Category Archives: writing

More Home Truths About Food

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In fact, it wasn’t just rice and lentils and vegetables and yogurt on the table growing up.  My mom is an excellent cook.  In the early days of immigration, there were lots of parties, and lots of food.  My mom made snacks and sweets, and specialties from all over South Asia.  Home cooks, my mother and her friends knew how to cook for the family and cook to impress, and traded ingenious ways to coax delicacies using Pillsbury products and Bisquix, in addition to what could be found from a trip to the Indian grocery store, hours away.  This supplemented the foods my grandmother had prepared and paxcked in her suitcase, and later sent through friends.  Savories like dried salted mango, homemade mango pickles, ready to fry pappadum.  

My mom would use a hand held brass press to shape chickpea batter into hot oil where the complicated shapes would bubble up and solidify into preztels.  There were pounds of carrots grated into halvah: that was my job, to grate the carrots.  I helped shape  the dough to transform into sugar soaked badushas and rasagullas, though my shapes were never as good as my mom’s.   Her hands steady, the same fingers that made perfect rounds to fry into sweets also made dresses for me, and my dolls, not to mention the slipcovers and  curtains. She had a BSc in Chemistry and Biology from india,and though her life centered around the house and us, she gave us dreams to leave and circle back.

She is in her eighties now, and doesn’t cook as much as she used to, and why should she, but she did make badushas for my niece to celebrate going to college.  And I made a hot-milk vanilla cake,decorated it with rose petals and lavender, and put it on instagram.  Unlike the beauty of the photo, the cake was less than great.  I had over beaten the batter, and a rubbery streak ran through it when I finally cut into it.

Now I have eggplants sizzling in ot oil, stuffed with amixture of coconut and spice.  Sounds good, right, if you like those ingredients.  The result won’t be instagram perfect. but I’ll let you know how it turned out.  I used Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe from her beautifully illustrated World of East Vegetarian Cooking. 

And this video in Telegu uses a different recipe but fun to watch:

https://youtu.be/ZyEQPiQvUHo

My brinjal came out okay. Like anything, these things take practice. And fall is always energizing.

 

Every Day the Hummingbird

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Most every day this summer, a hummingbird visits the balcony, sometimes twice, sipping from the salvias. It has a tweet that I’ve learned to distinguish. Often, after sipping, it will hover in front of the window, as if to say hello, or perhaps see if there is more food available within. this never fails to delight. The cats, though, watch without interest, which interests me. The thrum of its wings, that distinct sound of a wooden chair scraping a wooden floor, or a distint helicopter lets me know it is near. Here, it comes again.

Indira Ganesan, Hummingbird Visit, 2019

A call from the Earth who calls when we cannot or will not hear

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Indira Ganesan, droplets, June 2019

Two things happened this last week that moved me considerably, the week that is that is not defined by Julian.  First, Toni Morrison passed, transitioned as Nikki Giovanni said in an interview with the BBC, and our hearts, those of us who not only adored her work, but looked to her for guidance, spilled open.  She transitioned, said Nikki Giovanni, and she is still with us.  Toni Morrison not only gave us story after story which blossomed into poetry but clearly, strongly, spoke out against, because she recognized it for what it was, and how persuasive it is, the horror of white supremacy.  

And Jorie Graham came to speak at the local arts center in Provincetown.  She spoke and read, and made the world stand still for an instant as we listened to poetry.  Like Toni Morrison, Jorie Graham looks at life in its face, and does not turn away.  She does not serve it to us neat on a plate with a platitude about how things will get better.  Her poems, incantations of sense and sensibility, are like clear drops of water steadily dripping onto a plate that we did not know needed to be filled.

Poetry moves us, and it moves us best when we forget about ourselves, and pay attention to something much bigger. I have not learned this completely, but remember, when I read, and when I write in moments of stillness, broken by a horse’s neigh, the passing truck, the invisible breath of my cat asleep on the desk.  Something tumbles down now, the cat shifts and sighs, and the horse cries again.