¼ cup coconut oil
a few curry leaves
salt to taste
For Paste
½ coconut
6 to 7 green chiles
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
Grind together the coconut, green chiles, and cumin seeds to make a fine paste, adding very little water while grinding. Mix the curd with the ground paste and keep aside. Peel and chop all the vegetables and cook separately with a little water. Mix all the cooked vegetables and salt and turmeric powder. Add the paste to the vegetables and heat through-take care to prevent curdling. Remove from heat and add coconut oil and curry leaves, and mix well. Serve hot with rice.
Thatha and His Merry Women
Thatha was not supposed to have married Ammamma in the first place. It had happened by accident. Thatha had gone to Ammamma’s village with his parents to see Ammamma’s cousin and arrange a marriage with her.
“But I saw her,” Thatha said, “and I wanted to marry her only. What did I know? I was just fifteen.”
“My father agreed to the proposal immediately,” Ammamma would say, giggling as if she were indeed thirteen years old and a blushing bride. “Ratna, (the poor cousin), didn’t speak to me for five years after that. But she got married, too, and her husband… He is a doctor, owns his own clinic in Vaisakh. What luck, enh?”
I was never sure if the story indicated that Thatha and Ammamma were pleased about being married to each other or if Thatha felt he had been too young to have made the right decision and Ammamma thought she could have married the doctor if Ratna had married Thatha.
In any case, happiness and love was not the point of their marriage. They had two sons and two daughters and now they were trying to have a son’s son; they were living the righteous life and no one could tell them otherwise.
“Eating pomegranates again?” Ma asked, as soon as Thatha and I entered the hall.
While I had been sneaking around fruit trees with Thatha, the others had done some major damage with the mangoes. Slices of mango were spread out evenly for different purposes. There were thick slices of peeled mangoes in a bucket alongside a big sheet of white muslin cloth. These I assumed were for making another type of mango pickle, maggai.
For maggai, slices of mango covered with turmeric, salt, and oil had to be dried for two days in the hot sun. After they were dry and almost brittle, they were marinated in a mixture of oil and spices. Another set of chopped mangoes languished in colored plastic buckets. The dark pink and yellow buckets were Lata’s, the neon green and light pink ones were Ma’s, the three red ones were Ammamma’s, and the blue one was Neelima’s.
The mangoes used for making avakai still had their skin and stone casing intact. My lips twitched into a smile as I remembered how the remnants of mango pickle lay on discarded plates of food after a meal-the core of the mango stones lay in bloody red oil like dead and mutilated soldiers in a battlefield of yogurt and rice. I used to think it was barbaric, eating the pickle with bare hands, tearing into the fleshy part of the mango that stuck to the core. Now I thought it was exotic, as if from a different culture and therefore tolerable.
“Oh come on, Radha, I am seeing my granddaughter after seven years.” Thatha put his arm around me. “And the pomegranates were ripe, she won’t fall sick.”
My mother smiled to my utter shock. There were perks to seeing my parents once in seven years-everything was easily forgiven, within limits, of course. Wanting to marry an American probably did not fall in the easy to forgive category. I smiled uneasily and Thatha tightened his arm around me.
“So, when are you going to get her married?” he asked as if he could read my mind and I shifted in his grip.
My mother’s smile turned into a pout. “As soon as we find a nice boy… Someone she can’t find anything wrong with. Every boy we sent to her, she doesn’t like. Like they have horns growing out of their heads or something.” She sighed deeply. “Nanna, you have to talk to her now,” she said as if he was her last hope in convincing me to get married. I wasn’t listening to my own father, what made her think I would listen to hers?
Sowmya tucked the edge of her sari around her waist and picked up a bucket filled with thick slices of peeled mango, lying listlessly, squished against each other. Seeing it as a chance to avoid talking about my marriage I picked up the other bucket, which was filled with oil, turmeric, and salt.
“Neelima, can you bring the muslin cloth upstairs?” Sowmya called out when we reached the stairs to go up to the terrace. “So much to be done and Lata and your mother do absolutely nothing. They just sit around giving orders. Must’ve been queens, maharanis, in some past life.”
I grinned. “And they take all the credit for the pachadi.”
Sowmya snorted. “I make better avakai than both of them. You think they would come upstairs and strain their backs a little? Nothing. They will sit downstairs under the fan while we sweat up here.”
On the terrace there was a coconut-straw bed that was used for the purpose of drying mangoes or any other fruit or vegetable that needed to get some sun. And it was a good place to get some sun-heat scorched the cement floor, burning everything in its wake.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch.” Sowmya and I danced on the cement floor as the heat burned our bare feet. We reached the coconut-straw bed next to which tall coconut trees threw some shade on the floor, making it cooler, bearable to touch with the soles of our feet.
“Should’ve worn slippers,” I said. “I’d forgotten how hot it gets.”
“Ah, slippers are for babies,” Sowmya said, laughing. “I don’t know how you can stand the cold in the States. It gets very cold, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged. “In San Francisco I think it’s always cold. But it gets quite hot in the summers in the Bay Area and yes, a little cold, nothing drastic. It doesn’t snow or anything.”
“Why is it always cold in San Francisco?”
“It’s by the bay. Lots of people joke that the coldest winter they endured was a summer in San Francisco.”
“Then why do you live there?” Sowmya asked.
“Because I like the city,” I said. I didn’t tell her that it was Nick who liked the city a lot more than I did. I wouldn’t mind living in the South Bay with the Indian restaurants and Indian movie theaters in arm’s reach. But Nick liked the way he could just walk from our apartment and find a café to get a cup of coffee and a croissant.
“Can’t have tandoori chicken early in the morning,” Nick would say when I would complain about San Francisco, and how I hated to find parking when I got home every day from working in the South Bay, and how wonderful it would be to live close to all those Indian restaurants.
But my bitching and moaning aside, I liked living in San Francisco as well; not as much as Nick, but I certainly liked being able to live amidst the bustle of the city. I liked having an apartment from where I could look at San Francisco and know that I was here, in the U.S., in the land of opportunities. I had worked so hard to get here and nothing said America as clearly to me as standing in the balcony with a cup of coffee looking at the city of San Francisco.
Neelima came upstairs and spread the muslin cloth on the coconut straw bed. We dunked the mangoes in the bucket filled with oil, salt, and turmeric.
It was great fun, just like the olden times when I was a child visiting my grandparents. My hands would smell of turmeric and stay yellow for days. I hadn’t done this for so long and I was stung by the loss. I had lost so much since I had left India and I hadn’t even thought about it. I had become so much a part of America that the small joys of dunking pieces of mango inside gooey paste were forgotten and not even missed.