Curry Read online

  With ‘hands like my mother’s,’ we are again in the arena of the authentic, with the buried signal that what we’re eating in Indian restaurants – though they might be Northern Indian dishes cooked by Northern Indian hands – is not quite real. Sen’s clarifications, that he is an advocate of accuracy in writing on Indian food, ‘anchored in the specificity of an individual experience without reaching for any greater truths about a monolithic Indian experience,’ still don’t preclude that ‘hands like my mother’s’ phrase. He’s not exactly engaged in a pissing contest for which Indian food is da realest, but he is invested in letting it be known that the food of his parents’ state of origin (itself a place of diverse kitchens – his parents make two completely different egg curries) is real. The dominance-of-authenticity discourse when we write and talk about curry is such that even unique details – those two egg curries – risk becoming subsumed in the genre’s codifications by all but the most perceptive readers.

  Finding examples of a disappearing reality tied to the past is a key component of Samanth Subramanian’s 2010 book Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast. This journalistic travelogue is the kind of book that allows you to travel as someone else. The title, self-explanatory as it is, was modified for the book’s 2016 reprint, when the subtitle was swapped out for One Man’s Journey into the Food and Culture of the Indian Coast. This is telling for two reasons: one, that the journey is reoriented even more specifically to become a personal one; the reader is being told that there won’t just be discoveries of culture and history here, but self-discovery – hopefully of the homecoming sort. And two, with the insertion of Food into the title, readers are being assured the book won’t be all grim conversations about depleted stocks and the lives of rural fishermen: there will be curries, specific curries, ones that perhaps they’ve never eaten. Maybe even recipes. Subramanian, a New Delhi/Dublin-based journalist, is in search of a piece of the country that might soon be altered, for traditions and landscapes that may be on the verge of vast change or vanishing.

  His quest, as a journalist and historian, parallels Western travelogues from the past century like Gavin Maxwell’s A Reed Shaken by the Wind or Kenneth Fitze’s Twilight of the Maharajahs: both books seek to capture what is about to be lost to the encroaching reach of the modern. Subramanian’s fascination with the historical circumstances that led to a fishing region converting to Christianity from Hinduism (they needed Portuguese military support to fend off attackers) and the complex relations of fish and spice trading along the coast lead him closer to the authentic than any sense of nostalgia could. The history of India we see here is one of constant interaction and exchange with other countries, the conflicts and compromises that shape a culture and national identity.

  There’s a chapter in Subramanian’s book in which he’s cruising Kerala looking for variations on the ideal toddy-shop curry. Toddy is a coconut-palm sap fermentation that pops up in novels about the Raj under the name arrack, but the toddy-shop experience is about as distant from the parasols and cannonballs of those books as one can imagine: these are roadside boozers, where the drinks are served with a meen curry accompanied by kappa. Kappa’s made of tapioca, coconut, and chilies, a starch that counters what Subramanian calls the ‘overwhelming gravy’ of the curry: ‘All toddy shop meen curries come furiously red with industrial doses of chilli powder.’

  Reading about this dish for pages, I had to attempt it. Subramanian’s travelogue contains no recipes, but his regional and lingual specificity makes googling easy. Kurryleaves.com, a detailed, regionalized archive of Indian dishes, had the recipe, and most of what I needed for the rest would be an easy find.

  I live in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto, which has the largest concentration of Tibetans in North America. That’s part of the reason Indian groceries thrive here, and why vindaloo and bhuna share page space with momos and shaptak on the menus of Tibetan restaurants: people pick things up in a diaspora, and end up enjoying them, making them, selling them, or some combination of the three. I bought the spice I was missing (asafoetida, used historically by certain Hindus, such as the Kashmiri Brahmins, whose faith-based avoidance of onions and garlic is one of the few truly incomprehensible culinary quirks I discovered in Lizzie Collingham’s curry history). I also picked up two bagged parathas that had been made in the suburbs the day before. I’ve lost the knack of making rice on the stovetop, thanks to being spoiled by my now-broken rice cooker.

  As is true of the slight majority of the meals I’ve eaten since I moved away from home after high school, I ate the toddy-shop curry alone, going faster as the heat caught up and started to overwhelm me, liquefying everything in my sinuses and then starting to work on my brain. It had that enlivening taste of a great curry, that primal sting of spice and challenge, with enough uniqueness that you seek the space on your carbonizing tongue where a new flavour has landed, as though you could map the regions on your palate and overlay this with a chart of the country. This intensely regional dish, crammed with spices and techniques picked up and developed in coastal Kerala, came together in my bowl thanks to the vagaries of international immigration and trade that resulted in my neighbourhood grocery stores, long after the ingredients to the general guidelines of the recipe had coalesced (Subramanian notes that there is a range of ingredient differences in the toddy-shop curries). The cycling story of diaspora, of human movement across great spaces, constant dislocation and relocation, is present in mouthfuls of this dish: curry’s reassuring power isn’t a resurrection of a stable past, but a reminder that the past, and our former countries, are as fractious and adaptable as the present.

  Reading

  Writing about food leads to writing about the complex histories of our relationships to eating, and to food itself. If that food is curry, we enter the metaphysical realm of discussing what’s real. Not reality itself, but being real. Novels, memoirs, and food writing that touch on authentic experiences of elsewhere, delivered via fork or paratha, enter into a conversation about experience, alienation, authenticity, and belonging: this ‘mystical microcosmic’ element of South Asian writing plays an important role for both non–South Asian readers and nostalgic brown readers. Eat, pray, love: curry is good for you, especially when it seems real.

  Readers of 2003’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, by Shoba Narayan, can cook along to the author’s memories and stories, extending from her first childhood meals in South India to her departure for college and life in America. The dishes lend solidity to the experiences – by cooking along to this book, readers are meant to enter Narayan’s journey through the senses. The author recounts the day when her bid for freedom from the family home was cemented: she cooked a feast so convincing that her parents just had to grant her permission to leave. In America, one of her ongoing struggles is persuading her arranged-marriage husband, Ram, that fusion cuisine is an acceptable alternative to the South Indian recipes he’s used to.

  Monsoon Diary is one of countless books that deal in South Asian food and culture, and extend dinner-table conversation into the discussion of life’s greater questions. Narayan examines the particular cards she’s been dealt while teaching the reader to prepare a bowl of steaming sambar to accompany her ruminations on fate and belonging. Monsoon Diary is an account of childhood, emigration, and diasporic life, and provides consistent links between cooking in the home and keeping a connection to the homeland. Preparing a meal becomes an act of recollection. Even if nostalgia may alter the familial memories that are conjured, the descriptions of food are precise: Narayan’s largely unsentimental prose can be strikingly evocative, such as when she describes ghee as ‘the vegetarian’s caviar.’

  Remembering a country in writing – or recreating a country and past that may never have existed – is a form of definition, particularly when the recollection is aimed at an audience. To readers, nations and culture perceived through tales of food and caring family become realms of nostalgia or otherness, defined more by how they are
recollected than by their physical existence.

  The home, the domestic space, is a crucial part of any immigrant story: it’s the place where safety, guilt, and disconnection often meet, and where language is in its greatest state of fusion flux, as Western tongues meld with whatever is spoken in the kitchen. Making a home through food is the constant in Narayan’s journey through a past that resulted in a happy emigrated existence in America. A Western audience can read, taste, and visit someone else’s past, without having to swap the dice-roll of a love marriage for the dice-roll of an arranged marriage.

  Monsoon Diary belongs to that genre I, at first, jokingly, then more thoughtfully, have been calling currybooks. These books, part of the influx of great, good, and bad diasporic literature that came after the early eighties, follow a set of invisible and flexible genre rules. As with all genre fiction, the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad. And if you’re a brown writer, it will be presumed to be your default genre, and you’d best recognize that.

  In a 1982 essay, Salman Rushdie described several attempts at defining the ‘Indo-Anglian’ writer, and indeed the idea of Indianness itself, that he encountered at a conference about Indian writing in the English language. The definitions on offer ranged from a knowledge of Sanskrit to membership in mainstream Indian culture, disregarding the minority cultures of Buddhists, Sikhs, or Muslims. Rushdie, himself a member of that latter group, recollects the point precisely: ‘if Muslims were “Mughals,” then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time we made light of the jibe, but it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn.’

  The concept of the ‘Indian writer’ (especially Indian writers abroad such as Rushdie) has since expanded into the idea of the ‘South Asian writer,’ the author of ‘immigrant fiction’: the category has broadened, and the critical need to define brown writers in English by their exact place of physical and linguistic origin has lessened. Contrarily, the critical and popular discussion around what’s between the pages of one of their books is perhaps more narrowly definition-focused than ever: as the tropes and genre conventions around books by South Asian authors have accumulated over the decades since Rushdie’s essay, the expectations for what brown writers are supposed to do in their work have narrowed.

  Hints and swipes aside, what differentiates the kind of work my younger, even more irritating, self began calling currybooks from the greater body of diasporic novels? For one, currybooks typically detail a wrenching sense of being in two worlds at once, torn between the traditions of the East and the liberating, if often unrewarding, freedoms of the West – as with, for example, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s 2008 Love Marriage, in which the Sri Lankan–American protagonist traces her ancestry and its impact on her present at the deathbed of her Tamil Tiger uncle. There’s typically also a generational divide, a bridge littered with pakoras and Reese’s Pieces that cannot be crossed except with soulful looks and tangential arguments. Most often we’re looking at a displaced South Asian character in the U.K., North America, or Western Europe, searching for place, belonging, and an outer and inner shape to her identity. This protagonist has perhaps been displaced before birth, by her parents.

  As South Asian literature (a term just as non-specific but functionally useful as Indian food) grew throughout the seventies and eighties to become an increasingly mainstream cultural force in the West, a generic calcification began to appear around certain elements. This thread of diasporic literature became a subgenre unto itself, and it’s now a sure thing that you’ll find a disconnected-family/roots-rediscovery page-turner with exotic red silks, black braided hair, and perhaps a mango on the cover among the stacked books at Costco, or on a chain-bookstore table under an ‘Eastern Journeys’ placard. These books bear titles like The Golden Son (by Shilpi Somaya Gowda), The Orphan Keeper (by Camron Wright, who is white, but the book is ‘based on a true story’ of kidnapping and orphan-selling in India, and therefore fits comfortably into this authenticity-rich subgenre), The Hindi-Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan), and The Mistress of Spices (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni). There is strong, sincere prose in many of these books, while others are solid entertainments. Regardless of literary quality, they typically hit enough nostalgia, authenticity, and exoticism points to score decently on Goodreads.

  When these books are really bad, nuance is out the door, as mothers and fathers screech rules and edgy white girlfriends and boyfriends offer drugs. Some of this reflects the lived experience of many South Asians, of course, but the poles of the pure-if-backward East in opposition to the corrupt-but-free West in these stories is drawn so strictly that the books become fairy tales by default. Books that escape the codifications of the genre often interrogate it – Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (later made into a television show scored by David Bowie and starring a pre-Lost Naveen Andrews) called bullshit on East and West equally. The protagonist is a sixties hippie teen whose father sets himself up as a junior maharishi in London’s suburbs, with unholy goals of sexual and financial enrichment. It’s possible for vendors of South Asian spiritual groundedness to make the move west, whether by plane ticket or by book – and it’s also possible for South Asian emigrants to the West, and for their children, to long for the truths of the past and a pure homeland.

  White writers have certainly pursued the authenticity of the imagined ancestral past that is the birthright of every second- or third-generation member of the South Asian diaspora. Getting back to the real, right thing is, after all, a key part of Elizabeth Gilbert’s overwhelmingly successful spiritual self-help/travel memoir, 2006’s Eat, Pray, Love, a cousin to a certain subgenre of books in the widening field of South Asian literature. Gilbert’s travel experience in the book reflects a particularly modern privilege: allocating circumscribed experiences to particular cultures and geographies, designating each place with a desire or goal. In Gilbert’s predetermination of how her year of self-discovery was going to unfold, India was the pray-place, after her feasting in Italy. The pounds she gained in experience of gelato, cheese, pasta, and bread on what her friend Susan calls the ‘No Carb Left Behind’ tour are to be abandoned, along with the spiritual clutter of her past, in her guru’s ashram. One of her ashram pals, ‘Richard from Texas,’ describes the place where Gilbert starts her Indian sojourn as ‘a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.’

  At that line, the quietude of Gilbert’s time in India, and its consequent artificiality, becomes striking: in exposing herself to spiritual truth, the overmastering fact of India’s population, its crammed density – ‘the crowd,’ as Salman Rushdie put it in a 1987 essay, ‘The Riddle of Midnight,’ on the separation of India and Pakistan – is nowhere to be seen. She’s in perpetual peace, with other seekers. From most accounts I’ve read, extending from the Raj to the present day, peace and quiet in India is an expensive commodity. In the country that Gilbert has allocated the role of finding her inner truth, she’s strictly averse to any outer experience. Her resistance to getting out of her Indo-spiritual mode by engaging with the country emerges as a reluctance to taste it:

  A few times a week, Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thumbs-Up – a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food – always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard’s rule about traveling in India is a sound one: ‘Don’t touch anything but yourself.’

  This may not be explicitly racist, but it is hilariously cautious – a hundred pages ago, Gilbert was dining on the intestines of a newborn lamb, but in India she’ll decide that her needs are best served by staying in the ashram for the full term of her spiritual education. Like Amit Chaudhuri, averse to the street food of Calcutta because it wouldn’t dovetail with his idea of a necessary experience of the city, Gilbert has a clear idea of what she’s there for. She didn’t come to India to eat. Where Italy was a place for gustatory hedo
nism, India is a place of spiritual honesty and reconstruction, and damned if she’s going to allow it to be anything else. Her time in the country, after her days of self-confrontation and looking for the yogic God in herself, ends with a flight out of ‘India at four in the morning, which is typical of how India works.’ Maybe it is typical – I haven’t been, myself. And it’s likely that Gilbert has been back and experienced a fuller version of the country since. But can she make the call of what’s typical of the country or not after having spent a few weeks meditating in a series of quiet rooms?

  Jhumpa Lahiri’s experience of Italy, a country she moved to in order to deepen a long-standing relationship with its language, speaks to another aspect of the inescapable realities of travel. In Other Words (2015), Lahiri’s written-in-Italian account of a mature writer coming to grips with a different language, can’t help but become a travelogue, as her Italian can only make the final leap toward fluency by her moving from America to Rome – a trip back to someone else’s old country, in pursuit of a language she wanted to make her own.

  Despite her advanced level of proficiency in the language, Lahiri’s white husband was taken by Italians to be the real native speaker in the family: ‘But your husband must be Italian. He speaks perfectly, without any accent,’ a saleswoman tells Lahiri, ignoring her husband’s clearly Spanish accent and Lahiri’s higher level of fluency. The saleswoman can’t hear Lahiri’s better grasp of the language, simply because she doesn’t look like her Italian should be better than her white husband’s. While Elizabeth Gilbert’s Americanness is often called to her attention in Italy, in relation to her body, her manner, and her clunky use of language, the sense of rejection is never as profound as the one Lahiri takes from her experience of her language being deemed inferior to her husband’s. Gilbert wanted to visit Italy to eat, to nourish herself in this place-away. Lahiri wants to absorb the country, to inhabit its language and ultimately the place itself. She’s confronted with the fact that her racism prevents this from occurring once she leaves the domain of pure language and enters the life of the country: on the Italian pages she writes and reads, she can belong, she can have an authentic experience and be accepted by the language as her mastery of it increases. But in the streets, she’s still a brown woman among white Italians. Gilbert’s whiteness allows her to shape Italy to fit the preconceived experience she needs to extract; Lahiri can’t. To get the Indian experience she needs, Gilbert also has to shut out the country outside and stay in her ashram the whole time – even privilege and whiteness aren’t enough to corral the actual life of India on the other side of the meditation gates.