Meenal Jhala

How many of you remember reading William Saroyan in school? His essay Locomotive 38, The Ojibway, appeared in our class 11th or 12th (I can’t remember which) CBSE textbook. That was the start of my lifelong love affair with Saroyan. I’ve always repented for not saving those textbooks as literary gems in my library

William Saroyan was born in America in 1908. He came from a family of exiled Armenian immigrants who lived in poverty in Fresno, California. He was not interested in studies but even as a young child he nurtured a secret ambition to be a writer. His determination didn’t falter through the depression years. In 1933 his story The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze was chosen by Story, a national magazine, and he received fifteen dollars for it. More stories were printed that year and by 1934 Random House had published The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze And Other Stories. Saroyan had arrived on the literary scene and was causing quite a stir!

Saroyan wrote many books in his lifetime but my favorite one is definitely My Name Is Aram which was published in the year 1940, and like most of his books was largely autobiographical, about his eccentric and colorful fellow Armenians in his hometown during his childhood.

William Saroyan’s style of writing was unorthodox which he worked on a great deal to develop. It reflected his zest for life, his joy with his people and his surroundings and his humor, and this style eventually came to be known as Saroyanesque.

Saroyan wrote not only stories but also plays that became famous and opened on Broadway.

The film based on his story The Human Comedy won an Oscar.

Saroyan died in 1981. I was only eleven years old. I wish I had lived in his times.

Arto Der Haroutunian was an Armenian architect, painter and restaurateur, famous in his own right, who opened his restaurant in London in 1970. He wrote cookbooks too. His restaurant was the watering hole for many fellow Armenians of his time, one among them being the famous Saroyan.

This recipe is from his cookbook Vegetarian Recipes From The Middle East. It is a delicious Armenian pasta recipe called Banirov Arsha or macaroni with cheese.

Yashica Dutt did her Masters in Journalism from Columbia University, the same place Dr Ambedkar, the visionary light of the Dalits received his PhD from in the year 1927.

When I read Yashica’s memoir I was disheartened. We cannot imagine….Casteism is India’s dirty blot. it has been going on for years without recourse to the affected. The caste system was introduced in the Hindu sacred text Manusmriti thousands of years ago. Things have’nt changed much over this long stretch of time. The Dalits have lost years and years of progress because of casteism. Those lower castes who do manage to do well for themselves must hide their identities and put in twice the amount of effort as an upper caste. In India the truth is that if you are an upper caste your chances of “swinging it” in any sphere are tenfold.

Of course the arguement of most upper castes is that the Dalits already get too many benefits from the Government. But do these benefits really peter down to reach the most disadvantaged? Even if some lower castes do take advantage of these benefits they are mocked and ridiculed for their caste as students and in their jobs.

It feels shameful to hear, in this day and age, about the atrocities that upper castes inflict on lower castes. Sometimes it’s sporting a mustache that irks them and sometimes its riding a horse to ones wedding. They also practice untouchability; they don’t drink water or eat from the same utensils or even sit near the lower castes.

While the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation uses machines to clean manholes, in the suburbs around Ahmedabad such as Bopal which is an upcoming industrial and residential area, humans still have to do this disgusting job. One of my friends told me of an incident when the sweeper who was let down a manhole in her society resurfaced with condoms stuck to his body.

If you feel the way I feel, if your heart and head says that Dalits deserve far better than they have now, read this memoir. It is heart breaking, eye opening and will convince you to take a stand.

In her memoir, Yashica writes that her mother loved baking cakes for her when she was a kid. Once she baked a cake for her and decorated it with gems. I’m not baking a cake but making a gem laden, chocolate circle that is at once attractive and tasty too.

Except for the effort you’ve got to put into this halwa stirring away continuously to cook it, it’s really an easy peasy dish to make. Not too many ingredients either. But when you taste it you’ll feel like a king or a queen. Carrot halwa turns out delicious.

Halwa is an Arabic word and the halwas that the middle eastern traders taught cooks in India during the Mughal period were made of flour and nuts. Carrot or gajar halwa on the other hand is made with ghee and milk and grated carrots and nuts and without flour and must have been introduced by some terrific Punjabi cooks to the Mughal emperors.

But where did carrots come from in the first place? Purple carrots were grown thousands of years ago in Afghanistan and Iran. The Dutch brought the orange carrot with them to India in the 17th century and when the cooks of Punjab got a taste of this delicious vegetable they lost no time in experimenting and making tasty dishes with it, sweet and savory. One of the dishes was gajar halwa.

Gajar, the Indian name for carrot is derived from gazar in Persian. So anyway, we were talking about Gajar halwa and it became very popular with the Mughals. And the dish spread to almost every part of India with the Mughal empire at its zenith.

We in India share many things in common with our Pakistani brothers and sisters. One of the things is food. Pakistanis love Gajar Halwa and make it for festivals like we do.

Here is the recipe of this easy peasy carrot halwa.

While most of us run a rat race to catch the fast train to nowhere, try to get a seat next to the latest hotshot, and keep up with the Joneses, Ruskin Bond is perfectly content to have Friends In Small Places (the name of one of his books). And, so charming is his world in the hills of small town Dehradun that he has us all bowled over.

Are they true or just a figment of an immensely fertile imagination, these stories that enchant and capture the imagination of his audience, both young and old? He keeps us guessing. No guns and violence for this Bond though. For one thing’s for sure, he is the James Bond of tender feelings. His stories treat us to the fresh, cool air, simple ways of life, quirks, and delights of the people of his home in the hills. Ordinary folks, sometimes with extraordinary hearts filled with kindness. Or does Ruskin Bond spread wonderful vibes around him wherever he goes?

He must be a keen observer of human nature because he has so many stories to tell of everyday people around him. His dad who he adores, his wayward uncle Ken, murderer uncle Bill, the Lafanga tongawalla who is actually delightfully sweet to him, his aayaah, not to forget the maharani who lives on the very top of a palace and is in love with the humble gardener.

Bond has written more than five hundred books, beautifully bringing to life the spirit of life in the hills. He still writes at the grand old age of 85. He’s written his autobiography which is a must read. It’s called Lone Fox Dancing.

One of Ruskin Bond’s favorite dishes is kofta curry. Most probably he eats a non vegetarian kofta curry. Most probably too, he downs a beer or two with his kofta curry meal. Since I’m vegetarian I’m posting a recipe here of a vegetarian bottle gourd kofta curry adapted from a recipe by Tarla Dalal. It’s heart healthy and tasty too.

Reading Deepa Narayan’s book CHUP-Breaking The Slience About India’s Women started a fire in my belly. I travelled to my village while reading the book and I wanted to rip apart the orthodox customs there. Many women in my village still practice purdah or the custom of covering their heads and faces in front of men folk. My family doesn’t endorse this hypocritical tradition.

That doesn’t mean Indian towns and cities fare better. The descrimination is as bad here. I’ll never forget what my hotelier boss in a prestigious hotel told me when I made my point of view. He said it was his job to think, not mine. What a jerk!

CHUP is a bomb. It explodes in your face. It slams you in the centre of your forehead. It shows you a mirror and you won’t like what you see. However old or young you are the book has something for you. It voices every woman’s frustrations with the patriarchal system. You will recognize with hard facts, figures and examples how Indian women are trained to habitually blame and self flagellate themselves.

Deepa Narayan is a strong and forceful writer. I love the way she uses Hindi words in her sentences, and in the title of one of the chapters in the book, Body: Women Don’t Have Bodies, Besharam or in another chapter called Isolation: I Am Alone And Afraid, Keep Women Apart, Akeli Hoon, Darti Hoon. She shows us how women are isolated and trampled upon. How families and society plot and design to oppress women in the name of izzat, respect and morality.

It was not always like this. There’s an example in the book of her grandmother who would have laughed if she knew that today’s women must wear undergarments below their clothing. True. None of our grandmothers were bound by their dress. The figures of statues in ancient temples are beautiful, voluptuous and nudity was perfectly normal and natural. We still worship Goddesses but it’s a sham.

Look how society owns women’s bodies. You must sit properly with legs crossed. You mustn’t wear sleeveless dresses. You must look thin, fair and pretty at all times and afcourse you must shut up and silently put up with marauding relatives.

One of the books she recommends caught my eye. The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred And Profane In Indian Art. This one I must read. Also, Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office.

So I made voluptuous banana and chocolate muffins, the recipe of which comes from Nigella Lawson that cooking diva, and feminist in her own right.

Shanta Gokhale’s writing is effortless, flowing like rich smooth cream and fresh as the scent of lemon. I don’t know why I didn’t discover her sooner. I’m making up for precious lost time. I read her book without a break. It was unputdownable.

She was born a few years before both my parents, in 1939, and lives in the grand old city of Bombay, where my parents grew up and went to school and college, before my dad left to join the Air Force and then married mom.

I love her simple writing style. She writes with finesse. A woman of the world.

She’s original. She’s written about her life through her body and she treats us to exquisite pirouettes (she’s learnt Indian dance, among her many talents) with her life. She’s courageous. She’s had more than her fair share of ups and downs with two unsuccessful marriages, illness, shortage of money and bringing up two children all on her own. Still she is honest, sensitive and witty. The lady is a tough cookie!

She’s lived life on her own terms, not hankering for fame or fortune. And she’s written this book at the age of 78 and remembers names and incidents from her childhood!

I didn’t know that TV personality Renuka Shahane was her daughter, before I read her autobiography.

I’m thirsting for more of Shanta Gokhale’s writing, what a massive contribution she has made to the performing arts with her voluminous writings in both Marathi and English and her translations from English to Marathi and vice versa.

In her book she writes about a trifle pudding she had many many times as a navy wife during her first marriage and when she was being courted. I think she has bittersweet memories of the pudding. Perhaps, I’m reading too much into her writing.

I looked everywhere for a tasty Indian Navy trifle pudding recipe but I couldn’t find one so I asked one of my good friends who is married into the navy if they still make trifle puddings like they made all those years back. She reasoned that the English influence has been overruled and the current crop of Taj and Oberoi trained cooks and chefs do make a favorite trifle called Trunk of Tree.

Here is a delicious trifle pudding recipe that I’ve adapted from Kikky Sihota’s book The Ultimate Army Cookbook: A Memsahib Cooks. She calls it Boozy Trifle because it contains delicious amounts of rum in it, but her trifle contains no fruit, like the usual trifle pudding. I changed some of the ingredient quantities and added dry fruits to it. I used less cake and less cream. Turned out yum.

Here’s the recipe.

Living life with a mentally ill person is difficult, especially if she’s so close, esepcially if she’s your mom. Jerry Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Em and the big Hoom is about suffering, it is endearing and touching and funny too.

It sure takes courage to write about it. People talk, they say all sorts of things. How could you write about a loved one for the money? How could you write about ‘shame’? But perhaps it’s a kind of catharsis, this writing. It saves you and heals others.

Not in the whole wide world is it easy to imagine the trauma that a mentally ill person and their family members go through. The mentally ill are stigmatized and society disclaims them as mad or retarded. If only we’d realize that this is an illness like any other, like diabetes or osteoporosis. It’s nobody’s fault, especially not the one who suffers. Anyone, you, me or somebody else could fall prey.

Your serotonin and dopamine levels play havoc and no one, least of all you know what to do about them. Sometimes family and friends think you’re ok and all is well, but then disaster strikes.

But I can also tell you that sometimes, love wins the day. It is difficult, but love and care and support do win the day.

Does the illness creep in through your genes or is the devastation caused by environmental factors, or both? Depression, bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia, doctors say they’re genetic but.. a hundred questions, science still doesn’t have answers.

In the book Em and her family drink tea by the gallons. Em, the mom has a sweet tooth. She loves to douse her tea with spoonfuls of sugar and eat chocolates and mithai.

These very chocolatey muffins are made in memory of Em. She would have delighted in the loads of chocolate in them.

The recipe is adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking, From My Home To Yours.

This beautiful song then, True Colours, for God’s specially loved ones.

R.K. Narayan’s books are a delight to read. There is an endearing simplicity and innocence about his writing. A sweetness and an earthiness. He managed to be innocent and yet an astute observer of people at the same time. The beauty of Natayan’s writing was that his humor was gentle and he rarely ever came across as nasty or mean, just like his younger brother R.K. Laxman, the eminent cartoonist. He also chose to write on many subjects other than the man woman relationship.

I’ve been reading Narayan’s autobiography, My Days. He was born in 1906. At the age of three or four he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Madras because his mother was too delicate to look after the entire brood. Here in his grandmother’s house he had a pet monkey and peacock. With such great flair does he begin his autobiography, writing about the antics of his two pets, that whatever your age may be you’ll be enchanted.

As a child Narayan didn’t like going to school and hated drill and examinations. Poor Narayan, at one stage, after he had finished his studies, and with no luck on the job front, he was made to take up a teacher’s job….and teach drill and mathematics! and how he hated both. He walked away from the teaching assignment never to return. Thank God, for what a loss it would have been for readers all over the world had he not become a writer. He also went against the grain about the education system all his life. He said he learnt more from books outside than the ones he was forced to read in school and in college.

In his early days most people poked fun at him for wanting to be a writer and thought he was being irresponsible by not taking up a job and supporting his large family when his father had just retired.

But he did become a writer, and how stylish, magnificent and priceless is his writing. He won many accolades for his brilliance, among them The Sahitya Academy award for his book The Guide, and the A.C Benson Medal by the Royal Society Of Literature in 1980. He was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy And Institute Of Arts And Letters In 1982. He was honored with the Padma Bhushan in 1964 and the Padma Vibhushan In 2000. He died in May 2001 at the age of 94.

In her book Tiffin, which I loved reading, Rukmini Srinivas reveals that Narayan was vegetarian. He liked eating curd rice, ulundu vadai or deep fried, spicy, split black bean batter vadais which she often made for him. He also loved his filter coffee. And his packet of scented betel nut which he kept with him at all times.

Here is the recipe of ulundu vadai or deep fried, spicy, split black bean batter vadais, as I have adapted it from Rukmini Srinivas’s book.

And finally this wonderful music from the title track of Malgudi Days which enthralled us when it appeared on television many years ago.

The pain and loss are heartrending. An entire community exiled in its own country. The anguish and the hurt, but no mention of this chapter of our recent history. Of brutality and savageness inflicted on Kashmiri Pandits whose only fault was, there was nothing to fault in them. Of human and political callousness at its worst. Targeted and hounded as infidels. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is shocking. It is the true story of Rahul Pandita, now a renowned journalist, the Kashmiri Pandit community, his parents, extended family and his cousin Ravi, his hero.

History forgotten is bound to be repeated, and Rahul Pandita is brave in his writing. His father is my hero. In the toughest of situations in his childhood he guided the author to stay on the right path. His mother is brave, struggling on a daily basis to keep the family going, when they are driven out of their huge home that her husband built with every penny of his savings, and have to live as refugees, shunted from room to room. Her health deteriorates. There is so much trauma. In happier times she used to hum a lovely song from the film Awaara where Nargis wishes that the moon would turn its face away so that she could love Raj Kapoor.

I’m posting a recipe of Chana ki dal from Krishna Prasad Dar’s book Kashmiri Cooking. He is the father of cartoonist Sudhir Dar. They are Kashmiri Pandits too.

Krishna Prasad Dar writes, Kashmiri Pandits prefer to use asafoetida and curd in their cooking as opposed to onions and garlic. But with outside influences, people today do use onion and garlic too. In this recipe he keeps the onion optional, but I did add an onion to my dal and it tasted very good. Have this dal with a vegetable dish, Indian breads, a curd dish and a sweetmeat to make a full meal. The Kashmiri Pandits, although they are Brahmins are great meat eaters.

Before I go on to the recipe, I’d like to let my readers know that this post is inspired by Valerie Stivers’s blog from the Paris Review. I found it stimulating.

Here is the recipe for Yellow Split Lentils or Bengal Gram or Chana ki Dal

There are many versions of the song Imagine but this particular version by Eva Cassidy strikes a heart touching chord.