Monsoon Diary (8 page)

We would wander the beach, tasting a little here, cooling our heels in the waves there, building giant sandcastles, or begging for money to ride the garishly painted carousels. Hawkers called, enticing us with their offerings. “Madam,
bhel-puri khaoge
?” (“Madam, will you eat a
bhel-puri
?) The more enterprising ones came after us, young boys carrying metal bins filled with fried snacks of various sorts. For a penny, the boy would deftly turn a piece of paper into a cone—the kind used for icing cakes—and fill it with
namkeens
(munchies) that we could share as we ambled along.

If mangoes were in season, the
aam vala
(mango vendor) would be there, slitting and slicing perfectly underripe mangoes that were on the verge of sweetness but had left behind the tartness of their youth. These green mango slices would be displayed on carts, with a series of slits like so many teeth. The vendor would dust the mango slices with salt and paprika and offer us a bite.

Sometimes we had corn on the cob, roasted over charcoals until it was black. The vendor would take a sizzling ear from the open fire and hand it to us with the gentle admonishment “Mind your fingers.” Occasionally my tummy hurt from all the eating and my uncle would buy me a soda, not an orange soda or a Pepsi but plain Indian soda— chilled carbonated water in a bottle that the hawker opened with a pop.

Suitably fortified, we would head out to one of Bombay’s numerous restaurants. Cream Center was famous for its
bhaturas,
deep-fried yeasty breads that puffed up into a giant ball. Chopsticks and any other Chinese restaurant for that matter spiced up their sauces to suit Indian tastes and were uniformly terrific. Sometimes we would get a Gujerati
thali
(meal-in-a-plate) at a restaurant near Churchgate Station where waiters with lightning hands served first, second, third, and fourth helpings until you begged them to stop.

The
paan
vendor outside Churchgate Station was famous all over Bombay, and the adults would indulge in a
paan
after the meal—it was an excellent digestive. Our final stop was the promenade on Marine Drive. We would saunter down, lulled by the moonlit waves and twinkling stars, until we happened upon an ice cream vendor ringing his bell and cooing “
Kulfi khaoge?
” Yes, we wanted an ice cream, brimming with slivered almonds and pistachios and as creamy and seductive as the tropical breeze. The man would slip the
kulfi
off its aluminum shell onto a leaf, cut it into small pieces, and hand it over to us. The leaf’s latent saltiness contrasted pleasantly with the
kulfi
’s creamy sweetness.

If there was a tea stall around, my uncle, who was fond of thick Irani chai, would have a cup, along with a
brun maska,
a type of biscuit.

And with that, we would go home.

PAV-BHAJI

Place: Camden Town, London. Time: a few years ago. I am wandering around a weekend open-air market. Amidst the stalls selling T-shirts, souvenirs, trinkets, and Chinese curios is a tiny stall selling—can it be?
—pav-bhaji.
I find myself wandering over, drawn by the smell of cumin, cloves, and cardamom. Behind the counter is a blue-eyed, blond Caucasian. I frown in confusion. A Caucasian making
pav-bhaji
? My chin rises challengingly. His name is Mike Guest, and he hands me a steaming plate. The
pav
is crisp on the outside and buttery soft inside. The
bhaji
vegetables are just right: a combination of soft potatoes, tangy tomatoes, crisp onions, and peas that have been transformed by the spices into a symphony of taste. Mike Guest watches with a satisfied smile as I quickly polish off the entire plate. “I’ve eaten better,” I say airily to the reincarnated Indian as I pay. “Can I have another plate to go? For my friend, not for me.”

Pav-bhaji
is one of the few roadside snacks that tastes just as authentic when made at home. The trick is to make the
bhaji
(vegetables) piping hot and the
pav
(buns) buttery and crisp. The combination gives
pav-bhaji
its distinctive flavor.

SERVES 8

1 carrot, chopped
2 cauliflower florets, chopped
2 large potatoes, peeled and chopped
5 green beans, chopped
1/2 cup peas
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for serving
1/2 teaspoon grated ginger
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 small green pepper, chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped fine, plus more for garnish
2 medium tomatoes, chopped fine
2 teaspoons
pav-bhaji masala
(available in Indian grocery stores)
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Butter
Chopped fresh cilantro
8 hamburger buns
Lemon slices

Cook the carrot, cauliflower, potatoes, beans, and peas in a cup of water until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and mash them coarsely. Set aside.

Heat the 2 tablespoons butter in a pan. Add the ginger, garlic, green pepper, onion, and tomatoes. Sauté over high heat, stirring for 2 to 3 minutes until the onions are translucent and the other vegetables are soft. Add the
pav-bhaji masala,
turmeric, and salt. Mix well and stir in 1/2 cup water so that the whole thing is the consistency of a thick gravy. Bring to a boil.

Simmer until the gravy is thick, stirring and mashing pieces so that the spices penetrate the vegetables. Remove from the stove. Add the lemon juice and mix well. Garnish with chopped cilantro and a half-inch slab of butter.

Slit the buns horizontally, leaving one edge attached (to open like a book). Coat with butter (as desired) and roast open on a griddle until hot and soft with the surface crisp on both sides. Fill with the vegetable
bhaji,
a teaspoon of chopped onions, and serve with half a slice of lemon.

SEVEN

Of Baking and Brides

ONE AFTERNOON I came back home from school to find about eight ladies sitting around the dining table. In front of them were bowls of flour, butter, and some eggs.

“I am teaching them baking,” my mom explained. “We are making sponge cake.”

I knew that my mother knew how to bake—she had taken classes when we were babies. But our family’s Brahminical aversion to eggs combined with the fact that we didn’t possess an oven had prevented my mother from acting on her knowledge. All that changed when my father surprised her by buying a small portable oven for her fortieth birthday.

Mom was delighted. She began baking cakes for my lunch box, offered to bring a cake for the class picnic, and donated cakes in lieu of money. She had tiny cupcakes waiting for us when we came home from school. When my orthodox aunt, who couldn’t abide an egg, came to visit, Mom even tried her hand at eggless cakes, substituting yogurt for eggs. The cake tasted good, in my opinion, but my aunt still wouldn’t eat it, since it was cooked in the same vessel that previously held the tainted egg-containing cakes, or “egg-plus cakes” as she called them.

A year later my mother was ready to become a culinary guru. She put up a flyer in the local Ladies Club and was in business. Every Thursday afternoon about eight ladies would congregate in our living room at four o’clock—after their naps but before the dinner hour. Happily for me, it was also the time when I returned home from school. I would drop my bags and promptly sit down beside them, enraptured by the smell of butter, sugar, and vanilla essence.

My mother would measure flour, butter, and sugar into a large bowl and pass it around. Since we didn’t possess a blender or a cake mixer, we had to mix the ingredients by hand, with a wooden spoon.

“Twirl it faster, faster,” my mother urged. “The dough has to be like a feather. Only then the cake will rise.”

I gritted my teeth and held my breath as I turned the wooden spoon around as fast as I could. Finally, breathless, I would pass the bowl to the next lady.

Each “aunty” had her own style of mixing the cake. Devi-aunty would start slow and build up speed with every turn until her hand looked like a whirling dervish. Leela-aunty, on the other hand, took off like a sprinter—at top speed from start to finish. Old Mrs. Rao went red in the face as she swirled the mix till her capillaries jutted out like black worms.

“Enough, enough,” my mom would say worriedly.

Viji, the single accountant, would stare into the cake batter as if it were an analytical problem to be solved. Then she would take a deep breath and nod slightly before setting off at a steady clip. She stirred the slowest but for the longest time.

Tina and Reena, twins who were waiting to get married, would collapse into giggles while turning the spoon.

When the bowl circled back to my mother, she would whirl the wooden spoon around authoritatively, break a few eggs into the mixture, and pass it around again. This time speed was not of the essence. The main thing was to make sure that the eggs didn’t spill over the sides of the bowl. We took turns and carefully mixed everything before passing it back to my mother.

She would add the final touches—a few drops of vanilla or orange essence, a handful of chocolate chips, raisins, and nuts—before pouring the mixture into the cake bowl and sticking it in the oven. She shut the door with the air of a magician and beamed.

Thirty minutes later the cake emerged from the oven, having risen to nearly double its size. I licked my lips as my mother cut generous slices for everyone. And so it came to be that my brother and I enjoyed finger-licking cake and tea every Thursday when we came back from school.

As the demand for my mother’s baking classes spiraled, she began thinking about charging her students and expanding her course offerings. She was also proficient in juice making, fabric painting, flower arrangement (
ikebana
), and crocheting, and wondered if she could teach a different class each afternoon. She didn’t want to do it at the Ladies Club. “Too much politics,” she said. Rather, she wanted to operate out of our home.

It was my father who suggested that they go into business together. He was a professor of English at Anna University. Since he knew several languages—French, German, and Russian besides a few Indian ones—he also gave private lessons at home. “Why not combine their services under one umbrella?” Dad asked. He had even thought of a name: Bright Tutorial Academy. It would be a school where the home arts merged with foreign languages and turned out bright students, he explained.

“Why the ‘Tutorial’?” asked Mom.

“Because it has a nice ring to it,” Dad replied.

They hired a Chinese painter and asked him to make a signboard. Old Chu had come to Madras eons ago to work for one of the many Chinese dentists practicing in my hometown. He had married a Korean lady, opened a Chinese restaurant, which his children ran, and a beauty salon, managed by his wife. Chu himself had “retired” to pursue his passion: painting signs in beautiful calligraphy. He turned up on Saturday morning toting a signboard that he unwrapped with a flourish of cloth. Mom and Dad stared at the sign, speechless. Old Chu had misheard the name. Instead of “Bright Tutorial Academy” he had painted—in elegant letters: BLIGHT TUTORIAL ACADEMY.

“It’s an omen,” said Mom, bursting into tears. “It’s a sign that says we should not proceed.”

“It’s a sign that says we shouldn’t hire deaf painters and instruct them over the phone,” said Dad.

Old Chu was appalled when Dad, the English professor, explained the meaning of
blight.
Of course, he would repaint the sign, Chu said, stuttering in embarrassment. He was sorry for the mistake. “Madam was not to cly.” He would fix things.

IN SPITE OF its rather inauspicious beginning, Bright Tutorial Academy took off. To our surprise, there were enough women who were interested in apprenticing themselves under my mother. The baking and juice-making classes were the most popular of all.

Every week my mother bought bushels of fruits, wholesale, and taught the women how to preserve and bottle them as juices. Before long, our fridge was lined with bottles of multicolored juices: green sarsaparilla, pink guava, apple and orange, blood red tomato, yellow pineapple, ruby red grape, and golden mango nectar. I consumed them by the gallon every day in spite of my mother’s admonitions that too much fruit juice and cake would result in acne.

One day a municipal official walked into our house. “You have put up this signboard in front of your house. So you have to pay municipal taxes at double the rate, because you are using the house as commercial, and not residential, premises.” The next morning my father removed the signboard and closed the Academy.

MOM WAS RIGHT about drinking too much fruit juice and about the cake. When I turned thirteen, one of the first things that happened was a pimple the size of a small hill—or so it seemed to me—on the left side of my face. It was followed by another and another, until my whole face was covered with angry red eruptions. For the first time, Shyam took great interest in my face, examining the sizes and shapes of various pimples and discovering patterns.

My budding interest in recipes and cooking was completely channeled into concocting decoctions to cure my pimples. I starting with a foul-tasting mixture of equal parts brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and molasses, which I blended with milk and drank while holding my breath. The fiber helped my intestines but did nothing for my skin. Someone told me that prune juice helped clear the skin, so I bugged my mother to invent a palatable prune-juice recipe. She did but it had little effect. I applied gallons of turmeric. My face turned yellow, but the pimples persisted. After six months I went to a dermatologist. He prodded my face, twisted my neck, and slapped my chin.

“You have to give up eating sweets, chocolate, candy, fried stuff, oily stuff, fats, dairy products, and spicy stuff,” he said gravely.

“Doctor,” I replied, equally grave. “I am a growing girl. It seems like the only thing you have left in my diet is grass.”

AT AROUND THE SAME TIME, I became interested in the opposite sex. I had grown up around boys and tended to take them for granted. Both on my maternal and paternal sides my male cousins outnumbered the females. So was the case with my neighbors. I was used to fighting with boys using a cane or cricket ball, giving as good as I got when they taunted me with grasshoppers, climbing higher than they did to pluck the juiciest mango just to prove that I could, punching them in the face when they stole my diary and read passages out loud, and competing with them at sports or swimming just to feel included. Viewing them as objects of desire was a completely new emotion for me, one that I wasn’t sure what to do with.

Dating wasn’t widespread in Madras in the eighties. I needed another method to get close to the dozen or so boys who gathered outside our home every evening. They came from all parts of Adyar and were bound by a consuming interest in cricket and little interest in me. Since ours was a quiet street, they played right on the road’s intersection, pausing when a car passed by. The game always ended with a measuring tape. Two boys would stand on either side of a boundary line and argue for hours about whether the ball was a “four” or a “six.” Since the boundaries were drawn on the sand, there was never any agreement about whether the ball had crossed a certain line or not. Names were called, threats exchanged, and the tape was produced to measure the distance from the stumps to the boundary.

I was a peripheral member of this coterie, much to the dismay of my brother, who frequently and vociferously complained that “Shoba didn’t behave like a girl.” The game itself didn’t captivate me as much as the fervor it evoked in the boys. My brother was wrong. I was behaving like a girl. As a freshly minted teenager, I was experiencing one of the most feminine of all emotions, even though I didn’t realize it. I was jealous of cricket because it took the attention of the boys away from me.

After days of arguing about how unfair it was that I, a competent cricket player, could not participate in their games simply because I was a girl, after days of bribing the boys with chocolates coupled with abject pleading, I was finally allowed to be a batsman for a day.

So there I stood, clutching my bat, facing my childhood nemesis, a precocious kid by the name of Vikas (now an I.T. professional in New Jersey). Vikas bowled a “googly.” I lofted the ball. Crash. Silence. Nobody moved.

Mr. Gadgil, a stern moustachioed military man, leopard-walked out of his home and bellowed, “Which of you chimps threw the ball on my glass window?”

No one said a word.

“Haven’t I told you idiots a million times not to play outside my house?” Mr. Gadgil continued. “If I catch you playing here one more time . . . As for the ball, you can kiss it good-bye. I am not going to give it back until you pay for my damaged window.”

With one shot, I had become the neighborhood scourge, the killer of cricket games, the lousy batsman who ousted us from our makeshift cricket ground by stirring the tiger in Mr. Gadgil.

There were more games, of course. After all, Mr. Gadgil’s window had been broken before. The boys whined, the fathers relented and paid off Mr. Gadgil, and the game resumed, but without me.

PERHAPS AS A WAY to distract me from my obsession with my pimples, or to solve the problem herself, my mother enrolled in the local community college and studied cosmetology. Three months later she was a certified aesthetician, and I was a willing guinea pig on whom she could practice. She waxed my legs, threaded my eyebrows, removed blackheads, gave me facials, and formulated face packs. At age thirteen, thanks to my mother’s interest in practicing her craft, I was being indulged with “Days of Beauty” that remain far superior to any that I have experienced since.

Six months after she graduated, with typical confidence, Mom opened a beauty parlor in the room upstairs. As usual, my dad offered his quiet support in many ways: one afternoon he went upstairs and cleaned out the dusty old books, odd items of furniture, and the random coconuts that had been stored in the room. Together my parents ordered some equipment: a massage table, several mirrors, chairs, a facial steamer, a hair dryer, and a medicine cabinet for storing bottles of lotion. Old Chu painted another signboard and this time he spelled it correctly. Within months, Mom had closed down one business and opened another. We named her beauty parlor Kadambari, a Sanskrit word that meant “sweet-smelling.” Not that her parlor smelled sweet, but we just liked the sound of it. Kadambari Beauty Parlor officially opened for business on my fourteenth birthday. It was, in a sense, my mother’s birthday present to me.

All our friends came to Mom’s beauty parlor, first out of curiosity and then attracted by her compelling personality and comforting hands that massaged each customer’s skin till it bloomed. I would go up on weekends and listen to the women talk, laugh, and exchange confidences as women do when they are together, about secret trysts, broken promises, and dreams of eternal youth.

Mom had been a beautician long before she became certified as one. She loved makeup and jewelry and gave tips to everyone in her acquaintance about lipstick colors and costume jewelry. From my point of view, however, the best part of Mom’s expertise was her popularity on the bridal circuit.