Nourishment for the soul

"If you want to make pasta or anything else, you can get them from the store nearby," my sister said when we talked about my upcoming visit to the old country, which will be for more than a mere couple of weeks.

People know how much I love the traditional foods, like erisheri and pitla and sirukizhangu and more.  At a recent wedding in the extended family, a cousin invited us to visit with them on the east coast and she promised me that she cooks all the traditional foods.  Even maambazha puliseri!  She knew how to bait me!

But, they also know that I have changed.  A lot.  My food tastes are also different now, and vastly expanded too.  The pleasure in having a Caprese salad with fresh tomatoes and basil on a warm summer evening is not something that I had known to even dream about when I was young.

"You know me" I told my sister.  "When I am in India, I eat only Indian food."

"Yes, only Indian food."

I bet she also knows that it means that she will end up cooking those awesome dishes for which my tongue tingles even now.

When I worked in Calcutta, I ate Bengali food and sweets every day.  I do not recall going to a "Madrasi" restaurant even once during those three months.  I lived for arepas in Venezuela.  In Costa Rica, I ate rice and beans and potato fries.  I was pleasantly shocked at the familiarity of the okra and plantain dishes that were served with chapati as regular food in Tanzania.

But, there is a great deal of India within me.  The stories of my people and their photographs that I cherish. The wall clock that once chimed the time at grandma's home, which now is a loud tick-tock in a quiet Eugene. 

I am a product of the old country.

There is so much India within me that it reflects in so many things I think and act.  In my old job as a university professor, from which I was laid off, a peer who read my application for promotion later told me that he had never imagined that somebody would quote the poet Kalidasa in an application for promotion, which I had done.  How could I not?

The intellectual and physical wandering away from the old country does not mean that I have ditched the old in favor of the new.  There is now a lot within me from different parts of the world too, and the accumulation within has changed me for the better.  

It has been a long journey from Sengottai and Pattamadai, and erisheri and chakka_varatti.  Soon, I will be able to taste pooris and vadais and idlis all over again. 

The Caprese can wait.