Mother dreams of puffed rice

Words by Dr. Christianez Ratna Kiruba

As we walk past an old tamarind tree in her village, its sickly sour scent in the air, my mother remembers her school days. "We ran past this tamarind tree on our way to school," she recollects. "We used to believe tamarind trees had ghosts living in them and did not want to spend too much time near them." This was not something only children believed. According to my mother, even adults scurried past these trees if they ever had to cross them and no one ever planted more than one in the same place. And yet, she also remembers always picking up a stray tamarind or two from where they've fallen on the ground to take home. "I'd open the shell and pour a little milk into it and wait for it to curdle from the tanginess of the tamarind and slurp it up, ", she says.

Hailing from a small village on the outskirts of town in rural India, my mother's memories of childhood all seem to involve some exotic snack or the other. Powdered groundnuts mixed with jaggery, puffed rice with coconut and spiced black coffee seem to colour every tale she regales me with. The successful big-city doctor that she has become now has not somehow masked the daughter of the puffed rice vendor she was inside. "When rainy seasons come," she says, "winged termites that we called eesal would flood our homes. We would then sometimes roast them and use their bodies to flavour our puffed rice." This amuses me to no end, the thought of my mother eating insects, but it was a delicacy, the way she says it. "It did taste quite nutty and crispy" she laughs.

She even recounts keeping time by the whistles of the trains that race past. Her village had been devoid of any other way to tell time then, she talks of her mother waking up to the sound of the 5am train at the break of dawn and grinding ginger with a mortar and pestle to steep into the coffee that she would wake up her family for. "The ginger we believed protected us from the cold as everyone would be venturing out to work in the fields before it was time to head to school," she adds.

"In the break times from school, we'd run down to the groves of cotton trees and pick up fallen fibres from there and pocket them, " she says. "A shopkeeper in the village would exchange them for candy if we brought him enough. That was the only way you could eat something that was not made at home for a snack." She mentions the hustle and bustle of hordes of children sweeping the ground for these fibres in pursuit of the elusive 'English candy' which was factory-made and hence deemed as very select and exotic. The cotton seeds were then used to make cotton seed milk that the children were sometimes offered and the husks finally went to the cattle.

She talks of rooster fights. Of the roosters that lost and were killed in the games, which were then brought door to door by people looking to sell them. "My father always bought one, regardless of how late in the night these visitors come selling," she says, "And then the whole household would be awake immediately getting to work cleaning, plucking and preparing the meat." My mother's assigned job on these nights was getting the spice mix ready, mashing chillies, garlic, ginger and cumin to flavour the meat. She then remembers how the entire family would sit down for a midnight feast: chicken curry and rice, which had to be immediately consumed as there were no refrigerators then. The leftover rice would then be mixed with water and curd and left until morning to be drunk as a porridge with onions and pickles for breakfast.

These days, she feels the cuisine she grew up with is all but lost. Many indigenous herbs, roots and berries, which once formed a part of everyday life, have fallen out of use in India, especially in the south. Even cooking techniques she'd known then are now barely used. The food from my mother's childhood "I sometimes dream of cooked banana stems" she laughs, "Sweet potato roots boiled, dried and cured salty fish, sweets cooked in braided coconut leaves and, of course, puffed rice!" And I laugh alongside her because now, I might dream of them too.