thunderous farts. My mother, coming from her respectable civil servant family in Delhi, closed her eyes with disgust at this after-dinner ritual. And she was always on him while he was eating. “Abbas,” she’d say. “Slow down. You’ll choke. Good heavens. Like eating with a donkey.”
But you had to admire Papa, the charisma and determination behind his immense drive. By the time I came along in 1975, he was firmly in control of the family restaurant, my grandfather ailing from emphysema and largely confined, on his good days, to overseeing the tiffin delivery business from a stiff-backed chair in the courtyard.
Ammi’s tent was retired for a gray concrete-and-brick compound. My family lived on the second floor of the main house, above our restaurant. My grandparents and childless aunt and uncle lived in the house one over, and down from them our family enclave was sealed off with a cube of wooden two-story shacks where our Kerala cook, Bappu, and the other servants slept on the floor.
It was the courtyard that was the heart and soul of the old family business. Tiffin carts and bicycle-snack-bars were stacked against the far wall, and under the shade of the saggy tarp were cauldrons of carp-head soup, stacks of banana leaves, and freshly made samosas
on wax paper. The great iron vats of flecked rice, perfumed with bay leaf and cardamom, stood against the courtyard’s opposite wall, and around these delicacies hummed a constant thrum of flies. A male servant usually sat on a canvas sack at the kitchen’s back door, carefully picking out the black specks of dirt among the basmati kernels; and an oily-headed female, bent at the waist with her sari gathered between her legs, was brushing with a short broom the courtyard dirt, back and forth, back and forth. And I recall our yard as always full of life, filled with constant comings and goings that made the roosters and chickens jerk about, nervously clucking in the shadows of my childhood.
It was here, in the heat of the afternoon after school, that I would find Ammi working under the porch eaves overhanging the interior courtyard. I’d scramble atop a crate for a hot-faced sniff of her spicy fish soup, and we’d chat a bit about my day at school before she passed over to me the stirring of the cauldron. And I remember her gracefully gathering up the hem of her sari, retreating to the wall where she kept an eye on me as she smoked her iron pipe, a habit she kept from her village days in Gujarat.
I remember this as if it were yesterday: stirring and stirring to the city’s beat, passing for the very first time into the magic trance that has ever since taken me when I cook. The balmy wind warbled across the courtyard, bringing the faraway yap of Bombay dogs and traffic and the smell of raw sewage into the family compound. Ammi squatted in the shady corner, her tiny wrinkled face disappearing behind contented claps of smoke; and, floating down from above, the girlish voices of my mother and aunt as they folded chickpea and chili into skirts of pastry on the first-floor veranda overhead. But most of all I recall the sound of my iron hoe grating rhythmically across the vessel’s floor, bringing jewels up from the soup-deep: the bony fish heads and the white eyes rising to the surface on eddies ruby red.
I still dream of the place. If you stepped out of the immediate safety of our family compound you stood at the edge of the notorious Napean Sea Road shantytown. It was a sea of roof scraps atop rickety clapboard shacks, all crisscrossed by putrid streams. From the shantytown rose the pungent smells of charcoal fires and rotting garbage, and the hazy air itself was thick with the roar of roosters and bleating goats and the slap-thud of washing beaten on cement slabs. Here, children and adults shat in the streets.
But on the other side of us, a different India. As I grew up, so, too, did my country. Malabar Hill, towering above us, quickly filled with cranes as between
But you had to admire Papa, the charisma and determination behind his immense drive. By the time I came along in 1975, he was firmly in control of the family restaurant, my grandfather ailing from emphysema and largely confined, on his good days, to overseeing the tiffin delivery business from a stiff-backed chair in the courtyard.
Ammi’s tent was retired for a gray concrete-and-brick compound. My family lived on the second floor of the main house, above our restaurant. My grandparents and childless aunt and uncle lived in the house one over, and down from them our family enclave was sealed off with a cube of wooden two-story shacks where our Kerala cook, Bappu, and the other servants slept on the floor.
It was the courtyard that was the heart and soul of the old family business. Tiffin carts and bicycle-snack-bars were stacked against the far wall, and under the shade of the saggy tarp were cauldrons of carp-head soup, stacks of banana leaves, and freshly made samosas
on wax paper. The great iron vats of flecked rice, perfumed with bay leaf and cardamom, stood against the courtyard’s opposite wall, and around these delicacies hummed a constant thrum of flies. A male servant usually sat on a canvas sack at the kitchen’s back door, carefully picking out the black specks of dirt among the basmati kernels; and an oily-headed female, bent at the waist with her sari gathered between her legs, was brushing with a short broom the courtyard dirt, back and forth, back and forth. And I recall our yard as always full of life, filled with constant comings and goings that made the roosters and chickens jerk about, nervously clucking in the shadows of my childhood.
It was here, in the heat of the afternoon after school, that I would find Ammi working under the porch eaves overhanging the interior courtyard. I’d scramble atop a crate for a hot-faced sniff of her spicy fish soup, and we’d chat a bit about my day at school before she passed over to me the stirring of the cauldron. And I remember her gracefully gathering up the hem of her sari, retreating to the wall where she kept an eye on me as she smoked her iron pipe, a habit she kept from her village days in Gujarat.
I remember this as if it were yesterday: stirring and stirring to the city’s beat, passing for the very first time into the magic trance that has ever since taken me when I cook. The balmy wind warbled across the courtyard, bringing the faraway yap of Bombay dogs and traffic and the smell of raw sewage into the family compound. Ammi squatted in the shady corner, her tiny wrinkled face disappearing behind contented claps of smoke; and, floating down from above, the girlish voices of my mother and aunt as they folded chickpea and chili into skirts of pastry on the first-floor veranda overhead. But most of all I recall the sound of my iron hoe grating rhythmically across the vessel’s floor, bringing jewels up from the soup-deep: the bony fish heads and the white eyes rising to the surface on eddies ruby red.
I still dream of the place. If you stepped out of the immediate safety of our family compound you stood at the edge of the notorious Napean Sea Road shantytown. It was a sea of roof scraps atop rickety clapboard shacks, all crisscrossed by putrid streams. From the shantytown rose the pungent smells of charcoal fires and rotting garbage, and the hazy air itself was thick with the roar of roosters and bleating goats and the slap-thud of washing beaten on cement slabs. Here, children and adults shat in the streets.
But on the other side of us, a different India. As I grew up, so, too, did my country. Malabar Hill, towering above us, quickly filled with cranes as between
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