred coconuts cracked open to reveal a glimpse of a colonized world of the future 
Of kitchens in thrall of this alien fruit
Of cooks offering deep obeisance to this grand oval of green
Of mothers using the hard brown nut
As a charm against all evil.
Of little children sucking the last drop sweet coconut water through cheap plastic pipes.
Of big corporations marketing the coconut and its byproducts as new age organic mumbo-jumbo

A strange three-headed monster or divine avatar
A freakish mutant or a lesser God
Gave birth to a hundred coconuts
That went forth and conquered the world.

Priestesses of this temple and storytellers beyond compare, Anu and Aniamma are the keepers of this patch of paradise. There is a bit of magic in their lives as the simple raw vegetable turn to gourmet creations beneath their deft fingers. A sprinkle of this and a dash of that yields a spectacular symphony of flavours and textures. Grand conductors of the kitchen, they cajole you into taking a ride into their world. Love pours out of their kitchens, heat exudes from the food. The land screams its history and the river sings a song through their food. One of the last frontiers of a harmonious world, eating in their kitchen is a peaceful homecoming.

finis

In God's Own Kitchen (Part II)

Bananas

"Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said."

Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things (1997)

The classification of jam-jelly was not a dilemma to be pondered over on a holiday. Yet, as the dark red banana jam-jelly spread itself over my toast like luxuriant silk and exploded in a thousand microscopic shrapnels of  honeyed sweetness inside my mouth, I wondered about the often autocratic nature of classifications.

Surrounded by the swaying fronds of young banana tree and lulled into catlike contentment after gorging on  flaky and tender banana fritters and uncountable cups of fragrant filter coffee, I thought what better place or time to ponder than a holiday, and what better subject than the one nearest at hand, namely the banana.

Before I came to Kerala, I used to think Bengalis were the only race who had perfected culinary experimentation with the banana.  Not only did the average non-intrepid Bengali eat everything from the stem to the flower, he also ate his meal on the ample, freshly washed leaves of the selfsame plant.
Food and religion mingle imperceptibly in our country and this ubiquitous culinary staple is swathed in a nine-and-a-half yard yellow cotton sari and transformed into a blushing young bride, the kola bou. She carries the spirit that is to infuse the Goddess Durga with life on the dawn of Maha Saptami and is also Ganesha's wife.

The intrepid Bengali cooks his fish coated with mustard in a banana leaf packet. He makes his creamy cottage cheese confections in little banana leaf moulds. He minces the raw banana and combines it with spices and chillies to simulate a dish of spicy meatballs redolent with all the aromas and textures of a rich gourmet meat. The banana is Bengal’s edible gold. It is the dream of every Bengali domestic goddess to perfect the mochar ghonto (a spicy vegetable preparation with the banana flower and pieces of coconut) or the crisp and tantalizing mochar chop (spiced cutlet made with banana flowers) to complete the rite of passage necessary for kitchen queendom.

I thought this love for the banana plant was singularly unmatched. That was before I came to Kerala.
Here, the fruit is is the stuff of lore. Grown in every backyard, big or small, eaten in nearly every form sweet or savoury, the banana is an omniscient presence.
The wide leaves of the banana plant seem to enfold the whole land in a protective swathe offering solace from any storm.
Right through its lifespan from a firm green youth to an overripe yellow maturity, the banana grows from food staple to cultural icon. it provides economic and emotional succour.

The banana fruit carries memories...of grandmothers in warm kitchens peeling piles of sweet, ripe bananas to make delicious puttu (a combination of rice flour, coconut and steamed bananas) for breakfast. It carries with it the smell of woodfire that permeates the narrow backwaters where rural country boats laden high with freshly plucked bananas, make their way to the local markets. It is a harbinger of good fortune and a good crop, a familiar green stain along the whole coastline.

There are chips and chops, jams and jellies, cakes and candies. Violently chopped, cruelly minced, brutally beaten and mercilessly whipped, the banana fruit is tortured till it yields new culinary fantasies.

In Kerala, God cooks with a long ladle. The banana steeped in the smells and juices of the indigenous spices is simmered and stirred into delightful bite-size pieces of heavenly manna.

Gluttony is one of the deadly seven and needless to say I am a sinner.
I stole one banana from a perfect pile of the tiny golden-yellow fruits.
I licked my fingers clean after nearly inhaling an exceptionally crisp and succulent pazham pori (fried bananas in a sweet batter) in a single bite.
I swallowed the tenth slice of toast slathered in banana jam lost in Arundhati Roy's exquisite metaphors on the selfsame jam.

"Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home."

While the sometimes heart wrenching, sometimes heart warming and always foot tapping Banana Boat Song was not quite my theme, I did sing the song sometimes. As I travelled around Kerala, sometimes I tired of my own romantic notions. Sometimes I tired of the picture perfect landscape. Sometimes, I longed for the searing heat rather than the mellow rain. Sometimes I wanted a rotten banana to fall in a wet sploosh at my feet as an indication that even Gods could have feet of clay.
And almost on cue I would collide with the most beautiful stretch of backwater, eat the most perfect karimeen polichathu (fried spicy pearlspot) or chance upon the friendliest local full of stories. Like a chastised child I would hang my head in shame, for I had attempted to hunt for imperfection in God's own country.
More importantly, I realized that this land was stacked with the sights, smells and tastes redolent of my own hometown. All I had to do was scratch beneath the firm fibrous skin...
And the sweet hint of banana formed the perfect bookend for these discoveries.