Dried fish and vegetables, cooked in an intestine-burning spice mix. Redolent and ‘smelly’. Steamed rice. Hands approaching the plate. Fingers slicked with the spicy, umami delight being licked at length. Relentless mango showers outside.
This is probably the fondest memory I have of my childhood. I remember my ghoti*, brahmin neighbour exclaiming “Chotoloki khabar shob (Such plebian food)!”
Later, I read a book. Parts of it describing “plebian” food, still makes me salivate.
I also read a story about some particularly blasphemous food once. It left me with a craving no less than any desire. Let me share it with you.
Written by Mohammed Khadeer Babu and illustrated by Gulammohammed Sheikh, Head Curry is a complete sensory experience.
A day in a young boy’s life. The promise of a delicious meal. The anticipation. The episodic preparation.
The smells, the sight of a simmering pot. And then, instant gratification served straight onto the plate. Hot and tantalising.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once famously wrote, “…cooking was a metaphor for the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture.” The idea was to talk about how some categorical opposites like ‘raw’ and ‘cooked,’ ‘fresh’ and ‘rotten,’ ‘moist’ and ‘parched’ also gave rise to propositions, or beliefs involving everyday life.
In a cultural conundrum like India, these categories explode with binaries like brahmin-dalit, Hindu-Muslim, and even other forms of social stratifications, like bangal-ghoti**.
Cow-vigilantism is on the rise in India. Reported cases of caste atrocities seem to be rising in number every passing day. Muslims and dalits both consume beef in the sub-continent. Caste Hindu society has historically relegated the task of scavenging animal carcasses to dalits. Eating beef, or even being seen close to a dead cow, or perhaps any dead animal, can lead to deaths in contemporary India.
Food is everyday. It’s sustenance. It’s memory. It’s desire. Let it be.
*Colloquial Bengali term used for inhabitants of West
Bengal. My family were ‘refugees’ from East Pakistan, or Bangladesh.
**Bangal is the
colloquial Bengali word for people from East Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh. The bangal-ghoti divide exists across culinary and cultural terrains.
Head Curry is part of Different Tales – a project involving stories from the lives of children who rarely find place in mainstream children’s literature. This series of thirteen stories addresses issues of marginalisation – along the axes of gender, caste, minority, disability.
The series is published by Mango Books, an imprint of DC Books, Kerala.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)