MY grandmother suffered a brain hemorrhage. Just that afternoon she had enjoyed her favourite pista flavoured ‘cup ice-cream’ with her two-year-old great grandchild. They shared a private joke, giggled non-stop, and the ‘cup ice cream’ ceremony had gone on for over thirty minutes; she had scraped even micro drops of ice cream with the wooden spoon. As she walked to wash her hands with creamy happiness all over her mouth, she said: ‘Nothing like the home-made bucket ice cream.’ It was a reference to the ice cream my mother used to make with the wooden bucket ice-cream maker.

It was indeed a ceremonious affair: my father and I cycled to the ice factory, brought back a huge block of ice wrapped in layers of gunny sack, it would then be pounded and layered into the wooden bucket along with rock salt. My mother would by then be ready to toss in the thickened milk, sugar and fruit pulp into the metallic container, and neighbours would begin to arrive. Uncles, cousins, and friends followed. As my mother churned and churned, we took turns to fill the bucket with more ice and salt and salt and ice. ‘Can we see?’ my grandmother would ask every now and then, peeping excitedly into the metallic container to see how far the ice cream was from finish point. It took hours to make, but once the creamy, soft mixture got transferred into multiple cups, it was polished off in no time. My grandmother loved ice cream, she would sit in the middle of everyone, lost in its melting textures, once in a while she looked up to catch other similar heavenly expressions. Her contact with kitchens outside her own was so few that her recognition of them was amazingly accurate.

Doctors said she had thirty hours. She lived on for the next five years, mostly in a vegetative state with occasional spurts of memory. When memory sneaked in for a few moments we rushed to ask her if she knew who we were, at times we got lucky. Once, as she stared at the television blankly, she murmured Rajkumar… it was indeed a film of the iconic Kannada actor Dr. Rajkumar who she literally worshipped. If she was in her senses, she would have said one such story: ‘Susheela Bai and I watched this film at Uma theatre, we quietly slipped out for a matinee show. Rajkumar is King Krishnadevaraya himself! Do you know how many people performed arati to the screen?’

Another evening, she whispered incoherently into my uncle’s ears, Vidyarthi Bhavan masala dosa. Vidyarthi Bhavan is an 80-year-old dosa joint in Bangalore which has very few competitors even now when there is a proliferation of restaurants. My uncle walked into a neighbourhood restaurant and got a masala dosa packed. Grandmother looked hesitant even as she took a bite: with a faraway look, she pushed the plate away. ‘Trying to cheat your mother?’ She was lying in a state of unawareness to her surroundings, but you couldn’t fault her on Vidyarthi Bhavan masala dosa, VB Bakery bread, Harsha Stores badam burfi and Joy ice cream.

 

All my childhood I was my grandmother’s close accomplice. She made at least a couple of expeditions to Gandhi Bazaar everyday on the pretext of buying a sprig of curry leaves or an inch of ginger, just something. Gandhi Bazaar is among the oldest extensions of Bangalore with one of the most colourful markets. It signified everything that is Kannada, a veritable sensorium of sounds, smells, colours, and an assortment of typical Kannada characters. In spirit and sight it was somewhat close to R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi – everyone knew everybody. A small wire basket hanging from her scrawny right arm, and holding me with her left, I have walked with my grandmother listening to hundreds of stories about people, happenings, disappearances, changes and what not. She knew multiple people with the same name, so someone was short Savitri, her namesake was the tall Savitri… and so on. She stood before the vegetable vendors she knew from ancient times, deliberating if she should buy, what she should buy and how much she should buy.

 

Holding the vegetables close to her nose, she loudly wondered if they smelt the same as they did in her childhood in Hassan. How would the vangibaath taste with brinjals that are not as aromatic and tender, would the sambar get a slightly bitter flavour if the amaranth had such a thick stem? There were discussions on how the rains were not the same, the fertilizers were loaded with chemicals, soil composition had changed etc. Of course, there was also, is his daughter-in-law back with the new born, and has that drunkard son-in-law stopped beating her daughter? Grandmother would walk back with a sense of accomplishment and four-odd brinjals, ensuring that she had reason for another trip the next day.

Gouramma was in her late eighties, frail, bowed, and wrinkled when I saw her. Her head was shaven, and the red, coarse cotton saris that child widows like her draped, was literally her second skin. She walked slowly with a walking stick twice her size. Once a month, she came to grandmother’s to make all the masalas, the flour for the fried goodies, and sometimes sweets. If Gouramma didn’t turn up on the stipulated day, I would be sent away to check on her, and before I left I would be told for the hundredth time, the cruel story of her life. ‘The story of Subbamma is not very different,’ grandmother used to say. Also a widow, she made a livelihood selling her extraordinary masala powders, papads… and educated all her children.

Apart from these alliances, grandmother was a sort of a leader in the neighbourhood; she never missed a single concert during the Ramanavami season. Every evening for the next six weeks, we both finished dinner by 6 pm, and left for the concerts with many women in the neighbourhood joining us. She knew every Carnatic musician, and even before the first phrase was completed, she could tell the raga and could guess what kriti would be rendered. As we all walked back home around ten in the night – in our own groups – she led the lively discussion on that evening’s concert, cracking harmless jokes about the musician’s mannerisms, sparkle of the diamond earring and more. So, what’s for breakfast tomorrow, the women asked each other before parting. ‘After breakfast is done, I will quickly go to Gandhi Bazar to get some fresh coriander leaves, want to come Susheela Bai?’ grandmother would ask.

 

It is ten years since grandmother passed away, whatever I remember her for, the masala dosa episode often comes to my mind. Memory had exiled her, yet she crossed the boundaries of conscious memory and pulled out the masala dosa from unconscious awareness. Memory transcends food itself, it is often trying to conjure up associations you had with it in the past. And that past could be a way of life, people, situation or location. So what was it that grandmother remembered, was it really the masala dosa from Vidyarthi Bhavan that was located in the heart of Gandhi Bazaar? Or was she trying to re-find herself within the community that she was estranged from? She appreciated good food, but she was no foodie. She had to feed a large family and therefore spent long hours in the kitchen, but her repertoire was limited. The masala dosa, the curry leaves, the brinjal, the badam burfi… each of these in her life had been an excuse for those conversations, those coveted musical expeditions. Through the language of the kitchen she strung together her internal and external lives.

 

If food becomes a pretext to open up the world of long-ago memories that is hard to articulate, food can also become the source of nostalgia. Taste, smell, and texture is extraordinarily evocative, capable of triggering deep memories of feelings and emotions. Kannada poet Sabiha Bhoomigowda’s poem Meluku (Rumination) conveys the latter.

Like last year, this year too

As if I was waiting just for summer

I put out the entire paraphernalia

Of tender mangoes, salt, chillies

Mustard and fenugreek.

The poem moves on to speak of a husband who is irritated with the wife’s pickle-making efforts when it can simply be picked off the market shelf. ‘You complain you’ve no time to read and write, do you have time for this?’ he taunts. Her mind harks back to her mother, her childhood, the colours, aroma and taste of the annual pickle-making ritual.

Those images carved within me

I want to fill them with new colours

Even now I long to labour over this…

In yet another poem, Sambhandha (Relationship), she writes about a porcelain pickle jar, a hand me down from her mother. It had passed on from one generation to the other, preserving many varieties of pickles. She writes: ‘Each time I open its lid, a cartload of stories come alive.’

Continuing –

Such a jar, for some reason,

Sat adamantly.

The lid wouldn’t come up

Nor go down

It was stuck

Time came to a standstill!

Time for Sabiha is fluid, past merges into present and the future contains the past. As T.S. Eliot writes in the Four Quartets, all time is ‘redeemable’, and in this case the porcelain jar becomes the symbol of that time which is over, yet, continues to be there. To lose this object is seen as a rupture in that seamless motion of time, signifying a dissociation from a certain experience that belonged to a past that is dead, Hence, for Sabiha, it is important that the lid can finally be opened at the end of ‘Sambhandha’. The act of pickle making in ‘Meluku’ therefore, is not only about continuing a food tradition, it is also about locating oneself in a certain memory, and bringing both the memory and its time of occurrence into the present.

 

My mother too had never shut the lid. She is a repository of traditional cuisine, loves to innovate and is a wonderful host. In her long years as daughter-in-law of a large family, as wife, mother, sister, daughter, grandmother and as someone with a large social circle, she has not once expressed fatigue or disinterest. She has been physically tired, she has, on occasions been sad that her efforts go unacknowledged, but each time she has entered the kitchen with great enthusiasm and a large bag of stories. Nothing was a deterrent in her enduring relationship with the kitchen.

Every single day there was some story about her village Kuppahalli. No conversation with her ended without invoking the two decades she spent there. You appreciate the mosaru kodubale, and she would say, ‘Wish you had tasted Sundari’s preparation. I can never get there.’ The halubayi would be a delight, melt in the mouth, supple and glazed, ‘Ah, nothing to beat what Susheela used to make!’ The best kolakatte went back to Shamanni Mavayya’s kitchen, Chomayi was its ultimate stringy, soft self in Jaya’s skilful fingers, so on and so forth. ‘You know how I got the idea to make this sweet?’ she would trace the idea of her innovation back to Subbamami who used to come to Kuppahalli from Nagpur during summer vacation. Her narrative of food was full of people, the village, the festivities, the fair, the temple, the many kitchens she had walked into, how ingredients were cleaned, pounded and dried, happy and sad stories, tragedies, who liked what, who said what, how they all sat down to a meal, what preceded the meal, what followed it … it was endless.

These stories cut across class, caste and gender in the most natural way, because, her father’s home was an open one – a whole assortment of people had walked in and out of it. And they all took away from the ‘kitchen’ experience or brought something into it. She saw herself among these numerous people, and her own cooking as a tribute to their genius. Her food rhetoric, unconsciously, was a juxtaposition of public history and personal memory. It set out from the kitchen, but didn’t end there.

 

The kitchen therefore was a window through which she looked out at the world, and when she physically moved away from that viewpoint, she peeped into all those kitchens from this very window. She saw them unfolding in the here and now, she reinvented them, and breathed with them. Mother probably saw that the grand narrative she had for her life hadn’t quite worked, but it hadn’t either for those many women who she kept seeing through the window, and yet, they toiled endlessly to spread love, warmth and affection through their acts of cooking.

What exactly are these acts of cooking? They are cultural signifiers, they are narrativised embodiments of memories, stories, language, conversations, they are embodied politics of remembering, and about identity formation. It upholds the Gandhian theory of trusteeship, which is not economic, but spiritual and moral. These women were benevolent custodians of all the wealth that was placed in their care. They were caretakers of all that they happened to look after. My mother was the guardian of all that had been bequeathed to her by the community.

 

While a traditional cookbook is a clinical list of ingredients, measures and procedures, food memoirs are perched at the intersection of food and memory. Food memoirs talk about taste as well as the art of cooking, but it foregrounds experience in such a way that the taste of the food is almost always shaped by the social-emotional experience of it. It is interesting that this leads you on to ask what the constituents of taste are. Speaking about ‘perfect beauty’, philosopher M. Hiriyanna in his work Art Experience says that we often ‘perceive outward symbols and describe them as beautiful, since we experience Ananda at their sight. Those who identify beauty with these external factors and seek it as an attribute forget that while these are perceivable by the senses, beauty is disclosed only to the inward eye. True beauty is neither expressible in words, nor knowable objectively, it can only be realized.’

If one extends this to food, ‘perfect beauty’ could be those that satiate our eyes. Perfect colour, shape, size etc. In that case, how was dry roti, with cooked, unsalted brinjal or beetroot high cuisine for Gandhi? Why do so many regard the humble gruel as manna from heaven? Good food is hardly about taste (ruchi) as it is in the standardized sense of the modern food industry. It is hardly what appeases the tongue. Instead, it is more about what cannot be described – beyond salt, spice and sour. It is that which stirs your emotion or feeling, food is rasa.

Let’s taste this poem by Vaidehi, Aduge Mattu Nataka (Cooking and Theatre):

Call it cooking

Call it theatre

Just when you thought

They were two separate things –

 

It’s the everyday rasam

Same number of people, same measure

Same vessel

But each day it tastes different – how’s that?

As she goes on, the making of rasam is like a performance, she says. It’s all the same, same play of things. But yesterday’s rasam like yesterday’s drama is not the same as todays. There’s an interplay at work, and finally aren’t both about cooking of emotions, she asks. Taste is evanescent, it satiates the tongue, but rasa is about inner stirrings.

 

The biggest challenge for a cultural translation is not merely linguistic. It also opens up the problem of being intrinsically political. Food – my grandmother using it as an excuse to throw herself into the community, or my mother’s creative engagement with tradition and a cultural way of life, or Gouramma and Subbamma using it for livelihood – at best can be explained. You can perhaps translate a recipe, but how do you translate food which is language, geography, community life, identity, remembrance and experience? What we see on a television show or on a YouTube video can only be imitated. Food is that which lies in a continuum of past, present and future time, it is a story, it is a source of sustenance, it is obeisance, it is informal science, and art experience. It is about abstinence, restraint, sacrifice, and bonding. Food straddles the tangible and intangible – it falls somewhere between the worlds of my grandmother and mother.