Anu Chenji

“It’s called shabdkosh in Hindi. What a pretty name!” announces my friend, reading out from a website she’s checking out.

We are in a shop with interesting and unfamiliar products and there’s something called “seabuckthorn juice”. We live next to the sea but haven’t ever heard of this and we’re googling to figure out whether it’s called something else in any of the languages we are familiar with.

There are three of us and the other two stare at her in disbelief… for a few moments before erupting in laughter! She has hit on a Hindi to English dictionary (shabdkosh!!) looking for a translation of seabuckthorn and is reading out the title under the impression that that is the word she is looking for!

Even funnier because all this is in India and the English poses no problem – only the Hindi bits! Most jokes about language tend to be centred around translating stuff from any Indian language into English (like this classic translation of a Mulk Raj Anand line “there is something black in the lentil soup” for daal mein kuch kaala hai meaning “something fishy is afoot”!! )

But translating from English to Hindi – like my pal did above or from one Indian language to another can be just as hilarious. Or trying to speak in an unfamiliar tongue. Like this gem from my uncle, who had just shifted to Hyderabad from his native Bangalore. He tells our man Friday (those were the days when such a species still existed!) to run to the shop and buy him two goats for ten paise! (Shop ki poyi padi paisalaku rendu mekalu theesukuraa, he explains.

Our man Friday is a villager. He scratches his head… yes, things were cheaper back then but two goats? For ten paise? (For comparison, ten paise would buy you one small square inch chikki (peanut brittle)!

Two goats, even one, is a tall order! Dorakadu, saar (you won’t get it, sir), he finally answers.

“I only need to hang my shaving mirror on the wall,” he protests! How much does it cost to get a nail?

Aha moment and the mystery is cleared up. My Kannada speaking uncle has used the Telugu word for goat (meka) instead of the word for nail (meku) – just one little vowel sound but we could have ended up celebrating Eid on the wrong day! Goat biryani, that is – if anyone was up to slaughtering a goat!

Being a vegetarian, however, we’d probably have had something involving no slaughter… maybe just some translation, like the village milkman, when asked by a visiting American to explain what “curd” was, scratches his head and explains, “Milk sleep in the night, early morning tight!!”

Like this very simple, almost forgotten “tiffin” item called…

MOR KALI

• Rice flour – 1 cup
• Sour buttermilk – 3 cups (1 cup yogurt whisked with 2 cups water)
• Oil – 2 tbsp (preferably sesame oil)
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Mor milagai/majjiga mirapakaayalu/green chilies soaked in buttermilk and sun dried – 3-4 (substitute with red chilies if you can’t get these)
• Urad dal -1 tsp
• Asafoetida – 1 large pinch
• Curry leaves – 2 sprigs

Whisk the rice flour, buttermilk and salt together.

Heat the oil in a apn and fry the mor milagai for a few seconds till crisp. Take out, cool and crush with the fingers.

In the same oil, pop the mustard seeds, add urad dal, curry leaves and asafoetida.

Lower heat, add back the fried mor milagai and pour in the buttermilk mixture, stirring constantly.

Cook for 7-8 minutes till it forma a ball around the ladle. Take a little between your fingers and press. It shouldn’t be too sticky.

Spread it on to a greased plate and cool.

Cut into pieces with a knife or if you want it to look exciting, with a cookie cutter!

Serve plain or with coconut chutney.

Who cares what it’s called in any language anyway – food is a universal lingo!

“Betty doesn’t act like Veronica and Charlie Brown doesn’t act like Lucy!” said Tom Moore.

Don’t recognise the name? Well, you should – he brought happiness in enormous quantities to a generation of 50’s, 60’s and 70’s kids who pored over his drawings  – of Betty, Veronica and of course, the boy everyone wanted/wanted to be – Archie! What exactly was it that made these characters so attractive to teens the world over? Why did we take sides, strongly partisan in favour of one of the two main girl characters in the comics? Indian girls, brought up in the cloistered environments of those days, were strongly like Betty but wanted to be Veronica! Ronnie was the top of the Maslow need-fulfilment triangle!

Being barely aware of psychology as a science, Maslow was completely unknown to us then. And so we hankered innocently after everything that seemed so easily available – teens with cars (so what if it was only an old jalopy? Most Indian cars of those days made Archie’s falling-to-pieces steed look glamorous in comparison!), easygoing teachers (well, we had a couple of those but they were still “Sirs” and “Ma’ams” and exotic adults, demanding respect if not downright obeisance!), X-ray vision glasses, bullworkers and above all, Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies (these last few being the ads on the last pages of comic books over which we pored with serious concentration!)

Most of us couldn’t afford to buy all the comics so these were carefully hunted down – from friends (begged, traded, borrowed on promise of everlasting friendship!), filched from libraries (with the library’s purple ink stamp being carefully erased with whatever was doing the rounds then as “the best/only way to get the stamp off” brigade – ranging from lime juice to yogurt to Erasex fluid – the bottle being passed around for rapturous sniffing – who knew it  was supposed to be an addictive psychotropic substance??!). Having erased (or so we fondly believed!) all traces of iniquity, these were then given for “binding” – and the proud owner of said bound volume was definitely cock of the walk! And would condescend to lend his bound volume to “select” friends. Or, if he happened to be your older brother, would hide it carefully from untrustworthy younger siblings who, in the spirit of being cock of thing the walk themselves, might lend it out to their friends – woe betide the younger sibling who got caught – he/she ended up envying the early worm which got caught!

Ah well, Betty stayed Betty and Ronnie continued on her heartless journey – no identity confusion there, for sure – one of the things which was so attractive about those characters – they were reflective of our own simpler selves – free from modern angst!

After all that drooling over Twinkies in the comics, when I finally saw them in American stores, they looked most  unappetisingly artificial! And anyway I was craving Indian stuff by then – khatta, meetha, teekha – all the familiar hot, sweet and sour balances of Indian chutneys… like this incredibly simple and completely irresistable, zero fat chutney…

RAW MANGO & CORIANDER CHUTNEY

• Semi-ripe mango – thothapuris are the best for this – 1 medium sized – washed and chopped any which way. Don’t bother to peel
• Fresh coriander – cleaned and chopped – 2 cups
• Green chilies – 1 or 2
• Tomato – 1 – chunked
• Jaggery or brown sugar – 1 tbsp
• Salt – 1/2 tsp
• Cumin/jeera seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Lime – optional – depending on the sourness of the mango – 1

Just grind everything up!

Makes a super chutney for dosas or a dip for vegetable sticks or a sauce for frankies or wraps or a sandwich spread.

Or even on Jughead’s hotdogs!

“Let’s cut back on household expenses a little,” both of us decide seriously and take a solemn vow to keep accounts properly this month at least!

We have tried earlier, fired by the reformatory zeal every time a couple we meet tells us about how they document their expenses, writing down every pie they spend, including the fifty pips donated to a beggar outside the temple! Wow, we go, we must do this and off  we traipse on a shopping expedition to buy a neatly lined little notebook, black pens for writing expenses, a red pen for totals at the bottom of every page, a green pen to make the job of double entry book-keeping (yes, that’s how ambitious we used to get!!) look prettier, a ruler and a pencil (after serious discussions on whether a blue pencil or a black pencil would be easier to maintain accounts with!)

So much effort is bound to meet with success, right? And we know exactly where we are wrt to money coming in and money going out?!! The book, ruler, pencils don’t seem to make much difference at the end of the month – yes, I know I paid ten bucks to the flower seller but what on earth happened to the thousand bucks that was right there???! This was the 1980s and a thousand bucks was a goodly proportion of my monthly salary so to have it unaccountably missing was well… sigh… tension-making… to say the very least! We break our heads over it for two days, the tension broken only by an occasional TV programme till realisation dawns… we didn’t possess a TV last month right? Didn’t we buy it this month and isn’t that where the thousand bucks went?

Eureka!! And we forgot to enter the darn thing in our beautiful account book… where is the thing by the way??! Hunt ensues, book is found… book is opened and we go into raptures as we flip the pages over – our little one-year old Picasso-in-the-making has drawn the cutest pictures – look at that… and that… and that! It would be sacrilege to deface the book with any more accounting entries. The drawings are carefully framed and we decide to buy another book and this time, we promise to keep accounts beautifully…! And in the meantime, we go out for a celebratory dinner…

The years roll on, we manage to scrape by without doing any accounts… till we decide to build a house… buy a flat, rather… this is pricey-real-estate Madras! And then the whole bogey of keeping accounts surfaces!

We are very sincere and twenty straight days of keeping accounts takes its toll on a couple to whom the whole idea is anathema! We do totals, we scratch and re-write, we total up again and scratch our heads in puzzlement… but we do it!   (Note to self : To two normally intelligent human beings both in the corporate world, why is household account keeping so fraught with difficulty?? Pls find out!) And then we sit down to do a BUDGETARY REVIEW. (Please note capitalised seriousness!)

Sample of our budgetary review:

Me: Omg, did you see the amount we’ve spent on powder (talcum) this month? What do you do with the darn thing? Eat it?! (It  is only hubby who uses talcum powder by the way, slathering it on with the gay abandon of a bricklayer slathering on cement!) Ever dealt with powdery footsteps on the bathroom floor??!

He counters with Madras being so hot etc. etc. and we leave it at that till the doctor tells him that his asthma is getting worse. The powder question is revived. I tell him that not only will we save money usefully to pay off EMIs, but he will gain health! Not to mention saving the environment!

He is convinced – almost. And promises to take steps to reduce talcum consumption. Off he goes to the local grocery and comes back with four tins of powder (they had a deal that was too good to pass up!) and a baby pink powder puff – for himself – to make the task of powdering more efficient, he says!

I swear even the baby chuckled!

Thirty years on and we have sensibly decided that there are two kinds of people in the world – those who can and those who can’t keep household accounts – and we belong to the latter family! RIP account books, red, blue and green pens and rulers! We now live in blissful ignorance of all accounting matters… life is beautiful – and very fragrant with talcum! Smells almost as good as this…

 CARAMELISED ONION AND HERB BREAD

• Whole wheat flour/atta – 2 cups
• Plain flour/maida – 2 cups
• Yeast – 1 sachet
• Onion – sliced – 1 cup
• Mixed dried herbs (marjoram, oregano, thyme, basil, parsley or any combination of these) – 3 tsp
• Salt – 3/4 tsp
• Vegetable oil or butter – 2 tbsp
• Milk powder – 2 tsp
• Warm water – 1.25 cups (approximately)
• 1 cup boiling water
• Sugar – 2 tsp
• Milk – 2 tbsp – for brushing.

Heat the oil/butter in a saucepan. Add onions and cook on a low flame, stirring occasionally, till caramelised – about 5-7 minutes. Cool.

Prove the yeast and knead a soft, springy dough adding all the ingredients including onions.

Cover and set in a warm place to rise. When doubled ( about 1 hour), knock back.

Shape into a loaf and place in a  greased loaf tin. Cover and let it rise again till doubled in size – about 15 minutes. Brush with milk.

Place the cup of boiling water in a preheated oven – 200 C.

Place the loaf tin with the dough in the oven.

Bake at 200 C for about 35-40 minutes till golden brown on top and the bottom feels hollow when tapped.

Serve warm with garlic butter and cheese.

Who cares about budgets and accounts? Pooh!

The other place we were taken to year after year, with great expectations, which were never disappointed – was the annual medical exhibition at Osmania Medical College. Mom being a doctor, I guess this was an occupational hazard of being her children!

But we, ghoulish creatures that we were, were nothing loth – no one had to force us to come. We got dressed and traipsed off quite happily, eager for the treat in store. My oldest brother Anand, could be a little squeamish on occasion, having to be reminded of the rooms full of specimens smelling gloriously of the formalin in which they were preserved and then the eats to follow (oh yes, we did!) before he could be persuaded sometimes! We, the younger two, had no such problems – our curiosity was rampantly morbid and we obviously had no higher sensibilities!

One particular room, the perinatal pathology room, was the highlight of our visit every year. This room was lined with large glass jars filled with a clear fluid – with human foetuses preserved in them – in various stages of development and deformity! And that was how I learnt to spell ‘hydrocephaly’ before I learnt to spell ‘squirrel‘!

For some strange reason, these things in the jars were not human in any sense to us – they were the 70’s equivalent of watching Animal Planet or Discovery channels and therefore excited neither horror nor disgust!

“Oooh, look at his one with the weird head! Doesn’t it look like a lizard?!!” could only be topped with someone else’s discovery and exclamation over something else which looked like… nothing on earth! Our field of knowledge being necessarily limited to the books we had read, we sometimes fell short of things to compare these things with!

There were also other rooms filled with mosquitoes in various stages of development, worms of various kinds which could lodge inside your body (okay, this one grossed us out a bit – particularly the tapeworms!), rooms filled with various organs afflicted by various diseases – we drank in the gamut of cirrhosed livers, brain tumours, kidney stones, cancerous stomachs and other bits and pieces with avidity!

Strangely, these exhibitions were never degraded by the kind of “cultural” programmes that one sees today in various educational institutions – the lewd songs and dances that pass for “entertainment” didn’t exist – we were quite happy to see science in all its glory and be entertained by its avatars!

After all these high treats, an even higher treat awaited – in the form of a visit to one of the cafes around the college, where we gorged ourselves on vadas and masal dosas or even – shiver-y pleasure – to a big hotel – like “Annapoorna” or somewhere else where we got to sample things usually not made at home like butter naans and vegetable koftas!

The smell of formalin only served to whet our appetites!

One of those dishes which we loved and my mother learnt to reproduce at home was this simply scrumptious, rather unusual…

ARBI MUGHLAI (Taro/chaamagadda/chepankizhangu/colocasia gravy)

• Arbi (medium size) – 250 gms
• Besan (gram flour) – 2 tblsp
• Oil  – 3 tblsp
• Omam/carom/ajwain seeds- 1/2 tsp
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Onion (chopped)- one large
• Green chilli minced – one
• Red chilli powder – 1.5 tsp
• Chopped coriander – 1 tblsp
• Salt
• Juice of 1/2 lime
• Garam masala – 1/4 tsp

GRAVY

• Tomatoes – chunked – 250 gms
• 10 cashewnuts
• Tomato puree – 2 tbsp
• Ginger – grated – 1/2 tsp
• Garlic chopped – 3-4 flakes
• Green chilli – one -chopped
• Red chilli powder – 1/2 tsp
• Cloves – 2
• Green cardamom- one
• Salt to taste
• Butter – 2 tblsp
• Sugar or jaggery – 1 tsp
• Kasooti methi – 1 tblsp

Pressure cook the whole arbi with three cups of water for one whistle.

Lower heat and cook for 3 minutes. Switch off and cool.

Peel and slice into 1/2 cm thick discs.

FOR GRAVY

Cook together tomatoes, one cup of water, ginger and garlic paste, cashewnuts, green chilli, red chilli powder, cloves and cardamom.

Bring to a boil, reduce the flame and cook, covered till it is reduced to a thick sauce.

Remove from fire. Cool.

Blend in a mixer to a smooth puree.

In a fresh pan, caramelise the sugar in butter.

Add the puree.

Add salt to taste.

Simmer on low flame for 1-2 minutes.

Add kasooti methi and remove from fire.

FOR ARBI

Mix salt, red chili powder and besan and coat the arbi pieces.

Shallow fry till golden and crisp.

In the same oil, add ajwain and jeera.

Add chopped onions, grated ginger and green chilli and sauté for three minutes.

Add 1/2 tsp salt and arbi pieces.

Fry for a minute.

Add the prepared gravy and fry until the arbi is coated with the gravy.

Adjust seasoning.

Sprinkle lemon juice, garam masala and the remaining coriander.

Stir and serve immediately.

Don’t let those hydrocephalic foetuses put you off your feed!

“We’re going to the Exhibition tomorrow!”

Always spelt with a capital E in our minds, the annual Industrial Exhibition or “Numaysh” as it was better known, was a high point of our lives. It opened on the 1st of January with a few stalls being inaugurated by some big bug (it mattered not a jot to us whether it was the Chief Minister or a film star – we were not yet of an age to be starstruck!) and then over the next week, all the stalls would be open for business and some business it was!

Stalls from all over India, selling or showcasing everything under the sun (everything that we knew at least!) from my dad’s electricity board stall- which we visited with due solemnity every year, staring curiously at models of hydroelectric power projects and statistics that Dad explained to us patiently – I still remember the year he was simply bursting with pride because AP had become a power -surplus state for the first time – the only state in India to do so!

Being deeply patriotic, the parents would drag us to all the government departmental stalls – including the Jails Department stall – what???! No, it didn’t showcase a jail – it was just a stall to sell products made by prisoners – including the roughest of bedsheets – patriotically bought by parents, which we slept in till we grew up! I remember a trip to an aunt’s house in Madras one summer – I couldn’t get to sleep because the sheets were too soft! Give me jail sheets any day!

These visits were intended by the parents to give birth to some patriotism in our heathen souls (!) but what we really looked forward to was the mirchi  bajji stalls and my brother Arvind to the AP Fisheries Department stall. Why fisheries? Because they had a fish cutlet stand! Going by the number of fish cutlets he put away every visit, his middle name should have been Jeeves! Anand and me, the veggies, would wait patiently till he finished and then head for the mirchi bajji stall – where Arvind could match us bajji for bajji in consumption – even after two dozen fish cutlets!

Considering that I never ate any mirchis (thick green chilies) from the bajji, preferring to nibble the bajji part only and pass the mirchis on to whichever hapless adult accompanied us, I don’t know why we just didn’t buy some other, not so hot bajji! But that would have been sacrilege!

This was followed more often than not by a ride on the Giant Wheel (notice how many things are capitalised in the lives of kids?!), where the mirchi bajjis were expelled more often than not!

The trip to the month-long Exhibition was made at least twice and more often if parents could be wheedled into taking us. At school, if you were one of those lucky few whose parents could take you many times, you were definitely cock of the walk and queened it over the rest – poor sods who got taken only once… or god forbid, not at all!

Surprisingly, the charm of the numaysh didn’t pall as we grew older and many trips were made bunking college and bargaining for Lucknowi chikan kurtas and Kashmiri jackets with the handsome, young shopkeepers, always ready to flirt with a gaggle of giggly college girls!

Sigh, think I’ll make a trip this January…

And in the meantime, all that talk of bajjis and cutlets notwithstanding, here’s my very simple and simply yummy dinner…

METHI WITH CHANA DAL

• Fresh methi/fenugreek leaves /menthikoora – chopped – 1 cup
• Chana dal/bengal gram dal – 1 cup – soaked for two hours in 3 cups water
• Onion sliced -1 large
• Garlic pods – 5-6 – crushed
• Green chilies – 2 – slit
• Ginger – 1/2 ” piece – minced
• Tomatoes – 2 large – chopped
• Tomato puree – 1 tbsp
• Turmeric – 1/4 tsp
• Chili powder – 1/2 tsp
• Coconut sliced NOT grated – 1 tbsp – 1 cm long, thin slivers
• Sugar or jaggery – 1 tsp
• Salt
• Oil – 1 tbsp
• Mustard seeds – 1/2 tsp
• Jeera/cumin seeds – 1/2 tsp

Pressure cook the chana dal with turmeric for two whistles. Lower the heat and cook for a further 6-7 minutes. Switch off and cool.

Heat oil in a pan. Add mustard seeds and when they pop, add jeera and curry leaves.

Add green chilies and saute.

Add onion, garlic, ginger and saute till onions change colour.

Add fenugreek leaves and saute till wilted.

Add tomatoes and tomato puree and cook till mushy.

Add the dal, jaggery, coconut slivers and salt  and 1 cup water and cover and cook till tender – about ten minutes. Add water if necessary – this dal is a thick, ‘sitting’ consistency!

Serve with rice or rotis or bread.