Anu Chenji

The excitement is building up… kids start trickling in first, occupying the floor space in front. In a little while, older people start coming in, grinning self-consciously as they do. The women have mallepoovulu (jasmine) strands in their hair, faces scrubbed and bindis refreshed with a fresh application of kumkum (this was in the days before the “sticker bottu” or sticker bindi had come into the market and kumkum paste and kumkum were still used. The older people sit at the back. Finally the family who actually lived in the house (you thought it was a public ‘function hall’ or what???!) came and occupied the chairs at the back, which had been pushed so far back with the twenty or so bodies pressing up in front that they had no choice!

Wedding? Party? Free meals? You’re all wrong! It is the early ’80s and television had just arrived in most Indian states. Very few households, even in the big cities, had a TV set. With just one channel – the government-run Doordarshan, India was introduced to the pleasures of home entertainment (hithertofore provided by gossipy neighbours, oh-my-god amateur Carnatic music recitals by the daughters of the household and an occasional festival).

The world had entered our drawing room – on a dark decolam and chrome pedestal and India rushed to embrace it – by entertaining every neighbour, and there were many of these, who did not possess a TV set! The telecast began only after five in the evening – the government, in its wisdom, decided that only so much TV was good for the soul!

Friday evenings and Saturdays were special, the former airing a film-based music programme – Chitrahaar – and the latter with, what else, a film! Otherwise the workday evening was enlivened for those who owned a TV set, by a farmers programme! I am city-born and city-bred but I can still reel off statistics on how phosphate and “natrajani” (nitrogen) is to be used for what crop – we watched it for lack of anything else to watch!

Strangely, for all the Indian love of Antakshari, no one sang along with the Chitrahaar programme. One the contrary, they listened in reverential silence as the old time heroes and heroines cavorted around trees, singing their favourite songs!

Come Saturday, much planning was done for an early dinner so that the movie could be viewed in unalloyed enjoyment, kids were put to bed if they were young enough, exhorted to be on their best behaviour if they were old enough to watch the movie and sent off to the neighbour’s to ‘book’  a seat on the floor!

India being what it was then, no one even thought of barring sundry neighbourhood kids from this weekly ritual. The owners of TV sets were invariably a generous breed, not ony putting up with the uninvited crowd with good grace but praying silently that no snotty kid would, under cover of darkness enlivened only by the flickering screen (these TV viewing sessions were always in darkness, btw, all lights being switched off, maybe to enhance the “theatre experience” but more likely to save on power bills!) carefully wipe the gold he dug out of his nose on the upholstery! What was worse, of course, was to switch the lights on, find one kid streaking out of your house as though the devil were on his tail. Invariably this meant that someone had had an “accident”. Not wanting to miss even a second of the movie, he wouldn’t have asked to use the bathroom!

Ah well, no one ever complained that we were not an inclusive society!

Like a circle… like many concentric circles… like this…

CHAKLI

• Rice flour – 2 cups
• Urad dal flour (wash, dry in the shade, roast and powder) – 2 tbsp
• Salt- 3/4 tsp
• Butter – melted – 2 tbsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Sesame seeds – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Oil to deep fry

Mix everything except the oil together adding water a little at a time to make a stiff-ish dough.

Squeeze out of a chakli mould – see pic – into hot (but not smoking hot) oil in spirals.

Lower heat and fry till golden brown, turning over once.

Check the living room for stray kids before you sit down to eat!

“My husband is away for several weeks and I’ve to do so much… ” I grumble at the office at lunchtime. Have just had one of those mornings where I got up late, was late to cook and pack lunches, managed to drop the kids at school in time before noticing in the rearview mirror that my hair was unbrushed and then made it to office – at the other end of town, brushing my hair at a stop sign, applying kaajal at the next one, lipstick at another (thankfully i had dressed before leaving home!) and so on – till I reach office looking reasonably presentable – with a lot of amused grins from other commuters on the way at every red signal!

Which is more than on occasion happened to my mother – also an equally harried mother – of three children!

She makes it out of the house one morning for an early case, rushes to the bus stop to find she’s got odd slippers on. That’s not the worst of it though, she’s wearing one slipper of hers and another of my dad’s on the other foot! Too late to go back home and change, she carries on through the day, the pucca professional looking doctor in her crisp, starched cotton sari, provided… your gaze doesn’t travel down to her feet!

So back to my office day… I’m about to open my ‘tiffin dabba’ and my boss is gently pulling my leg. “What work? Bet you have khichdi in your dabba today!” he chuckles. My hand is arrested midway to opening the dabba, my jaw drops down… “But… how did you know?” I stutter…

“If the husband is away from home, the lady of the house takes a holiday from her work in the kitchen – khichdi is always the easiest dish to make,” announces the chauvinist! He obviously can’t get away with that – boss or no boss, a lecture on feminism follows!

I now have two grown-up daughters cast strongly in the feminist mould so any stray anti-feminist remark made by a guest or visitor is like a red rag to a bull… except in this case, the maker of the remark is so thoroughy slaughtered that he (mostly they’re he’s with a few oddball she’s interspersed!) counts himself lucky to walk away unscathed in body if not spirit!

My husband, a staunch feminist himself, often claims to be “an honorary woman” – in a famly of three women, it’s the safer course to take, I’m guessing! But I protest – he has to earn the honour!

Am reminded of this today – husband again away on work and so the women make… naah, you guessed wrong – not khichdi  but the Tamilnadu favourite…

KARUVEPILLAI KOZHAMBU/CURRY LEAF GRAVY

• Drumstick (the vegetable variety, not the one which is disinterred from a hen!) – 1 – cut into 2″ pieces
• Eggplants or okra – 6 – sliced
• Sambar onions/shallots – 4-5 – halved
• Garlic – 8-10 flakes (more if you like it really garlicky , can be omitted altogether if you don’t like it)
• Tomato – 1 – quartered
• Oil – 3 tbsp
• Tamarind paste – 3 tsp
• Jaggery – 1 tbsp
• Salt
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Sambar powder – 1 tsp

FOR MASALA POWDER

• Pepper – 1/2 tsp
• Red chilies – 2-3
• Garlic – 2 flakes – optional
• Curry leaves – 1/2 cup
• Asafoetida – 1 pinch
• Fenugreek seeds/methi – 1/2 tsp
• Urad dal – 1 tsp

Roast and powder these together. Add a little water and the tomato to grind to a really smooth paste.

Heat the oil and temper with mustard seeds. Add the onion and fry till golden.

Add the garlic and sambar powder and continue to fry for 30 seconds more.

Add eggplant pieces and turmeric and fry for 2-3 minutes. Add drumsticks and half a glass of water.

Cover and cook till half done.

Add the tamarind paste, salt, jaggery, masala powder and two glasses of water.

Cover and cook for 10-15 minutes till vegetables are tender.

Eat with hot rice and appalams. Or dosa or idli.

This keeps really well so make a large quantity and keep eating it the entire week the garlic-averse husband is travelling! Or when you are fed up, give it to your boss!

       

“BaaaaWWWWW... ” goes the almost-asleep baby loudly and looks up, head shaking in wonderment (also because she is only two months old and the neck is still not strong enough to hold her head up) with a surprised expression as if to say, “Now who did that? Who woke me up???!” before shaking herself and nodding off again.

The loud burps were always surprising coming from such a tiny creature but also a source of joy for the tired parents – her dad and me. Now that the baby had burped after her night feed, we could finally go to sleep peacefully without having nightmares that she was going to choke in her sleep! I swear to god, I have had nightmares about this – as I am sure every parent of an infant has!

Kanch, my younger one, was the burper – the one who was born inheriting the genes of every Indian who had ever been taught that the proper way to indicate approval and satiety after a meal, very flattering to mine hosts was to burp, nay belch loudly, a belch which started somewhere inside the belly button and rumbled it’s way out of of the oesophagus, gathering steam along the way! A very proper Asian belch!

By the same token, Arch, my older one, was a very polite ‘burper’, a burp that was just a ‘blip’ on the radar, over almost before it registered! With the result that we did miss it – many times and then spent hours doing the pendulum thing (with the baby’s torso being moved up and down, her sleepy eyes opening surprisedly every time she was upright and shutting as she was moved backward – rather like the walkie-talkie dolls of our childhood. These, by the way, were the envy of every little girl who did not possess one (read 99 out of one hundred little girls!) and the prized possession of those who did, being carefully locked away in a showcase and taken out gingerly by the mom for a very special occasion!), or walking around with her on our shoulder, hoping, even, praying – for a burp – the teeniest one! Whether you had a good night and managed to get to work without looking as though someone had smeared mascara all around your eyes, making you look like a racoon – all hinged on one tiny creature’s burping or not!

Babies are probably the most potent weapons on earth – negligible in size and with the power of several atomic bombs in their potential to disrupt or make an entire extended family dance to their every fancy – people are shushed while whole roomfuls of people wait with bated breath – “Has the baby burped? Oh, has the baby burped?” (sounds like a music hall  song, right??!) and then when the baby finally does, there is much rejoicing in heaven! And if, god forbid, someone has to leave for a life-threatening appointment, there are calls or texts, “Has the baby burped?!!”

So, when I recently heard my daughter (the big belcher and also a fitness intructor), talking to someone over the telephone about doing so many “burpees” during their workout, I chuckled to myself over a mental picture of several people trying to lose weight, agonizedly doing a duck walk across the gym floor, burping alway loudly with each step! Apparently this is not what it is but I like my burpees better than hers!

Same like I like my way of making karelas (based on a recipe of my sister-in-law’s – thanks, Shipra)… thusly…

UP-STYLE KARELAS

• Karelas/bitter gourd/bitter melon/kaakarakayi/paavakai – 300 gm – cut into squares of about haf an inch
• Thinly sliced onions – 1 cup
• Saunf/fennel seeds – 1 tsp
• Red chilies – 4
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Dhania/corainder seeds – 1 tbsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch aside.
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
• Amchoor (dried mango powder) – 1 tsp
• Grated jaggery – 2-3 tbsp
• Salt
• Oil – 2 tbsp

Powder the saunf, jeera, red chilies and dhania into a fine powder and set aside.

Heat the oil and add asafoetida. Immediately add onions and fry till pink.

Add the karela pieces, mix, sprinkle a little water, cover and cook for 5-6 minutes.

Add powdered masala, salt, jaggery and amchoor and mix well. Sprinkle a little more water and cover and cook for 5-6 minutes more till tender. Cook uncovered for a few minutes more till medium dry.

Serve with rotis or rice and watch the burps roll in, not Ogden Nash’s “burbulence” burps but rather deeply satisfied, all-Asian burps! And to save you the trouble of looking up the burbulence poem, here it is:

How do I feel today? 

As unfit as an unfiddle.

I’ve a turbulence in my mind

And a burbulence in my middle.

“Daddy,  NOOOO… you must have more than and “a” or an “it”. You can’t play only two and three letter words all the time. Here let me see”, and my mom and me, playing Scrabble with my dad, promptly and unceremoniously turn his tile rack around and proceed to sabotage his entire game! My dad watches “his” tile rack for a while, protesting occasionally but less frequently as the game proceeds and he is shushed by the two of us with “Of course ‘dzho’ is a word. As is ‘ea’. Look up the Scrabble dictionary!” we tell him.

This was the 1980s, well before the world wide web was born and looking up stuff was not so easy. Some grumbling would happen, then he would stretch out and turn over sideways as we announced after half an hour to a now somnolent and snoring father that he had lost but played a good game because he lost by only fifty points!

Not just my dad, but any hapless visitor who came to our house, was inveigled into a game of Scrabble or Boggle and then promptly so subsumed into our game that he or she left several steps closer to nirvana – the first step to which is subsumation of self… or as happened in this house, subsumation of your tiles/blocks/letters/words!

This picchi (craze) for word games had started a generation earlier with an aunt who got us all hooked on to Scrabble and the crosswords. Her daughter, my cousin Minnie, brought back a Scrabble board from Singapore in the early eighties and the fate of the extended family was decided – with as many as twenty of us – ranging from eighty to eight hanging over the board and scribbling away fast and furiously our ‘finds’ on ironed-out pieces of bread paper! (The unbleached ivory coloured paper in which bread used to be wrapped at the baker’s before plastic became so common).

I don’t remember precisely what happened to that first board but we lost it, I think and Minnie was not going to be back from Singapore for a while with a replacement. The game hadn’t made an appearance in India yet so no board could be had for love or money. But ingenuity was quite another coin! My uncle, Minnie’s dad, very fond of pooh-poohing all word games (his favourite line about crosswords being that only crooked minds could do them!), was so kind-hearted that he got his carpenter to make a Boggle block for us out of small cubes of wood and etch the letters in each! The wood was dark, the letters were barely visible but we rubbed chalk powder into the letters to make them stand out in white relief against the ebony background… and heaved a collective sigh of relief – the game was back!

Over three decades have passed but the addiction to word games thrives in most of us still…

…just like the addiction to this afternoon tiffin in most Kannadiga households…

AVALAKKI CHIVDA/BEATEN RICE ROASTED SNACK/DRY MASALA POHA

• Avalakki/thin beaten rice/poha – 5-6 cups – roast on a low flame for 5-6 minutes till crisp and set aside
• Roasted peanuts – 1 cup
• Roasted gram dal/putani/putnala pappu/pottukadalai – 1 cup
• Cashewnuts – 2 tbsp – split into halves
• Copra/dry coconut – thin slivers – 2 tbsp – optional
• Green chilies – 5-6 – sliced
• Curry leaves – 3 tbsps – microwave on high till crisp – about 2 minutes. Set aside
• Mustard seeds – 1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1/8 tsp
• Sesame seeds – 1 tbsp
• Oil – 2 tbsp
• Turmeric powder – 1/2 tsp
• Red chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Sugar – 1 tsp
• Salt

Heat the in a large pan and add mustard, green chilies and asafoetida. Fry till chilies are crisp.

Add sesame seeds, copra and cashewnuts and fry for about thirty seconds more.

Add the nuts, roasted gram, salt, turmeric and chili powder. Mix well.

Add sugar and roasted poha and mix really well. Add the crisped curry leaves.

You could also add fried raisins.

Switch off. Let cool and store in an airtight dabba. Snack on when hungry or playing a word game!