Stir Me Up

(Published in First City magazine, December 2012).

“Vegetables in Delhi are like the people here: just pretty to look at. No taste,” my best friend  said recently, during a randomly meandering conversation about ways to cook fish, fish and fish. She is Bengali, yes. She was raised in Kolkata, yes. She regretted saying this, yes, because the look on my Dilliwali face told her instantly that her utterance would find a way into my next column.

As my friends and spouse would testify, it’s dangerous when writers smile without reason during a conversation. It usually means they’ve snapped up (also see: plagiarised) from your daily chatter, an opening line or two of their next work. Now stolen, your words will be splayed apart like Lego blocks, put back together just a tad out of context, and buffed into what only you know is a gorgeous lie. This is how our gang does it, how we survive every kind of conversation, because we are the ultimate foodie, cannibal even; for a writer, everything is potential food. Gossip, opinions, life stories, break-up speeches, even the unsaid things like a tilt of the head: we rummage through them all, we nibble, we reject, we keep the precious treats in a box on the top shelf where no one can reach.

Ridiculous, I say, wondering when I began living so bloody metaphorically. There was a time not so long ago, when I was an uncomplicated foodie who lived from meal to meal, and had very modest pretensions of being a writer. I was a proud, Nigella-sized ‘food-reviewer type’ for the very magazine you read; my days were spent hunting and gathering food trivia about the city, my evenings tasting creations by chefs of all kinds – brilliant, nervous, arrogant, genius. I was convinced that food was about cuisines, dishes and preparation; about being able to tell that a flavour is ‘subtle’, or a menu is ‘sophisticated’, a preparation ‘authentic’.

I loved food back then, because for me it was a means of instant travel; I was in Morocco with a bite last afternoon, sipping rooibos in South Africa at 4 pm the other day, Italia-smacking over risotto right this moment of dinner. The world was an experience to taste, and I was a discoverer; such travel so fluid, so irreverent of the peculiarities of time and space that I was entrenched in, so addictive. And then who knows what happened - perhaps the planets realigned rhisomatically, a meteor fell from the sky, or maybe I just grew older - but I began to feel that it wasn’t enough to talk merely about what was being done to the food, especially when all I really wanted to express was what the food was doing to me. I thought I was travelling the world, but what I really was doing, was finding a way home. The more I hunted for food-trivia, the harder I found it to be the food expert. The harder I tried to be objective, the more emotional I was becoming about food. The more I tasted, the more I craved to go home, to taste the only flavours I once knew.

This was when I started cooking with gusto (needless to say, my Nigella look began blooming wildly). I realised that the pleasure of eating is sharpened by the pleasure of cooking - which has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with feeling. Typed and pasted in my notebook, or scrawled neatly in my head, recipes were banal, unsuspicious objects; a sum of actions, a universally applicable formula, wholly dismissive of personal quirks. But if I surrendered myself to their prim directives of ‘take’ ‘chop’ ‘set aside’, they revealed not just flavours, but also, people. One day, inadvertently, I conjured my mother from 10 years ago, while trying to reproduce her methi ka parantha recipe wholly from my memory of eating them for breakfast every winter day in college. It took more than a few trials and errors, but I got it down to pat, replicating even her parantha’s flaws perfectly (they have amoebic shapes, since you asked). It was the day I realised that perhaps what makes food nourishing is not the best preparation, but the most evocative. It was the day I decided I will keep this recipe flawed like a well-preserved memory; I want to pass it on as Mummy’s Methi Parantha (1999-2002), not just Perfect Methi Parantha.

Cooking took me where no food review could, but my father did: to the mandi. Being the typical Bengali male who used the market errand as a happy reprieve from home-maintenance, he was always happy to be sent to buy vegetables. I tagged along: when I was younger, this was in the hope of a few candy treats on the way back; when older, it was because I was substitute for the driver. My father loved this, and took upon himself to educate bored, feet-dragging me about the many varieties of seasonal produce, and the cleverest ways to choose, clean (“process”, he calls it) and cook them. Strangely, it was only years later, when I stood in my kitchen drooling over recipes of Aamer Chatni in cold December, I realised that on those sabzi-surrounded evenings my agricultural scientist father had taught me more than merely his detailed, foolproof, ‘scientific’ recipes. He had taught me, perhaps inadvertently, that just like emotions, the tasting of food is invisibly and intrinsically tied to the passage of time. The first taste of a dish you love, begins with its anticipation. Like the long wintry wait for late spring – and for that moment when unripe mangoes shall descend on the mandi like gorgeous green river pebbles. What makes the slurpy sip of that cool, syrupy Aamer Chatni incredible is nothing but the taste of fermented desire.

Now food has become a beautiful personal universe for me – one that evades wordy expression and explicable logic, a most relieving thing for a writer engaged in the Sisyphian task of sorting the enormity of her world with mere word-shovels. It is so entwined with emotion that I am rendered wholly incapable of retrieving perfect words for dishes, not even if I jog memory back to my past life of meticulous food reviews. Food still is a world of travel for me, but one that is gaining interiority. It is a way to silently traverse my own memories; one look, one bite and a wispy, elusive memory gains solidity, making it as easy to enter a time past as plunging toe-first into a rippled pond. In my writerly life that’s all about a relentless exhibitionism, food is that one thing that preserves the lusciously secretive: it spins complex spider-silk-thin webs of associative memory that I am blissfully unaware of, until a column like this comes along and I write them down. Coffee is solitude is half-moon stains is winter afternoon sun is feeling super-lucky. Pancakes are a half-eaten stack and a conversation so luscious you want to swallow it whole. Besan ki roti is a bad cold chased away by a love so unaware of its generosity, that it could only be a mother’s.

And so I think, why I eat must be that question that comes closest to that essential question of why I write: because they are both made of the same stuff: memory, stirred and chafed, with a little bit of drama, a wee bit of ‘cooking up’. And a whole lot of nourishment.

BOX:

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

Dreams of home-cooked brown rice biryani, yes that’s what. Because it’s totally possible to have such a yummy dream come right home, wafting ghee-and-spice-laden aroma-tendrils, and carrying all the well-hyped goodness of brown rice. Bottomline: this rice tastes absolutely delish. Fancy-schmany show-offy trivia: it’s rice from a biodynamic farm in the Himalayas where they chant mantras at the certain points of planetary alignment during the day, to charge the grain-on-the-grow with good vibrations. Either way, very good for you.

This, and other tales of food bringing people together, with Ananda Anand of Food Meditations fame, who loves food with enviable enthusiasm and spirit, because it unravels so many events in human lives on its travels from idea to seed to produce to plate to tummy to smile. The brown rice biryani is one among his many initiatives to make food a focal point where people come together and share knowledge, joy and nourishment: in this instance, a very famous Biryani shop in Purani Dilli had expressed a desire to test this dish’s feasibility. Ultimate foodie who can make the word ‘holistic’ make sense, even when the food in question is Chhole Bhature! Get in touch at the Food Meditations group on Facebook, or drop in at the next Food Meditations event on December 8 at The Attic, Connaught Place. On the menu: Kadi Chawal!

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).