Curry Read online

  copyright © Naben Ruthnum, 2017

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Ruthnum, Naben, author

  Curry : eating, reading, and race / Naben Ruthnum.

  (Exploded views)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-351-3 (softcover).

  1. East Indian diaspora. 2. East Indians--Ethnic identity. 3. East Indians--Race identity. 4. East Indians in literature. 5. East Indian diaspora in literature. 6. Ethnicity in literature. 7. Race in literature. 8. Curry powder. 9. Ethnicity. 10. Group identity. I. Title. II. Series: Exploded views

  DS432.5.R88 2017 305.8914′11 C2017-904955-0

  Curry is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 523 4 (MOBI), ISBN 978 1 77056 524 1 (PDF).

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free download offer at any time.)

  for Kay Ruthnum

  Introduction

  I’ve only visited Mauritius, my particular old country, once. It was 1991, I was nine, and the visit turned into a funeral. Not my own – even though I did feel like I was dying while I sweated against the polyester chafe of the new Bart Simpson pyjamas my aunt had bought me during our London stopover.

  My father, sister, and I had gone to Mauritius to visit my grandmother, discovering only when we arrived that she was terminally ill. Well, my dad and sister found this out, not me. I was too young to be involved. I was also relatively unconcerned; I didn’t know her, having met her only once, as a toddler too young to form memories. The only recollection I have of being in my grandmother’s presence took place shortly before her funeral, in her hospital room, where I pulled on the brim of my Bulls cap until my father took it off my head. We left a few minutes later.

  I was shuttled off to my mother’s relatives, and so missed the death that Dad didn’t expect to deal with. Unequipped to face such seriousness, and isolated enough from this culture that I exhibited a juvenile version of cold, anthropological curiosity, I came back to a Hindu funeral: a pyre, torches. The only referent I had at that age was Return of the Jedi. A priest took a knife-swipe at a coconut balanced on my father’s shoulder and missed. I laughed (a memory that still chills) and was shushed. Earlier, a tonsured chunk of hair had been taken out of my father’s temple, exposing pale, veined skin. My unknown grandmother was wrapped in a sari, then wrapped in branches, then wrapped in flames. We left food offerings at the feet of temple gods, then, mysteriously, ate them after the funeral.

  Before, or after, there was a curry. Vegetables, a thick sauce, rice that I couldn’t get the knack of clumping and thrusting into the sauce with the bird-beak grip my uncles and cousins demoed for me. It had been forks and knives up until this day, as it would be afterwards. Tiny cuts I didn’t know I had at the base of my cuticles tasted the curry as I did, the elements of sauce that bit my tongue taking purchase in the blood there, leaving a sting that lasted.

  This is how books like these are supposed to start, isn’t it? While it would be a little thin as a memoir, the material I have here would be excellent fodder for for a diasporic South Asian novel, one of many books in the genre about reconnecting to a homeland that makes sense of my alienated, Western childhood. But the brief account is incomplete, missing a key element: when I went back, I didn’t have the revelatory homecoming or correction to a sense of loss that I’ve since read about in countless books – good ones, like Romesh Gunsekera’s 1994 Man Booker finalist Reef, and stinkers like Kamala Nair’s 2011 trope-ridden mini epic, The Girl in the Garden. There’s no comfort or Truth to be found in my story of ‘going home’: only a series of incidents that revealed how isolated from the country of my family’s origin, how Westernized, I was at the time and, in many ways, still am. The tactile details – the Bulls cap, the banana leaf, that curry meal that hurt my fingers and mouth – they’re genuine, but on the page they become clichéd symbols in a story I’ve never wanted to write.

  Curry isn’t real. Its range of definitions, edible and otherwise, rob it of a stable existence. Curry is a leaf, a process, a certain kind of gravy with uncertain ingredients surrounding a starring meat or vegetable. It’s an elevating crust baked around previously bland foodstuffs, but it’s also an Indian fairy tale composed by cooks, Indians, émigrés, colonists, eaters, readers, and writers.

  Fuck off, my ideal reader might be saying right now. Of course it’s real, it was on my plate and soaking into your naan last night. And you’d be right, sort of. But even if the flavour is real, and delicious, it’s also become a crucial element of how the story of South Asian cultural identity is told, in our mouths and on the page. It’s a concept too large to be properly controlled by a recipe – the recommendations become descriptions of certain dishes, each push toward using hing or amchur an encouragement to use the same spice in a different dish, or to add so much turmeric that you permanently dye your roommate’s white plastic cooking spoon.

  Like wine, curry’s mixture of definable qualities and conceptual breadth wields a metaphorical power. Paul Giamatti, playing a neurotic oenophile, has a small speech in Alexander Payne’s 2004 film Sideways where he’s talking about Pinot Noir but really talking about himself: ‘It’s thin-skinned, temperamental … y’know, it’s not a survivor, like Cabernet … No, Pinot needs constant care and attention … Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.’ I remember being irritated by this transparently symbolic dialogue in a movie I’d been enjoying, though in later viewings it seems to me that the script and Giamatti’s character, Miles, know exactly who is being spoken about through the wine, that the personal symbolism of Pinot is a rooted part of Miles’s personal myth, one he repeats to himself and to anyone who asks him and cares to listen.

  Curry can, and often does, tell a similarly loaded story, but one that goes beyond emphasizing aspects of a single persona: it carries a weight of meaning across the immense and indefinable South Asian diasporic culture. The familiar flavour is an aromatic but invisible link between the writer and the reader, the cook and the eater. In the steadily building mass of South Asian diasporic writing and discussion of identity, curry is an abiding metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecoming, and distance from family and country. This collection of dishes covers a lot of metaphorical ground. It relies on a non-specific blend, a combination that can be adjusted and spun multiple ways, and yet carries identifiable defining top and bottom notes of flavour. The exact ingredients often aren’t clear to anyone but the cook, and sometimes not even to him or her – the Indian ammas of recipes and diasporic novels are notorious for their freehanded dashes and pinches of ingredients, and the first- or second-generation protagonists of these novels are consistently grasping for a sense of identity and place as they try to get the recipe right.

  Eating, reading, and remembering are all activities that begin domestically, perhaps especially in diasporic households, where home life can be all of life for kids who don’t insist on spending time outside or with friends in unregulated, non-learning-related activities. In the spirit of a book about curry and reading, I should be making a comparison between the bookshelves and the spice rack of a diasporic household, but there’s a crucial difference. I got to choose what I read when I was a kid, but not what I ate. From the outset, I avoided
books with Indian names on the cover, with tangles of red silk and those fonts that designers love sticking above a picture of a banyan tree and a scattering of cardamom seeds. I demanded a justification for why we – amend that we to my parents; I wasn’t buying anything – bought so many of these books written by people from a country my parents hadn’t even grown up in, or visited. They didn’t bother offering an answer to my questions, which were, more truthfully, attacks. The back-cover copy on these volumes was, if not identical, repetitive. Well into my teens, I’d always opt for Roth over Rushdie, Nabokov over Narayan.

  Stories about reading are necessarily stories about prejudice: forming reading habits means cultivating strict prejudices and then carefully discarding them. As the posters in the kids’ section at the library inform us, reading can take you anywhere. But damned if you’re not going to decide exactly where and when you want to go. Much of the research for this book derived from books that had arrived in my hands over the years and articles that had flitted into my feed: reading outside the classroom is about controlling the accidental arrival of information, turning a chaotic flow of words and stories into an organized system of taste through rejection.

  My family had a strict rule against reading at the table, the given logic being that it forced blood to your brain that should properly be in the gut, aiding digestion. My parents both being medical professionals (an ophthalmologist and a psych nurse), I didn’t challenge this logic.

  We ate with the news on, and only rarely was the nightly meal not Mauritian food, which I’d describe to friends as Indian food as a shorthand to leave out the explanation of Mauritius being an island off the east coast of Africa, and later just describe, self-mockingly, as ‘Curry, what else would we eat?’ anticipating and cutting off jokes from the fairly unprogressive Western Canada youth of the 1990s. I loved the stuff, anyway. I accepted it and defended it as part of my cultural identity, an easily identifiable and likeable part of it, one in which I had built-in, extremely fake expertise. Any time a white friend reported his mom or dad making a curry with coconut milk or snap peas in it, I dismissed it as ‘the white man’s curry,’ and was at least correct in that neither ingredient was common in the Mauritian curries that were made in my house.

  Curry was a territory I defended, an absolute truth based on the way it was made in my family’s kitchen, despite the delicious counterarguments we ate at restaurants in Vancouver (and eventually even in Kelowna, the expanding small city in British Columbia where I grew up). There was an acceptable authenticity in what we ate, one I felt ran counter to the books with various brown hands, red fabrics, clutched mangoes, and shielded faces that turned up on our shelves with such regularity that we may have been members of some Columbia House Diasporic Novel subscription package that none of us knew how to cancel. My family enjoyed the books, and continue to read some of them. In doing research for this volume, I had to expand beyond my usual method – picking up books that interest me and finding connected texts. I asked a close relative if she had any recommendations for – as I put it in the email – ‘super-typical “I miss the homeland” novels you’ve read by South Asian authors in the past few years.’ She replied, ‘Oh God, I avoid these like the plague. My white friends seem to enjoy them.’

  They do indeed – so do some of my white friends, and their parents. But so do some of my brown friends, and their parents. I’ve read quite a few of these books by now, both by accident and on determined purpose for this book, as I’ve tried to hew out exactly what I’ve had in mind when my teenaged self defined these novels that I avoided as ‘currybooks’: it’s certainly not a description I’d apply to absolutely any book from the vast output of diasporic authors, or authors still based in India. Anita Desai’s work, Salman Rushdie’s, Hari Kunzru’s, Michael Ondaatje’s – it doesn’t linger in the nostalgic, authenticity-seeking reconciliation-of-present-with-past family narratives that are endemic to what I call currybooks. They don’t follow the genre rules, even if they nip in and borrow here and there. They exist as reflections of the author’s consciousness and culture, with culture processed through that consciousness. For example, Rushdie’s continual seeking of the truth outside of realism is exactly how he escapes tropes before they can solidify: his own recollection of India in Midnight’s Children had to acknowledge the existence of an India-of-the-mind, constructed from recall. And Anita Desai’s vision, in books such as In Custody, is as connected to the stylistic work of authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, with whom she presumably went through that whole anxiety-of-influence thing that writers do, as it is to the places where she grew up and the work of Indian authors such as R. K. Narayan.

  Food and literature are the defining elements of the way I see myself in the Indian diaspora in the small world I’ve built around myself as a brown adult in the West: curry’s the vehicle I use to look at how we eat, read, and think of ourselves as a miniature mass-culture within the greater West. Curry’s just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity.

  Eating

  Like the English language, curry is a colonial endpoint: everything ended up in it, and it remains infinitely changeable, even as its complex colonial roots became disguised as homeland authenticity. The tikka masala–inventing cooks at Indian restaurants in the 1970s gave Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants a tasteable identity – a primarily British public encountered these people from the saucy, spicy dishes that would seem out of place in the homeland kitchens of these émigré chefs. What the Brits were really eating was the improvisations of various chefs. Tikka masala’s (disputed) origin: a Pakistani restaurateur in Glasgow added some tomato sauce to the meal of a bus driver who was complaining that his food was dry. Without abandoning the spices on the rack and the colonially informed cuisine they grew up with, the immigrant cooks of Great Britain shaped a cuisine that is definitive of eating out, and carry-out, in the U.K.

  Even the most commonly understood characteristic of curry came to be by way of the machinations of international trade and colonialism. Curry has many immutable qualities, but no definition of the dish can escape heat, or at the very least the potential for heat. This central characteristic is what prompts diners to say, ‘It’s not too hot, is it?’ or ‘Make it actually hot, not just medium, I can take it,’ to bored waiters in Indian restaurants all over the world. Though it is a truly difficult fact for many Indians and children of Indian immigrants to acknowledge, chilies are not native to India at all – they were actually brought to the subcontinent from the Caribbean in the fifteenth century, by way of the trade-savvy, empire-hungry Portuguese.

  It’s slightly identity-shaking to me – and perhaps to any brown person who wasn’t previously aware of the history – to find out that chilies were planted on our shores by some spice-route jagoff. Lizzie Collingham’s superb 2005 book Curry (subtitled A Biography in the U.K. and A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors in North America) is committed to drawing out the historical truths that shaped the elusive identity of curry. Indian recipes, including ones in the vast curry family, have been adapted or altered to suit rulers, visitors, and colonial intruders for hundreds of years – with pulao rice arising from Persian pillau rice, and with creams and spices being increased or decreased in various dishes to suit the increasingly adventurous palates of British Raj occupiers. The Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani immigrant cooks in 1970s England who added tinned tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and chili to tandoor-forged chicken to make tikka masala weren’t undoing centuries of tradition: they were innovating and adapting a living cuisine that has sustained itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by absorbing them. The inauthenticity of curry is its greatest claim to its position as a reflection of global history and the present politics of hunger, eating, and identity.

  As the resource-leeching rule of the British began to wane in India, a parallel distaste for food from India took place in the U.K. Curries, exotic to some Brits and a powerful reminder of youth and childhood to thousands of
whites who’d grown up or spent their career years working for the Empire abroad, fell out of fashion for a while. Collingham points to a post-Victorian backlash against curry due to its supposed unsuitability to middle-class British stomachs and the powerful smells attendant on its preparation. But curry had threaded as deeply into England as the English language had reached into the colonies. The influx of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani immigrants of the mid-twentieth century made the ingrained British taste for a food that had been part of their own national history impossible to ignore, and curry made its comeback. ‘By 1970 there were two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain,’ Collingham writes. This number has since climbed to about 12,000, with estimated sales of £4.2 billion.

  The food served in these establishments as late-twentieth-century U.K. Indian cuisine took shape often had little to do with what the cooks ate at home. For their children, this wasn’t the case. In an interview Collingham quotes, landmark British restaurateur Haji Shirajul Islam discusses how he didn’t eat the curries his restaurants prepared, but that his son’s palate quickly took a British turn: ‘When he goes to the restaurant he eats Madras – hot one … Me I always eat in the house. When I offer him food he eats it, but he says it’s not tasty like restaurant food, because he’s the other way round now.’ As Lizzie Collingham concludes: ‘For generations of British customers, and even second-generation Indians, the vindaloos and dhansaks, tarka dhals and Bombay potatoes, are Indian food.’

  As a first-generation Mauritian-Canadian, eating salmon and chicken curry and smelling it as it cooked were the earliest markers of my difference growing up, though I had to go outside and make white friends to truly find that out. In Kelowna, where I spent my childhood and teen years, I was twice literally asked what colour my blood was in a friendly, genuinely curious tone. Even as a child, I noticed the noticing, the whipped-around heads at the melanin flood my family represented when we entered any public space in 1980s Kelowna. Food supplies were also a problem: key ingredients for curry and other Mauritian meals had to be picked up on weekend missions to Vancouver, the nearest city with a significant population of South Asian transplants. For a few years, garam masala was shipped directly to us from Mauritian family in packages that leaked a powerful odour no matter how well they’d been wrapped. Curry travels along with the diaspora, continuing the long trip of its evolving existence. The range of variations on curry dishes just across the subcontinent, leaving out islands like Mauritius and Guyana, or significant outposts of diasporic Indians such as South Africa, is staggering. I can still go to an Indian restaurant and taste something made with ingredients that are entirely Indian but quite foreign to me. I had chicken chettinad and tasted the cinnamony tree-lichen kalpasi just a few months ago. It makes perfect sense that I’m unfamiliar with many Indian dishes: I learned them all from restaurants and books over here. From an early age, my parents made me aware that there were minor and major differences between Mauritian and Indian food, even if they didn’t provide a detailed explanation. Something to do with ginger and the Chinese population on the island, the story would start, before deviating into an anecdote about Chan, the man who ran the corner grocery on the street where my father grew up. Curry stories have a propensity for tipping into the nostalgic.