Memoirs with Asian flavors seem to appeal to me the most, and understandably so, since I am a full bred Asian, and will be forever Asian at heart. I recently finished my reading of Monsoon Diary, by Shoba Narayan. Let me just say that I can see how she is a recipient of the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. I really dig her writing style.
Being Asian though, I felt myself yearning for her times in India as she transported me with her to the United States where she ran into a fellow South Indian who gave her a much missed South Indian meal. The difference in the two environments was starkly apparent. I was the one who missed the scent of freshly bloomed night jasmine in Narayan’s yard, the clinking of cow bells, belching buses, the rainbow of sari-donning Indian women, the “Kuppa!” calls of Natesan, the garbage man, the breathtaking performance of Chinnapan, the din and bustle at the train station, not to mention the happenings in the journey itself, the aromatic smells coming from tiffin carriers, and the sharp tongued Nalla-Ma.
There was one glaring mistake I came across in her book though; Allahu Akbar translated as God is Good. Allahu Akbar is usually translated as God is Great, and I have to say that this should have been double checked. I wonder how many Muslims have read this book.
Other than that, I really love her narrative. In my previous post, I mentioned Teh tarik, which is as much performance as it is a hot beverage, usually attributed to the Indians in Malaysia. In Narayan’s recounting of her childhood, she writes about her father’s morning indulgence in coffee, in which she describes her father’s skilled act of pouring the coffee from one cup to another by raising one cup high above his head and keeping the other by his hip, done several times to produce a frothy cup of ‘processed’ coffee. The metaphoric stretching and pulling of the coffee from cup to cup is very much like the performance of Teh Tarik sellers in Malaysia. In my recent googling on Youtube, I even came across Malay youths taking these performances a step further by adding music and dance steps to the pouring act, which I personally deem quite distasteful.
In the course of reading the book, my mind kept wandering away to dwell on issues such as religion and culture. I have always been aware that we, the Malays have inherited a lot of the Hindu culture, one of which is the act of feeding one’s new spouse during the wedding. Before Islam arrived in the Malay Peninsula, Hindu was the reigning empire, and thus it’s really not surprising that some remnants of the culture is still present in the Malay culture. In her book, Narayan tells of the pressing dilemma she faced at her wedding reception when she was expected to feed her new husband. Not wanting to have rasam rice dripping all over his face, she ingeniously tipped a tumbler containing panagam to his lips instead. In the Malay culture, both the husband and wife would feed each other a fingerful of rice. No dripping rasam, but the same act nonetheless.
Tiffin carriers. Ahh…now I know what my mother was talking about. I’ve had my fair share of tiffin carriers. When I was in boarding school, my father and stepmother would pay me a visit on some weekends. On most visits, they would bring with them home-cooked food for lunch, that we usually ate in the school canteen, where other parents were seated with their sons or daughters, also enjoying their food. My stepmother’s cooking were deliciously packed in stainless steel tiffins. And together, we would have our lunch, freshly made at home, served in the tiffin carriers. How can I not remember those stainless containers stacked atop each other, clicked and held shut by the the U-shaped handle, when it was my source of weekend good eats throughout my five years in boarding school? I now know what a tiffin carrier is. I have known it all along. I just didn’t know what it was called. I just knew it provided me with good home-cooked food. And that was more than enough information for me back then.
My parallel reading of Curry, shed some light on the Hindu concept of purity. Narayan writes about how her mother designated special cups or plates from which their many ‘visitors’ such as the flower woman and Ayah would eat from. I now recall a custom some Malays still practice, or used to practice, of not allowing a woman in her menses to eat together with the rest of the family. This is, for the record, an unIslamic practice, lest people think it’s Islamic, but it may very well be again, the remnants of the Hindu culture that we have adopted into our culture.
Indian women and gold. Narayan mentions the love and weakness for gold in Indian women. I can say the same for Malay women. Especially the more traditional ones. Malays are quite fond of gold. Even infant girls are adorned with light gold bangles, and sometimes tinkling anklets. In fact, I have in my room, my daughter’s gold bangles, and I believe, mine too. I remember being summoned to my father’s room just a few nights before Eid every year. In boarding school, we were not allowed to sport jewelry, and I doubt very much that my parents would have allowed me to sport jewelry on a daily basis anyway. But on special occasions such as Eid, even at the age of seventeen, my father made the tradition of adorning me with gold jewelry each time. Out came the gold bracelets, necklaces with fat heart-shaped pendant, rings, and earrings. I would dutifully put them on, or rather, stand still as my stepmother clasped them on my person. And a tinkling I would go back to my room, bejeweled from head to toe, ready for Eid.
Nevertheless, despite the annual tradition of being ‘gilded’ for Eid, I fail to have a love or weakness for jewelry, with the exception of earrings, which I still don’t sport to this day because of logistics. For some reason, I think of jewelry as gaudy and glaring, though I remember loving how the anklets would tinkle merrily everytime I took a step. However such is my indifference to jewelry that I inadvertently lost my grandmother’s ring that she had passed down to me. That, and a necklace and bracelets, which I had left in my room, unlocked when we went away for vacation. The naive me didn’t think or expect our live-in maid to scoop those valuables and run away, never to return. Ahh…the drama of maids in Malaysia. We’ve had a lot of those too.
One thing I realized from all this reading of Indian cuisine and history, is that, Indian cuisine seems to have gone through a lot of evolution in and outside of India. We were recently invited to an Indian home-cooked dinner, consisting of raita, white rice, keema, and puri, which I was completely in awe of as I watched them puff up in the hot oil. Like I said, I was completely overtaken by the ‘magic’ of puri making, and I found myself looking on with the fascination of a child. Over a recent conversation with a fellow Malaysian, I found out that I have not been privy to the presence of Puri in Malaysia in all my years of growing up there. I have never heard of Puri before in my life, but apparently, some Malaysians even make Puri in their homes!
The cuisine of India has undergone worldwide evolution and adaptations along with Indian migrations. Roti canai, I now believe, is a Malaysian creation, for I can’t find it in any of Indian bread recipes. My mother, in a comment in a previous post, said that Nasi Kandar, is also a Malaysian creation, usually sold by Muslim Indians in the northern state, particularly Penang. I feel like I have come full circle in understanding Indian food. When I first encountered Indian food in the United States, I felt compelled to tell the Indians of the Indian food we have back home, but even in my ignorance, I had a feeling that some food such as roti canai sounded unfamiliar to them. The most similar food item we could find to roti canai here is Paratha, but the method of making roti canai is still uniquely Malaysian. In Lizzie Collingham’s book, Curry, she also writes of how the Indian cuisine have been undergoing globalization, such that what people claim to be Indian food in other parts of the world, is completely unrecognizable as Indian food to Indians in the subcontinent. I remember now the curry made by a sister from Jamaica. It is nothing like the curry we make back home in Malaysia, but then again, the curry we make in Malaysia is probably also quite different from the authentic Indian curries made in India. As Indians migrate away from India yet continue to cook their food in different countries and environments, the limiting factors such as availability of ingredients and pleasing foreign palates, have forced them to make some improvisations to the original recipes, thus producing ‘outside India’ versions of Indian food.
