Monsoon Diary (23 page)

When they came to visit us, Amma’s desire to bring her children the freshest foods was at odds with Appa’s intention to travel light. Amma was used to traveling with an entourage of boxes. Her ancient suitcases were usually filled to the brim with powders, pickles, incense, and snacks for kith and kin. In addition, she filled cardboard cartons with pressure cookers or Sumeet Ultra grinders and contained them with heavy-gauge yellow bungee cords. She didn’t dream about Louis Vuitton duffels; rather, her duffel bags—the largest size available—had long ago lost their shape through the determined insertion of portable
puja
stands and dismantled Indian handicrafts.

The problem was that my mother-in-law couldn’t say no. When any of her nieces or nephews asked for something, she took it upon herself to procure it. Her own clothes and accessories occupied a minuscule portion of her luggage. When I offered to keep a set of her clothes with me so that she needn’t lug them every time she visited, Amma beamed approvingly. “What a great idea,” she said. “That will free up more space for gifts.”

The same thing happened when she went back to India. As an aging baby boomer, she took back battery-operated cardiac monitors, multivitamin tablets, fat-free salad dressing of various flavors, energy-boosting granola bars bought in bulk from Price Club, and as much cholesterol-reducing oat cereals as she could stuff into a suitcase.

When my father-in-law protested, she said, “It looks like a lot, but by the time we distribute everything to friends and family, there will be nothing left.”

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW WAS one of five sisters, and every time I saw the sisters together, I envied their closeness. They finished one another’s sentences and fed one another fruits; they let their hair down and loosened their saris; they laughed over childhood jokes and giggled over shared secrets; they relaxed and gained strength from each other. They were all fond of their only brother, Mani.

Perhaps as a result of their closeness, their children too were more like brothers and sisters than cousins. Ram had dozens of cousins, and they all loved to get together, dress up, eat, drink, and party until late at night. In many ways they seemed more like a boisterous Punjabi family than a sedate Tamilian one.

Gatherings in Ram’s family centered around food. My mother-in-law had a keen sense of hospitality and thought nothing of entertaining large groups of houseguests. While I complained about being stuck in the kitchen when a mere two guests showed up, she loved nothing better than staying by the hot, smoking stove and making batch after batch of hot
puris
or
dosas
for appreciative guests. She liked to have twenty dishes on the table for every meal. “Every inch of the table should be covered with food,” she would say as she lined up pickles, chips, chocolates, and
namkeens
(snacks) along with the regular meal. She went out of her way to cook each guest’s favorite foods, and would press food and drink on friends from arrival to departure.

Perhaps all mothers love to feed people, but Amma approached it with the steely determination of a lawyer looking for loopholes. Indians expect to be force-fed when they visit other homes, and they relish the attention. In fact, Indians of my grandmother’s generation think it rude and walk away in a huff if the host doesn’t entreat them to eat, eat, and eat some more. Americans, however, are not used to this persistence, and certainly my friend Lisa, a formal New England WASP with coiffed blond hair and a careful smile, was ill prepared for what lay in store for her when she came to our home to visit.

All was well in the beginning. Pleasantries were exchanged, my in-laws thanked Lisa for the lovely bouquet of flowers she’d brought. They asked about her job as an attorney, and she asked about their long journey from India. Twenty minutes later Lisa shifted in her chair, preparing to depart.

“How about some lunch?” Amma asked brightly. It was eleven o’clock. “I’ve made some potato stew. Shoba’s favorite.”

“No, thank you,” Lisa replied in the tone of voice people use when they expect to end a conversation.

“Why not?” Amma asked.

Lisa looked a little surprised. Still, she managed a small smile. “I have to go to the gym,” she said.

“But you are not fat,” Amma said.

“No,” Lisa agreed. “Thank you,” she said. “But I still need to exercise.”

It was Amma’s turn to look surprised. She surveyed Lisa curiously, trying to decipher what it was that made this American woman so determined to exercise, given her tiny girth. A moment later she shrugged philosophically. After all, she liked to exercise too. But she also loved to eat.

“Well, have some lunch then,” Amma continued. “It will give you the strength to exercise.”

“Oh, no. Thank you, but I really am not hungry.” Lisa tried another tack.

“What did you have for breakfast?” Amma asked.

“Breakfast?” Lisa parroted. “I had some toast and orange juice.”

“That’s it? A young girl like you? You should be eating a proper breakfast. Well, at least I can give you a proper lunch.”

“I’m not sure I can manage a proper lunch,” Lisa said.

“Why? You don’t like Indian food?” Amma asked, eyes narrowed.

“Oh, no,” Lisa protested. “I love Indian food.”

“Is it the spices, then?” Amma asked. “Are you allergic to spices?”

Lisa’s eyes took on a slightly hunted look. She was an attorney and was experiencing, for the first time, the feeling of being put on the stand. “No, I’m not . . .”

“Well, then, it’s settled. You are going to have lunch with us,” Amma announced victoriously.

Lisa, too dazed to protest anymore, merely nodded acquiescence.

TWO WEEKS AFTER my in-laws arrived, the whole family decided to get together at my sister-in-law’s place for Thanksgiving. It was cold in the Northeast, and Florida would be gloriously warm. We were a group of Indians gathering to give thanks to America for its bounty. As usual, cousins flew in from all over—California, Michigan, Germany, St. Louis, Long Island, and the four of us from Connecticut.

My sister-in-law Anu and her husband were physicians and ran a private practice together. They lived with their two young children in a large house right on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers.

We arrived at noon to find the house full of people, ranging in age from two to seventy-five. The master bedroom had been taken over by teenage boys playing Nintendo. The two guest bedrooms were covered with sleeping bags, some with people in them. The men had retreated into the library to talk about the stock market, mortgages, cars, and computers. College grads pumped iron in the exercise room; the girls converged in the room of Ram’s niece Nithya, surrounded by clothes, colored gel, and CosmoGIRL! magazines. Only Ram’s nephew Arvind’s room was strikingly empty, since the young boys slavishly followed the older ones everywhere. There were suitcases and clothes all over the house. The kitchen was the domain of the women and the hub of all food-related activity. In front of the house was a minibus that had been rented for the week.

Ram and his sister were very similar. I would stagger in at 8:00 A.M. to find them halfway through their day. Empty coffee cups, rumpled newspapers, sneakers, and the dog’s leash gave testament to their prior activities. Ram and Anu would be talking on the phone (the house must have had seven lines) and walking around in circles like spinning meteors, always in danger of colliding but getting out of each other’s way at the last minute. Ram talked about markets on one line, and his sister called in prescriptions on the other while tending to simmering pots on the stove. My brother-in-law Krishnan, an avid gardener, spent the morning hours amidst his roses and gardenias, two phones to his head as he called the hospital to check on patients and conferred with the nursery about how to protect his hibiscus plants from weevils.

The eating began at dawn and didn’t end until midnight. At sunrise my mother-in-law and her elder sister, whom we all called Komperi (an abbreviation of her name, Koma, and her title, Periamma), went for a walk armed with cloth bags, which they used to collect fallen grapefruit, mangoes, and oranges from the yards of various houses they passed. My sister-in-law constantly admonished them about trespassing on other people’s property and the danger of invisible fences, but they claimed to knock on doors and ask people if they could pick up the fallen fruit.

“At dawn?” Ram asked skeptically.

“You’d be surprised how many old people are up at dawn and watching TV,” my mother-in-law replied.

A few days into the exercise, Amma began carrying a long walking stick with a hook tied to the end. Apparently, one of the homes she frequented during her morning walks had given her permission to pick the fruit off the trees, and she was elated. Soon the family room was filled with fruit—fat mangoes piled up on newspapers in one corner, and in another oranges, lemons, and grapefruit resting in large bins, perfuming the entire house.

Amma and Komperi could not fathom how Floridians could just allow the fruit to fall off the trees and lie on the ground without eating it or using it in some way—to make juice, preserves, or pickles. They exclaimed about it to their sisters in India, repeating in minute detail the quantity and quality of fruit that was going to waste. “Can you believe they just let the fruit lie there and rot?” they said. “We are doing them a favor by using it up.”

Amma and her sisters had grown up near Kashmir during the partitioning of India and had inherited the frugality of Depression-era Americans. While they were incredibly generous, they could not bear to waste food. Shelled peas served a dual purpose. The peas were used in pilafs, and the skin was made into pea-skin curry. The nub and head of okra wasn’t thrown in the garbage; it was ground up into the
dosa
batter to make it softer. Stems of broccoli and cauliflower were blended into soups. Mangoes were cut within an inch of the seed in the center; then the seed was dunked into
mor-kuzhambu
to increase the tartness of the buttermilk. I got a measure of how well my mother-in-law had trained Ram one morning when he went to take his shower after me.

“Can I throw out your hair?” Ram asked, holding out a knotted bunch of my fallen hair.

“Sure,” I said, apologizing for not discarding it myself. “What else can you do with it?”

“Well, Amma and Komperi collect discarded hair for their
chavuris,
” Ram replied, referring to false hair akin to a wig.

Amma and Komperi were like twins, doing the same things, watching the same game shows (they loved
Supermarket Sweep
), and sharing the same interests and food habits. They loved yogurt but wouldn’t eat the ones that contained gelatin. They would eat onions in moderation, garlic not at all, and tamarind in any form.

On Mondays, Amma and Komperi didn’t eat salt, both for religious and health reasons. It was a weekly ritual that involved some degree of planning. We went to the grocery store on weekends to pick out things they could eat: packets of unsalted peanuts, dried apricots, and figs. Since they were depriving themselves of salt, it was the one day of the week when they could indulge their love of chocolates and ice cream without feeling guilty. So we picked out cartons of Edy’s ice cream because it didn’t contain eggs, gelatin, or excess sugar.

At home Komperi cooked up a wonderfully spicy curry with banana peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes for their supper. They would eat it with salt-free roti and finish the meal with bowls of ice cream.

MY SISTER-IN-LAW Anu ran her medical practice as if she were in India, where goods are still bartered for services. As a medical resident in Kerala she treated numerous patients who came in with head injuries from falling coconuts. They would bring the coconuts as evidence and offer them to Anu as fees.

In Florida Anu had similar exchanges going. A Patel family who owned the local motel dry-cleaned her silk saris because she treated their three children. Julie, a geriatric nurse, offered starfruit and limes in lieu of payment when her grandson came into Anu’s clinic. When we visited, Julie invited us to her orchard and gave us a golf cart. Amma and Komperi had a field day, driving the cart all over the orchard, veering dangerously close to the tangerines and clementines as they collected enough fruit to guarantee several free treatments for Julie’s grandson.

One morning Ben, the plumber, pulled up in a pickup truck, carrying an entire beehive on his shoulders. Anu treated his children for free, and he made emergency visits whenever she called. The presence of fifty-odd people taking showers and doing laundry all day had tested the septic tank to its limits, and Ben was pressed into service. He came in carrying the beehive, still whirring with bees. “Here you go, Doc,” he said, beaming. “Fresh honey for the family.”

Anu excitedly woke us up a few mornings later. Betsy, one of her patients, called to say that her lychee tree had just rained a harvest. The whole family piled into the minibus, and off we went. Betsy and her ten-year-old twin sons were waiting for us. They were a little shy to see Anu, their pediatrician, amidst the lychee trees in their backyard, but that didn’t stop us. I had never eaten a lychee before, and in Florida I did, kneeling in Betsy’s sun-dappled front yard. Anu showed me how to break open the nubby pink exterior and pop the translucent fruit into my mouth. It tasted like a wine cooler on a hot day. It tasted like spring rain.

THE WHIRRING BEGAN at dawn. It was soft but persistent. When I came down, Anu, Amma, and Komperi were juicing the bounty of oranges and grapefruit. They had covered the juicer with a thick towel to mute the noise, but it penetrated the quiet house. Not that the young Stanford graduates lying willy-nilly in the living room could hear anything. They had been up until three and were in their deepest sleep cycle at dawn. By the time they arose for breakfast at noon, the elders were just finishing their brunch. Anu would lay out boxes of cereal, which the iron-pumping young men emptied, earning them the title “cereal killers.” The younger children gorged on Pop-Tarts, whined about drinking milk, and flung themselves into the swimming pool after their morning meal. When they emerged from the pool at three o’clock, the adult lunch was just winding up and Anu would put the giant stock-pot on the stove for the kids’ pasta. By the time the pasta lunch finished at four-thirty, we were ready for tea and tiffin. Anu was called the “Queen of Chips” in her family for her ability to churn out a variety of savory snacks. In one corner of the kitchen a wok with oil was permanently plugged in. Whenever Anu got a free moment—in between doing rounds at the hospital or taking calls from patients—she would use the SaladShooter to hurl slices of plantain into the oil and fry them into crisp plantain chips that we all consumed by the barrel with our tea. Sometimes she dipped cashews into a spicy batter and deep-fried them for the men, who snacked on them with their evening beer.