Curry Read online

  A couple of lines later, the narrator refers to Rupban’s pregnancy this way: ‘For seven months she had been ripening, like a mango on a tree.’ I’d venture to say that if the writer of these words were white and English, they’d be taken as exoticizing, ham-handed (that self-dialogue, the ‘cheepy-cheepy’), the food references sticking out as markers of a situation as recognizably foreign as red soil on Mars.

  The designations of poverty, of the exotic, of a cheerful comfort with one’s lot, of hospitality and familial closeness over the feast table: it’s all there, prefacing the as-yet-unborn protagonist’s uprooting to London. Ali herself was born in Bangladesh, which isn’t an incidental fact; it lends credence to her grasp of life there. But it’s incredible how imagined-from-the-outside the scene seems, if only for how often it has been emulated at varying degrees of qualities by writers after (and before) her.

  These currybook elements survive Nazneen’s arranged-marriage-facilitated emigration to London: she begins to receive letters from her sister, Hasina, which are presented to the reader in broken English, lacking articles and prepositions. This despite the fact that neither sister knows English at this point in the novel, which means the letters the reader is seeing are translated through Nazneen and Ali – if Nazneen’s Bengali dialogues with her husband and friends emerge in plain English, why does this written version of Bengali emerge with such lack of fluency? ‘They still playing chess but some of piece are lost there not so many fight now.’ These aren’t the errors of a native speaker who is bad at writing – they’re the errors of a woman writing outside her native language. Nazneen’s letters from her sister are doubly translated, first rendered into English from Bengali, and then into broken English, to emphasize the separation between life for women in Bangladesh and the life Nazneen is leading in England. Added to the abject conditions that Hasina endures in her increasingly difficult life, her lack of fluency becomes code for her distance from the relative freedom that Nazneen enjoys in the West, a life she ultimately can’t bring herself to abandon when Chanu makes the decision to move the family back.

  Hasina’s broken-English-Bengali has the same reality as the statues that Nazneen and her husband see in the windows of the Pakistani restaurants near their home:

  Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast. The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Popadum went with Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-tongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soap-stone Buddha. ‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’

  Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity,’ said Chanu.

  Ali’s novel adds a supplement to Chanu’s observation: brown readers and writers want to see authenticity, too, especially if it’s packaged with a message that the freedoms of the West can be had alongside a long-distance experience of the subcontinent. Ignoring Chanu and Heraclitus, as well as Ali’s precise and subtle delineation of the expectations placed on brown writers, the genre that Ali’s book flirts with continued to thrive.

  In Amulya Malladi’s 2003 novel The Mango Season, which kicks off every new section with a recipe, tech worker Priya Rao leaves her fiancé, Nick, at the airport to travel back to India after seven years in the U.S. Upon her return, she finds talk of an arranged marriage, yes, but also a vibrant, sensory overload that defines India in the peppier examples of currybooks. ‘Everything that had seemed natural just seven years ago seemed unnatural and chaotic compared to what I had been living with in the United States.’ Priya retains an American stiffness, and an attentiveness to carefully washing her fruit, as she wards off her mother’s attempts to inveigle her into an arranged marriage. Her memories of India, a place she now finds almost surreal, become more authentic, more real, as she reacclimatizes:

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and dropped my eyes to my plate where my fingers danced with the rice and the creamy bottle gourd pappu. How easy it was to eat with my fingers again. I had forgotten the joys of mixing rice and pappu with my fingers. Food just tasted better when eaten with such intimacy.

  Throughout her family conflicts and arguments over women’s freedom, the sensory largeness of India – the heat, dirt, colours, tastes, and scents of Hyderabad – provides its own unchallengeable argument. ‘India was not just a country you visited,’ Priya says, in a phone call with her American boyfriend’s mother, ‘it was a country that sank into your blood and stole a part of you.’ Priya goes on describe the smells, tastes, and noise of the country, as well as her hatred of the ‘bigotry, the treatment of women,’ concluding that it is still her country. Despite this balance of hatred and reluctant acceptance, India provides Priya with a sense of belonging, as well as truths and answers born in the honesty of the conflicts that arose from her homecoming.

  In a post-novel appendix in which she discusses the book with the engineering-school classmate whose name she borrowed for her main character, Malladi talks about how using India as a setting for her protagonist’s epiphany allowed her to use reality, to avoiding having to ‘make up stuff’: ‘For me writing The Mango Season was like taking a trip to India. I’d forgotten how good chaat tastes, or how good ganna juice tastes and when I was writing about it I could all but smell that sugarcane juice.’ Malladi’s recreated India, then, isn’t an India of the mind, to her: it’s a recreation of the place, the novel itself a comfortable return to the country she left. Her descriptions of food do ring true, and I want to taste that sugarcane juice, too. The very casualness of Priya’s quick passing over of caste and class issues in phrases such as her aside about how the ‘maidservant Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen’ serve as a jarring reminder that India is, indeed, a different place. The abrupt and frequently hammy dialogue, however, along with Priya’s sweeping pronouncements about the country’s narrow-mindedness, do give readers, or at least this reader, pause. Is this India that Priya returns to, and that Malladi re-inhabits on her novelist’s ‘trip to India,’ being viewed with heightened clarity after years away, or with a new collection of Westernized views? Despite Priya’s respect for the ‘essence’ of India, for its changeless place as her country, she discovers that the country

  was not home anymore. Home was in San Francisco with Nick. Home was Whole Foods grocery store and fast food at KFC. Home was Pier 1 and Wal-Mart. Home was 7-Eleven and Starbucks. Home was familiar, Hyderabad was a stranger; India was as alien, exasperating, and sometimes exotic to me as it would be to a foreigner.

  Yet even a negative nostalgia, the state in which Priya has arrested India as the repository of the family, prejudices, arranged marriages, and provincial values that she was desperate to escape as a teenager, provides the answer she needs: the place she is from, her country, is a fixed part of her past, unchanging and behind her. The truth she takes with her is that her present and future can happen only in the West.

  Malladi’s titular mangoes have a symbolic weight equal to my beloved curry, especially to the marketing departments of publishers. Pakistani-American novelist Soniah Kamal ran into a mango dilemma that she describes in her 2016 essay ‘When My Authentic Is Your Exotic,’ wondering whether including the fruit in her book would become a statement:

  If I put the mango in, was I a sell-out? If I took it out, was I being true to the season? What fruit could I substitute? A jamun? But what is the English name for jamun? Should an English name even matter, a jamun being a jamun, like a corn dog is a corn dog. Would I yet have to italicize jamun? Who is the audience for my novel, anyway? Everyone? But what does everyone mean? Should I stick to an apple or a banana? Or would that be too generic?

  Finally deciding she ‘can neither deny reality for fear of the disdainful Eastern eye any more than I can write in fear of needing to fulfill the expectations of the orientalist Western gaze,’ Kamal allowed her characters to eat the goddamn ma
ngoes, which made perfect sense in the scene she was writing, set at the peak of Pakistani summer. Reading this essay, I knew that the mangobooks Kamal dreaded seeing her novel shelved amongst were my currybooks – books that signal their falseness by underlining their authenticity, and placing that authenticity in a homeland lost to time and distance. The blended, diasporic person, existing away, is torn from one place, yes, and exists in another place, yes: but to assume that the before-place, the India or the Mauritius or the Trinidad, possesses a heightened reality and truth, what Kamal calls ‘the authentic exotic’? That’s not something I can accept in what I read, write, or remember. It’s also a type of narrative that does injustice to the true complexity, hilarity, danger, and weirdness of life as a brown person living anywhere in the world, either far away from their supposed home or right where their ancestors have dwelt for centuries.

  Kamal passes over another audience, neither the ‘disdainful Eastern eye’ nor the ‘orientalist Western gaze’ that she never wants to write for. It’s the diasporic reader, a first- or second- or third-generation-away-from-the-homeland person who also longs for a version of what Malladi serves in The Mango Season. Western isn’t actually synonymous with ‘white’ – we live here, too. The diasporic sense of nostalgia, of belonging, of home, isn’t simply shaped within brown households. The West leaks over the threshold, creating an overlap in what diasporic and other Western readers want from books by brown writers: and in that overlap is authenticity, and a sense that there is solidity, reality, and truth in that place and past that was left behind.

  While the growth of the South Asian genre hasn’t injured the capacity of diasporic and subcontinental writers to produce original, unique works, genre rules and parameters emerged as the commercial viability of immigrant fiction became clear, and editors and publishing boards began to seek variations on a certain type of brown story. There’s profit to be made in a relatable, seemingly authentic presentation of race and culture, even if there’s a placeless tinge of Westernization, subtle and ignorable under a formulaic blend as precisely calibrated as a Marks & Spencer chicken tikka masala. (I haven’t had one of these since M&S closed their Canadian stores in the nineties, when I would occasionally nuke one of them for a treat – if my preteen palate can be trusted, they were at least as rich as the real thing, even if something was missing in the flavour, and certainly from the soft fibres of the defrosted, industrial chicken). But what’s lost in this pursuit of the authentic is, perhaps, the reality of what lies in that placeless tinge: differentiated immigrant existences, ways of being and tasting that aren’t about pursuing the lost, truthful flavours of generations past.

  Is there something wrong with finding comfort and truth in tropes, whether as a South Asian writer or reader? Kamal and most other brown writers, including me, dread the idea of ‘serving’ a white audience, which is what tropes most clearly signal to people trying to publish in a market dominated by white editors and readers. In her essay ‘Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences,’ Jabeen Akhtar describes the defining elements of pandering ‘South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forwards,’ an era she sees as having been ‘ushered forth by [Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999] Pulitzer Prize–winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed.’ Tagging her list onto the end of writer Jeet Thayil’s exhaustion with the ‘mangoes, spices and monsoons’ that define these books, Akhtar adds ‘saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western Culture.’ Akhtar is also the author of ‘The 17 Elements of a (Bad) South Asian Novel,’ which I’m pretty sure is the essay that made Sandip Roy realize that his 2015 novel, Don’t Let Him Know, was slightly trope-ridden.

  ‘There was a recent article that had come out,’ Roy explained in a radio interview with NPR, ‘which talked about all the familiar tropes of South Asian fiction in America, and they had mentioned in there – mangoes, arranged marriage, a wise grandmother. And I went through the list and I was like, oh, my god, I have all of them in my book … But I’d like to think that I have them for a reason. I have them because they came naturally to me, and it was lovely.’ Here’s how the tropes that Roy is referring to shake out in one part of Don’t Let Him Know, where a character tells his mother that he intends to follow through on his dream of becoming a chef:

  ‘But you never even stepped into the kitchen when you were a boy in Calcutta,’ she said. ‘What do you even know of cooking?’

  ‘I’d love to cook, Ma, if only you’d let me step into the kitchen,’ he said sharply. ‘Ever since you came you’ve just taken it over. I’ve learned to cook in America and I really enjoy it.’

  ‘You do?’ She stared at him as if here was a stranger. Chefs were perfectly coiffed celebrities like Madhur Jaffrey in beautiful silk saris, not Amit. She couldn’t imagine him on television with an apron around him talking about sautéing chicken breasts and marinating kebabs.

  ‘It’s like meditation,’ he said. ‘It calms me.’ Then he paused and said, ‘And maybe you can teach me how. I could watch you and maybe we’ll even recreate your recipes, write a cookbook together – “Bengali Meals for an American Kitchen.” Wouldn’t that be fun, just you and me?’

  Romola smiled and shook her head gently at herself. She had been afraid she had lost Amit to America. Who could have thought that accursed letter from so long ago would bring him back to her? They used to call him her little tail when he was a toddler because he’d follow her everywhere. Today he was looking at her with those same eyes again as if she knew the answers and could wrap him in the love of her sari.

  The stories that come before us are inescapable. When Sandip Roy talks about how tropes came ‘naturally’ to him, it’s not just that the tropes reflect real circumstances of his background and life: it’s that the books and stories that came before him have embedded genre rules that can only be evaded by a determined writer.

  But as Kamal points out, mangoes really do grow on the subcontinent. So do the spices, even if they were imported some centuries ago. Perhaps there’s a native truth to genre conventions that catch on so solidly – Sandip Roy may say so, in defending the tropes in his novel that reflect his own experience. Just as the heroic beats of action cinema and the trials-to-consolations rhythms of romantic comedies resonate with audiences and creators, immigrant novels that cleave to embedded beats of authenticity still speak of a genuine sense of displacement that, while it isn’t always based in lived experience or doesn’t always hearken to a past and other place that actually exists, appeals to a vast range of writers, readers, and watchers. They – we – are in need of confirmation that the alienation we feel is at least shared, that it resonates for another, and that there is perhaps an answer to it in an embrace with the realness of another place and culture, the one that was truly always our own.

  Immigrant narratives allow readers to live in someone else’s past while sharing their sense of the fragility of that particular history: that the sense of alienation has roots in reality is as important to the reader and the writer as the idea of a distant land and a time that holds answers. For the brown-skinned writer, some versions of nostalgic existence are more appealing than others. ‘The ideal fusion fantasy,’ observes Githa Hariharan in Almost Home, ‘is a global address that allows you to hold on to the safe familiarity of provincialism.’

  In both the writing and the living, the deeper into detail you go – as is true for any place, people, or culture – the more a narrative of collective mass culture becomes a story of particularity, of regional and familial specificities, often defined against the stories outside of themselves. The diasporic bond is a shared, invented history, based on real events and a real place, but shared only as a tissue of agreements, disagreements, and ideas imposed from the outside. Cultural and family history is a fruit that expands as it is peeled, until it is too large to be gripped in the hands or the min
d.

  Race

  I can’t remember what books I brought with me to Mauritius, but I do remember one my father gave me while we were there. It was a yellow hardcover storybook, The Panchatantra, full of superb and cruel Indian animal fairy tales. In one story, an annoying bird explains to a monkey that the food he’s trying to fish out is part of a trap that will snap shut and kill him if he gets to it. The monkey throws the bird against a tree, killing it, then grabs the food, discharges the trap, and is crushed to death. The last line is ‘And that is the way of the world.’

  Even as a nine-year-old, I appreciated the lack of sentiment. It hinted at something missing from the shining distortions of Grimm’s stories I’d encountered thus far, and seemed to suggest that the place where my skin came from was a place where people talked straight, a quality I aspired to possess.

  Another memory from that trip: the entire country seemed to treat street traffic the way high school kids treat hallway movement. And I was genuinely surprised by how I was read on the streets – I asked my father, about a week in, why market vendors addressed me in English directly, why they tried to sell me souvenirs instead of groceries. ‘It’s … the way you walk,’ he replied, sparing himself a longer discussion while I dealt with this riddling proposition. Was it possible that I had a distinctive, Western walk – not a John Wayne swagger, but a sort of financially comfortable mince that broadcast my foreignness? Did I walk white?

  With my family, I’d already visited Vancouver and London, and in those cities, I knew I could exist the way I wanted to, unnoticed and anonymous in an urban mass of skin and clothing so uniformly varied that individual distinctions became important only if you were looking through the crowd for someone you already knew. There, I’d blend right in. Despite the options on offer in these metropolises, we ate in Indian restaurants on every vacation. The food wasn’t like what my parents made at home – cream, butter, and ghee were absent from the version of Mauritian home-cooking I grew up with. But these vacation meals must have been nostalgic reminders to my parents of their student days, when those U.K. Indian restaurants boomed and Mom and Dad were out of their own parents’ homes for the first time. Dad sharpened his cooking skills in the residence hall of his Glasgow medical school, but Mom already knew her way around the kitchen, having learned to cook for her fifteen siblings before getting into nursing school and sending back money to provide for them in a different way. The Indian restaurants of Glasgow, and the formulations that the probably-Bangladeshi chefs were coming up with, weren’t a taste of home for them, but part of the new exotic of the world beyond their island: these creamy, meatfilled curries that had nothing to do with their family dinner tables, beyond garlic, ginger, some chili, and cumin.