By Nisha Ravi
Every time my parents fought there would be rice and a bowlful of steaming turmeric laced potatoes for dinner, that have, despite some violent tossing, held shape only to crumble into mush when gently pressed between fingers. A remarkably dull sounding meal that had astonishing ways of comforting all members of the family alike, while effortlessly displaying a certain lackadaisical disdain on my mother’s part.
I remember my first memory of those potatoes. My parents had had the biggest argument. But it was I who sobbed inconsolably. As anger coursed through my mother, she decided she would not spend more time than was emotionally required of her, to prepare dinner that night. However, seeing her 6 year old wailing at the departure of her beloved father behind slammed doors, she was also confused with empathy. It’s what gave birth to a parboiled potato stir fry, tempered with a dash of chilli and flash fried in coconut oil. Golden yellow, crunchy on the outside, pillowy on the inside. Mashed into warm rice and rationed out in hand-rolled balls, in candle light. I still remember that meal being rife with emotions and delight alike.
Truth be told, comfort food is oversimplified for no one's benefit. It’s no secret that there is food for every mood. I mean, if someone says they have just one comfort food and can swear by its magical efficacy of bringing them right back to a good place, well I don’t know. It sounds like a lot of heavy lifting for one single meal. For me it’s always been a clear broth of spicy, tangy rasam and a simple helping of stir fried beans with rice after an unusually long holiday outside the country. On sick days it’s definitely palak khichdi. On days I miss home, idlis and sambar. The ironic thing is I grew up detesting khichdi, beans and idlis for that matter, as any normal, self-respecting high-school-going kid did. But you know what they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder. The further away from idlis I was, the more I realised my toxic obsession with it.
But the larger truth is that emotions play a huge role in Indian kitchens. My mother and perhaps all Indian mothers, do things a little bit differently. With a deep rooted belief that restaurant food is pure poison and an unsettling urge to feed and nourish the family, comes the need to cook a hot meal even on their worst days.
My mum has mastered this very art and her children could really begin to tell why the sabji tasted a little too burnt on some days or why there were idiyappams in place of dosas for breakfast.
But that’s not the encapsulation of her melee of emotions. There was a lot more.
On nights she was absolutely cheesed off with her colleagues, extra scrunches of pepper would fleck the near-clear rasam broth.
“You will not believe what Mala said today! She said that I made a mistake in the filing! Me! I made a mistake…how dare she….?” she would ramble on, the whole while she sprinkled pinchfuls after pinchfuls of pepper powder. The intention was perhaps for us to experience the same heat at the back of the throat as harshly as she had to swallow her anger and smile at this said Mala who ruined plenty of dinners at 2A Farm Quarters, on a regular basis.
It was often a deliberately spicy mackerel curry on nights succeeding big fights with her siblings.
“It’s a little spicy, no?” a feeble voice would announce knowing full well what was to come if it were any louder. “Curd!” an order would be barked from across while the rest of the table would sniff and wheeze from the double chilli dosage she decided was the only way to channel her rage.
But not all meals were tempered with anger, there were truly days when her love for us coursed through the creaminess of the chemmeen moilee that she carefully scooped into bowls with generous helpings of prawns for everyone on the table.
The days she was feeling particularly fierce and independent and accomplished after a day of yelling at the electrician, it would be a smoky and complex ulli theeyal in a chatti, placed smack in the middle of the table like a Mona Lisa exhibit. The main act. And while a theeyal can go wrong in so many ways, this one would have the perfect viscosity, the delicate dance of flavours between the heat of the roasted chillies and the sweetness of briefly fried shallots. Grated coconut would have been roasted to the perfect shade of muddy brown, not a shade darker, so as to give the theeyal the distinct smokiness - now that accuracy is a true labour of love and a reason to sit at the dining table and talk about her accomplishments of the day with a grin.
If she is running woefully late for work, then it's a burnt onion egg curry and half burnt rotis for breakfast. Deal with it if you must. But burnt rotis also featured on Sunday mornings for an entirely different reason. She’d hear the tape recorder from the drawing room carry a Rafi song ever so faintly to the kitchen which would then inspire her to carry the rest of the tune herself. And in the process drift away into a land of green pastures where she as a bejewelled actress would throw her hands in the air and dance, only to sniff the undeniable aroma of burning rotis on the tawa below.
But burnt or not, her food was consumed with fervour and franticness during school lunches by everyone else.
But for how excellent a cook she is today, she was, to quote my father, “terrible at it”.
In 1984 when she got married to a stranger and moved across the subcontinent to settle off in Mhow, she had 0% cooking skills and a 100% desire to impress her brand new husband. She apparently spent many evenings carefully cutting out recipes from Feminas, Good Housekeeping and Vanithas alike for random things like corn soup, bread puddings, khmeeri roti, saagwala mutton and a myriad more, only to carefully stick them into her diary, neatly labeled 'Recipes' and then completely forget about it. All this while, my father would finish work, come home, knead a silky smooth dough and roll out the perfectly round chapatis to be paired with a bachelor egg curry he would make in a matter of minutes. Soft chapatis, a fiery yet nourishing curry with a side of a simple onion-tomato salad with a curious squeeze of lime - this was perhaps his shy way of saying that he was falling in love with her.
To this date, this very recipe of bachelor egg curry and chapatis is a beloved breakfast at home and we never ever hear the end of that heroic tale of when my father undertook the tedious task of training her in the culinary arts.
Having spent close to 13 years in Madhya Pradesh she quickly managed to master the art of rolling out the roundest rotis, which would then be left to blister on an open flame for not more than a few seconds before being recklessly pried away with bare hands.
But the most fascinating thing about her, is the repository of recipes she has, tucked away at the back of her head. On a particularly chilly Winter night when we’d all be busy setting up a little bonfire in the garden to sit by with a cup of black coffee, she would have managed to hack away at a couple of tapiocas, chopped them into blocks and boiled them into starchy, sticky pieces with a dash of roughly pounded birds eye chilli and shallots chutney. Pakoras can wait in line.
And just like that her unpredictability would confuse us in the form of a murderous meal or a heartwarming spread and that is also how I would, maybe, describe my mother, a potent mix of the two.
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