Gaiety hung over the room. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling twinkled back from the gleaming stainless-steel plates set on the worn dining table, mirroring my delight at being home in Delhi, with my husband, for the first time since our move to America two years before. Eight of us were crowded around the table for dinner; my parents, grandfather, two younger sisters and a brother, and us. Stainless steel cooking utensils filled to the brim jostled for space on the chipped laminate as my mother brought in the pot of rice from the kitchen, and the familiar musty fragrance of freshly cooked rice made my stomach growl. I didn’t know where to start, the cabbage studded with peas and fresh grated coconut, or the soupy dal with black mustard seeds and chopped coriander leaves winking from its surface. I felt my mother lean against my chair and then her hand on my head and I turned around. Her dark eyes smiled and appraised, gauging how two years in a foreign country had changed me, her oldest daughter, her first born. I felt a knot inside me untangling, the familiar bickering of my siblings, the irresistible odors of a simple meal at home letting my shoulders move away from my ears for the first time in months.
There was no flatware on the table except for the serving utensils- a ladle for the dal, a flat scoop for the rice; our family, like other South Indian families ate with our fingers, using our right hand only, the “clean” hand. Adept at scooping up food with my fingers, I ate eagerly, my mother’s cooking filling the hole of homesickness that had grown larger each day in the two years I had been away. A mound of rice was piled in the middle of my plate, the grains clinging together and easily shaped into rough balls that I pulled through the cabbage first and the dal next, shreds of coconut sweet on the tongue, the rice and dal an inseparable amalgam in the mouth.
As I reached for another serving, I noticed that my husband, D, had barely made a dent in his food.
“Don’t you like it”, I whispered to him?
“I need a spoon,” he whispered back, the curve of his mouth settling downwards.
D was a Sindhi, not a South Indian, and his family had migrated from Karachi in Southeastern Pakistan to Delhi in Northern India, during the violent partition of India set in motion by the British in 1947. We had met in high school, dated through medical school, and eventually married. This dinner was one of the first meals my husband had eaten with my family and the cultural differences between our families was unhappily apparent. Rice and other mushy foods were always eaten with a spoon in D’s home. My family had retained our South Indian custom of eating with our hands even though we had lived in Delhi for decades.
I got up to fetch a spoon for him from the kitchen, and my mother watched quietly. My mother never forgot to set a spoon by his plate after this dinner.
I grew up in Delhi, the heart of North India, where my Southern Indian family had moved for my father’s work. The school D and I attended, Delhi Public School, was a private school, but true to India’s colonial British lingo, was called a public school. Most of the students in my school were Northern Indian, as also my friends in my class. We ate lunch at our desks most days, opening up our metal or plastic containers for each other’s inspection. Sharing our lunches became a mark of friendship and a window into what other families ate.
Manju was a close friend of mine and her mother made fresh hot rotis for her lunch each morning. She wrapped them in squares of newspaper to keep them soft. By lunchtime, the paper was soggy, and sometimes even left newsprint on the pale surface of the roti. A faint wood pulp smell of the paper sometimes permeated the roti, which made it easy to recognize Manju’s lunch with my eyes closed.
My mother too had learnt to make rotis after her decades of living in Delhi, and she believed that the whole wheat flour used in their making was more nutritious than rice, with more staying power for a long day of school. So, my lunch box too contained pan-fried rotis, folded into a triangle, soft even after several hours in a metal lunch box, and smelling only of the clarified butter and oil mixture my mother used for cooking.
It was the vegetables— cauliflower or cabbage in the winter, okra or squashes in the summer—that spoke eloquently of the different styles of cooking in Northern versus Southern households. The smell of onions and garlic and coriander powder drifted irresistibly from the lunch boxes of my classmates, while my own was so plain by comparison, the vegetables seasoned simply with mustard or cumin seeds and a sprinkling of fresh coriander leaves; most South Indian cooks use garlic and onion only sparingly as these aromatics are not considered conducive to maintaining balance in the body.
When rice made it into our lunch boxes, my friends brought pulao—long grains of Basmati rice cooked with vegetables and spices, the heady aroma of the rice and its accompaniments wafting through the classroom, the contents of the lunch boxes still delicious after their hours in a desk, at room temperature. My own lunch box usually had short grain rice congealed together with dal of one sort or another, and as my mother did not frequently use onion and garlic to season her cooking food, it lacked the aroma I found so enticing.
Spurning the familiar is a habit that creeps up on one. Sharing my friend’s lunches or being invited to meals in their homes made me start thinking of Basmati rice as the only one to covet. Its distinct aroma and long grains stay discrete and well defined from their brethren when cooked with the correct proportion of raw rice to water – a cup of raw rice cooked in 11/2 – 1 2/3 cups of water; no less, no more. Of course, there is also the matter of timing; the rice and water mix are brought to a boil, then turned down to a bare simmer, the pot then covered tightly and the timer set for 20 minutes, and voila- a perfect pot of rice each time.
Short grained varieties of rice, conversely, cling together, irrespective of the ratio of raw rice to water used to cook them; too little water makes the grains crunchy but still huddled together, while too much water renders the grains soft and easily mashed between gums or teeth, the moist texture is ideal for both toothless young babies and the edentulous old.
“Why don’t you use Basmati rice?” I questioned my mother one evening, as she scurried around the kitchen to get dinner ready.
“Because our ration card doesn’t allow us to buy Basmati, “she said crossly. During my childhood, the government had issued ration cards to prevent hoarding and each family was allotted a certain amount of staples – rice, flour, cooking oil, sugar, pulses – sold at a reasonable price. Basmati rice was a luxury good that had to be bought at whatever the shopkeeper wanted to sell it for. The shorter grained varieties, less expensive than Basmati, were covered by the ration card
My mother’s remark was a half-truth, and one I only recognized some months later. One night at dinner, the pot of rice smelt different and looked different. On my plate, it was difficult to clump it into balls to eat with the vegetables and the soupy sambar, the grains refusing to acquiesce to or coalesce with the other elements of my meal.
I looked at my mother.
“It’s Basmati,” she said. “Do you see why I don’t use it?”
I fretted over the disappointing Basmati for the next several days, and eventually came to recognize that the seductive rice pulaos in my friend’s lunch boxes owed their taste to the large amount of ghee and the spices that were used to make the pulao. In Northern Indian homes, wheat is the staple grain, not rice. My friend’s homes served wheat flour breads in various guises – simple rotis made of nothing more than a dough of flour and water, parathas where the roti was pan-fried, and deep fried puffy pooris. Rice made only an occasional entrance, as a rich pulao for a special meal, or Sunday lunch where a soupy dal or kadhi – buttermilk soup with chick pea fritters – was on the menu. At one such Sunday lunch in Manju’s home, her mother served kadhi over Basmati rice, and as I ate, I realized it would be better with the rice my mother made.
It took moving continents and the necessity to cook for myself and my family, before I recognized the skill it took to render plainly seasoned food delicious. The flavors were layered and deceptively simple, each element adding to the whole. Rasam without rice is a shadow of itself. And rice that allows the dal and sambhar to melt into itself- that is a true delicacy.
Eating with one’s hands takes practice. Watching someone do it requires a willingness to suspend judgement that eschewing the use of spoons and forks reflects uncivility or a lack of culture. Despite knowing my husband for over 7 years before we married, it was not until we started to eat regularly at each other’s homes that it became an issue.
“I don’t like watching your family eat,” he declared after one meal, as we settled in for afternoon naps.
“Why?” I said, already gearing up for an argument.
“It’s gross, licking your fingers, the liquid running down over your hand.”
I was at a loss for a response. What D said was factually correct – eating with one’s hands did require licking off the juices that lingered on one’s fingers, but everything tasted so much better when you could savor it till the last drop. Rice eating cultures in India, such as in Southern India and in Bengali homes, and even in parts of the Middle East, Africa and South America, use their hands preferably to eat. Spoons are offered to guests but eating with your hands admits you into the family immediately.
Rotis were the staple in Ds family, appearing at every meal, but there was always rice as well, unlike Punjabi households where rice was an occasional option. So, it was not that D or his family never ate with their hands. Rotis were always torn into pieces with fingers to scoop up bites of vegetables or other accompaniments. His proscription was only for mushy or liquid foods such as dal and rice, which are unquestionably a messy delight when fingers or hands are used to transport them from plate or bowl into the mouth.
Spoons and forks are now a part of most meals in my life in Philadelphia, except for rotis which we still use our fingers for. On our trips to India to visit family, I use spoons when I share meals with my in-laws; forks are rarely used in Indian households for any foods. In my mother’s home, I continue to eat with my fingers, and have taught my children how to use their fingertips to shape rice into balls, sweep it through the other components of the meal, and drop it into one’s mouth without letting a single grain of rice escape.
I find myself still needing to use my fingers to savor South Indian foods fully, the sambar and rice needing the oils from my fingers to taste just right.
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