The Hindi-Bindi Club (13 page)

I remember watching
Gone With the Wind
with my girlfriends in college. How I related to Scarlett O’Hara! I loved the end when, after surviving the Civil War, she lifts a handful of the earth and vows never to go hungry again.

In time, we replanted ourselves in the soil of our new motherland. The mournful wails of chest-beating women in grief subsided, and laughter replaced the horror stories. Still, memories of 1947 hung over our Punju community, the silence between our gay notes.

More than half a century later, they still hang over me.

I close my eyes and see Lahore, Kapoor Road, our bungalow. Zarkha and me swinging from the iron gate, throwing sticks for Moti, playing
stapu
and
kikli,
arranging the marriages of our dolls, dressing in yellow for Basant, eating pistachio
kulfi,
sneaking
bakarkhani
.

I remember an old Punjabi saying: If only these walls of steel could be brought down forever, we could once again gaze upon each other.

Saroj’s Famous Samosas

MAKES 16

PASTRY:

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for plate

¹
/
₃
cup vegetable shortening, chilled

½ teaspoon ajowan seeds,

¹
/
₃
cup butter, chilled

½ teaspoon salt

4–8 tablespoons very cold water

1. In a large mixing bowl, sift the flour, ajowan, and salt together. Cut in thin slices of shortening and butter. Using fingertips or pastry blender, rub mixture together until coarse and crumbly in texture.

2. Starting with 3 tablespoons, add water and work into mixture by hand or wooden spoon. Add more tablespoons as necessary until dough holds together, neither sticky nor dry. Knead on lightly floured surface 5–7 minutes or until smooth.

3. Wrap dough ball in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

FILLING:

2 tablespoons canola oil

1–3 fresh green chili peppers, finely chopped (adjust to spicy preference)

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

4–5 medium potatoes, peeled, boiled, cooled, and cubed

1 tablespoon fresh ginger root, peeled and minced

¾ cup frozen green peas, thawed

1 tablespoon coriander powder

¼ cup fresh coriander (cilantro), finely chopped

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon garam masala

₁
/
₈
cup fresh mint, finely chopped

½ teaspoon salt (adjust to preference)

1 tablespoon anardana powder (dried pomegranate seeds) or amchur powder (dried mango) or lemon juice

½ teaspoon sugar (adjust to preference)

½ teaspoon turmeric powder

¼ cup water

1. In a wok or deep 12-inch skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium-high heat.

2. Add cumin seeds and fennel seeds. When they change color, about 30 seconds, reduce heat to medium.

3. Add onion, ginger, and chilies. Mix well. Sauté until onion is golden brown.

4. Add potatoes and peas. Mix well.

5. Add coriander powder, cumin powder, garam masala, salt, sugar, turmeric, and water. Mix well. Cover and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until water is absorbed.

6. Remove from heat. Stir in fresh coriander, mint, and anardana (or substitution). Cover and let stand for 5 minutes. Uncover and let cool completely, about 20–30 minutes.

ASSEMBLING SAMOSAS
:

1. On a lightly floured surface, knead the pastry dough 3–5 minutes. Divide dough into 8 equal portions. Work with 1 at a time.

2. Roll portion into 6-inch circle. Cut into 2 half-moons. Arrange with straight edges closest to you.

3. Spoon 2 tablespoons of filling onto the center.

4. Fold left and right corners over to form a cone.

5. Tuck the top flap inside, like an envelope. Samosa should resemble an inverted pyramid.

6. Seal flap carefully using a little water. (Note: Contents will leak into the oil if the flap isn’t sealed completely.)

7. Place on floured plate to prevent sticking.

8. Repeat steps 2–7 for remaining dough.

COOKING SAMOSAS
:

1 cup canola oil for deep-frying

1. Heat oil in a wok or deep 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Carefully lower 4 samosas into the oil. Turn frequently until light golden brown.

2. Remove with slotted spoon. Drain on paper towels. Serve with chutney.*

Mint-Cilantro Chutney

2 CUPS

2 cups fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped

1 fresh green chili pepper, finely chopped (adjust to preference)

1 cup fresh mint, chopped

½ cup yellow onion, finely chopped

1½ teaspoons sugar (adjust to taste)

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

¾ teaspoon salt (adjust to taste)

1 teaspoon fresh ginger root, peeled and finely chopped

¼ cup lime juice

¼ cup water

1. In a blender or food processor, purée all ingredients until smooth. Pour into a bowl.

2. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Tamarind Chutney

1½
CUPS

¹
/
₃
cup tamarind

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (adjust to preference)

1 cup boiling water

1 teaspoon fresh ginger root, peeled and chopped

½ teaspoon salt (adjust to preference)

¾ cup jaggery or packed brown sugar

2 tablespoons fresh coriander (cilantro), finely chopped

1. In a small glass bowl, soak tamarind in boiling water until soft, approximately 10–15 minutes. Mash through a wire strainer. Reserve pulp and juices. Discard solids.

2. In a blender or food processor, combine all ingredients except fresh coriander. Purée until smooth. Pour into bowl.

3. Stir in fresh coriander. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.*

* Saroj’s Tips:

Samosas are best fresh but can be preassembled and frozen, then fried straight from the freezer, no defrosting necessary.

Chutney is best fresh, but can be refrigerated up to 2 days.

Uma Basu McGuiness: The Mother of a Hundred Daughters

R
ed is the color of love. Of passion. Of rage.

Red is the color of an Indian bride’s
sari
.
Sindoor
in the part of her hair when married. Blood when she fails to conceive.

Red is the color I see when I think of my mother. Red, red, red…

E
veryone believed
Ma
was mad, myself included. Even before The Unspeakable, signs that Something Was Not Right swirled like ever-present dust motes in the musty air of the Ballygunge house in South Calcutta where our large joint family resided.

Smaller signs we ignored, dismissed as we might a breeze that snuffs out the
prodeep
’s sacred flame and plunges a room into inauspicious darkness. But the bigger signs haunted our days and nights, as unshakable as horoscope predictions.

First we struggled to conceal, then to contain, and finally to survive, for no secret, not even the tiniest, remains secret for long in Calcutta’s Bengali community. And no one, not even the wealthiest family, can escape destiny.

N
ext semester, my research sabbatical begins, and I em-bark on a voyage of discovery to fulfill a longtime goal, professional and personal: translating my mother’s journals and poetry from Bengali to English. I want to preserve the enormous wealth of Bengali literature, to record new voices and recover lost ones, especially women’s. I want Bengali writing accessible outside Bengal as it once was—Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature after
Gitanjali
was translated into English by W. B. Yeats. I hope my experience proves enriching, cathartic. Right now, it’s merely daunting.

M
y mother was highly creative. She painted, wrote poetry, narrated fabulous stories, danced, and sang with the voice of a goddess. As the daughter of a wealthy
zamindar
—landowner—it was out of the question for her to pursue any of these talents professionally, something respectable women didn’t do. But she performed for her family and guests who came to dinner at the family home. After marriage, once settled in her
sasur-baari
—father-in-law’s house—she encouraged (or should I say
coerced
?) all of us children to put on skits, sing, and dance to Tagore’s plays and songs.

From family lore, we learned
Baba,
who also sang quite well, married
Ma
for her beautiful voice. After hearing her, he didn’t want to marry anyone else. He pleaded with
Thakurda
—my paternal grandfather—to do whatever it took to convince
Ma
’s father to accept their proposal.
Ma
had numerous interested parties, and
Baba
was afraid, with such stiff competition, he would lose out to one of them. Later,
Thakurma
—my paternal grandmother—said
Ma
cast a spell on everyone when she sang at the bride-viewing. She didn’t mean this nicely.

In
Ma
’s journals, she confessed though
Baba
wasn’t her first choice, she didn’t object to him when her father asked, so their match was fixed. Later, she lamented her lapse for not speaking up when she had the chance, for not voicing a single reservation, such as the smell of his hair oil, which grew to repulse her.

She wrote about her everyday life. Bargaining for
saris
. Lizards whose tails still wiggled after being severed from the rest of the body. Bolts on doors and bars on windows to “lock thieves out, and women in.” Wanting to march in a rally and not being allowed. Accidentally burning the rice. Deliberately spoiling a favored dish. Modest praise and stern reprimands. Massaging babies with mustard oil. Power cuts at inopportune times. Loneliness in a crowded house. Fantasies about film stars and cricket players. Women’s gossip, embellishments, deceptions. The escape of novels. Pleasure at possessing skills—reading, writing, singing—her mother-in-law didn’t.

These things are not so difficult to translate. Others…I cannot imagine coming out of her mouth, not the
Ma
I knew.

I remember her voice was always sweet, whether singing or speaking. Even when she cried, it sounded like a bittersweet melody.
Ma
claimed this was because of the honey
Thakurma
gave her during the welcome ceremony when she and
Baba
first arrived home as newlyweds.
Thakurma
put a little honey on
Ma
’s tongue and dabbed a drop in each of her ears so that
Ma
should always speak sweetly and hear sweet things in her
sasur-baari
. “It worked,”
Ma
told us, we who were too young to know any better.

The voice in
Ma
’s writing is her authentic one—the voice imprisoned in the body of a Bengali woman in the mid-twentieth century. The spirit I hope to set free.

M
y mother died far too young, when I was twelve. As to how…For that, I must back up a year to when I was eleven.

My parents had five daughters then. The firstborn was fair and ugly. The second was dark and lovely. I was in the middle, too tall, but otherwise unremarkable in all-important aesthetics. Finally after me, the goddess Parvati granted the most desirable female combination: two girls both fair and lovely. But by then it was too late.

Everyone knew three girls was triple unlucky, but
five
girls?
Five
dowries? And not a single penis to light the funeral pyre? That wasn’t just unlucky. That was
cursed
.

In traditional Indian culture, daughters are a liability, raised to be given away to another family. Sons are an asset, retained to support the family. And for Hindus, only sons can perform the parents’ last rites. A common Indian blessing is:
May you be the mother of a hundred sons.

“That poor man,” people said about my father. “His wife can’t bear sons.” From shopkeepers to socialites, illiterate servants to
babus
in suits and boots, tongues wagged.

In the evenings, when we piled into
Baba
’s Ambassador and drove to Victoria Memorial for our family outings at the lush gardens, we felt the weight of people’s gazes, heard whispers, sometimes snickers when
Baba
went across to the Maidan (think: New York’s Central Park, with litter) to buy rolls,
jhaal muri,
or
phuchkas
from a vendor’s stall.
Baba
was a well-known man. We were a well-known family.

When shopping on Chowringhee or Park Street or playing outside with siblings, cousins, or girlfriends from our
paara
—neighborhood—I overheard the speculations about my mother’s condition.

“You can hear her wailing at night. You must have heard.”

“I thought it was a stray cat or a baby crying.”

“No, it’s her. They say she’s mad. They’ve locked her away.”

“I heard she has a mysterious disease.”

“A disease? Is it contagious?”

No one knew for sure. They only knew Something Was Not Right.

We knew it, too. For as long as I can remember,
Ma
suffered from an illness no doctor could diagnose, let alone cure, that periodically confined her to bed for days, weeks, and sometimes months. During this time, she struggled to eat or bathe, even with assistance.

Sometimes,
Thakurma
didn’t so much mind having her daughter-in-law indisposed. With
Ma
out of the way,
Thakurma
could wait on
Baba,
her favorite son, as she’d done all his unmarried life, taking great pleasure in such simple expressions of affection as fanning him with a hand-fan while he ate.

But at other times,
Thakurma
grew skeptical and accused
Ma
of faking her ailment. “Why does she suddenly fall ill on gray, overcast days? After giving birth, why does it take her so long to recover? She’s lazy. That’s what she is.” Or, “She’s ashamed. She cannot face the humiliation of not bearing sons.”

On occasion, even my father, who doted on his daughters, buckled under society’s pressure and lashed out at my mother.

Thakurda
intervened. He was the only one who could, who held the power. Though as a general rule, he steered clear of household squabbles,
Thakurda
had a soft spot for his
bouma
—daughter-in-law—who dutifully massaged his feet, plucked his gray hairs, and read aloud to him for hours if he so desired. “
Bouma
would never do this on purpose,”
Thakurda
said in
Ma
’s defense. “It’s not her nature.”

Thakurma
may not have agreed, for she had witnessed many of
Ma
’s erratic moodswings, but she held her tongue.
Thakurda
had spoken, and no one could contradict him, certainly not a self-respecting wife. To do so would be undignified. As for
Baba,
his duty as a good son meant he obeyed his parents.

“Shuncho?” Thakurma
called to
Thakurda
one hot afternoon. (Neither she nor
Ma
addressed her husband by name, but by this expression that translates:
Are you listening to me?
)
Thakurma
handed
Thakurda
a tumbler of cold lime water and mused about my again-bedridden mother, “She must be cursed. There is no other explanation.”

Thakurda
didn’t so much as glance up from the crossword puzzle in the
Statesman,
his daily newspaper, but over time, the notion of a curse seized
Thakurma
. One day, she whisked
Ma
away to consult a highly respected guru who confirmed her suspicions: Indeed, my mother had been cursed by the evil eye in a previous life. The blessing, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons” was inverted to: “May you be the mother of a hundred daughters.”

To remove the curse, they had to perform various rituals. Among other things, my mother had to wear certain charms, fast, and make offerings at the Kalighat temple.

She followed the instructions to the letter, and with her next pregnancy, she grew so huge, everyone felt certain at long last, she carried the family heir. Suddenly, she was treated like a queen, instead of head servant.
Thakurma
pampered her and jumped to do her bidding.
Thakurma
felt vindicated her diagnosis of the problem had proven correct. The ring of keys she wore on her
palloo
—the long end of her
sari—
jingled as she walked with an extra bounce in every step, and she hummed as she rubbed
Ma
’s swollen feet with mustard oil.

As with all her previous deliveries, in
Ma
’s last trimester, she packed her suitcases and went to
Dadu
and
Dida
’s—my maternal grandparents’—house to have the baby.

I remember all of us standing on the veranda and running across the lawn to see her off. I remember
Ma
waving good-bye from
Baba
’s Ambassador. The
palloo
of her
taant
—Bengali
sari
—modestly covering her head. The
loha
—iron bangle—on her slim wrist. The newfound happiness on her round face. The hope in her eyes. The relief as she settled back, and the Ambassador drove off.

That was the last time I saw my mother.

After giving birth to twin girls, she selected one of her favorite
taants,
tied it to the ceiling fan, and hanged herself.

I
n grad school at Boston College, Colleen—then my best American friend, now my sister-in-law—asked if I blamed my parents, if I was angry with them. I told her no and no.

I lied.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t struggle with anger. A constant battle. One I like to think I’m winning, but there’s always the next round. Ask me then and my answer may change.

One’s demons don’t really go away. Have you noticed? They live, thrive in the shadows. Multiply if you let them, if you don’t learn to diffuse their power, control them so they don’t breed like the lower classes, don’t overcome you, control you. Turn your heart to ice, or to fire. Destroy you. And others.

Patrick taught me this. He would know. He returned from Vietnam an expert on demons.

I tell myself
of course
I wish it could have been different with my parents. How could I not? But my parents were products of their times, their culture, as each of us is. I cannot blame them for what happened. That’s what I tell myself. Most of the time, it works. Most of the time, but not always.

When intellect fails, Patrick takes me downstairs to our basement where the cinder-block walls contain a person’s howls. He holds the punching bag, and I release my fury. Release the animal inside me, the animal a good Hindu wife—a
proper
woman—isn’t supposed to have, let alone acknowledge. The animal whose existence I denied, until my husband called me on it.

“You aren’t sucking it up,” Patrick said. “You’re sucking it in.” He showed me the difference. Showed me what I could do, the ways of the warrior—the caste into which I was born—as he was shown by his fellow war veterans, his band of brothers and sisters.

In the basement, I hit and kick, scream and cry. I curse. If you saw me, you would think I had lost my mind, and you would be right. But I will let you in on a little secret, a paradox I believe my mother knew: Sometimes one must go insane, dance cheek-to-cheek with one’s demons, in order to slay them, to
regain
one’s sanity. This is the wisdom my husband gave me. Now, I’m giving it to you.

Uma’s Shorshe Salmon Maachh (Grilled Salmon with Spicy Mustard Glaze)

SERVES 4