Literary Safari

The following ranks amongst one of the top e-mailed articles in the NYTimes today: In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver, by Sarita Rai.

The article examines and pays subtle tribute to the clockwork lunch delivery system orchestrated by dabbawallas in Mumbai. I always thought that dabba literally means box, but Rai tells us it is also a reference to the colonial “tiffin dabba ” which a light meal. Walla means something along the lines of “the one who carries.” She writes,

The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas have been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination by means of a complex network.

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

What a quote. I love it.

There are tiffin services in New York (soon?), the San Fran Bay area, and Philadelphia. And, at sepia, there’s a number of a dude in NYC who already delivers.

I can’t wait for the day when I can pick up the phone and call in an order for two fresh chappatis, a steaming bowl of dal, a spicy gawar cooked like this, homemade yogurt, and of course, a piping hot gulab jamun. Only question: Would I be able to stay awake and work after my meal?!

Today is my grandmother’s (I call her Meme) birthday. She’s almost 90, and believe it or not, told me that she cooked up one kilo of Pav Bhaji this morning. Meme is the best cook I know, and even though her legs sometimes give way and are wobbly, she is still experimenting with new recipes and regularly treats her grandchildren and children to her divine home-made pizza.

I was reading Atul Gawande’s guest column “Rethinking Old Age” in the NYTimes a few days ago, and got to thinking about all the elderly women I know in India who either live alone or with their children … and, I mentally made a list of all the things that Meme would not be able to do if she weren’t in her own home:

She would not be able to sit on her favorite chair and watch her Hindi soap operas.
She would not be able to nap in her king-sized bed on hot summer afternoons, with her grandson and great grand children from Spain next to her.
She would not be able to chip pistachios on a marble counter-top or invent a new yogurt salad dressing.
She would not be able to sit at the dining table at dawn with her cup of coffee and toast, listening to the caw-caw of crows and the cooing of pigeons.
…

I feel so grateful today to have a Meme who celebrated her birthday knowing that she retains some control and independence over her life — and I feel so thankful to my aunt who is her primary caregiver.

In honor of Meme on her birthday, I offer the following short piece about her.

Meme Near 90 

Meme, my maternal grandma, is precious when she is asleep. I love to watch her chest and tummy heave up and down, up and down, as she lies on her side, one hand underneath her head of silvery-white hair, the other placed on her hip. The fan whirs its blades overhead, importing a warm breeze into the artificially darkened room whose curtains are drawn shut to keep out the strong afternoon sun. In the wintertime, a leopard skin print blanket covers Meme, but now that the summer heat has knocked forcefully at the door, she takes her afternoon nap covered only with a kaftan – – an ankle-length robe that she started wearing when she lived in Morocco in the 50’s.

I lie on the large, low bed beside her, my legs straight out, a book propped on my stomach. Her breathing diverts my attention away from the words on the page so that this afternoon, I, the avid reader, actually forget how to read. The acute dilemma of the two sisters, torn apart by a tragic secret assumes an insignificance in my mind. This story is make-believe and the story of the woman next to me is real, I think to myself, as I stare at my mother’s mother.

My eyes move down to her feet, which lie parallel to one another. In the muffled afternoon silence, they start to tell me her story.

In her youth, as a young bride living in French-occupied Morocco, my mother tells me, Meme was seen as a graceful and exotic Indian woman. When she walked down the streets of Casablanca, arm in arm with my suit-clad grandfather, heads turned to look at her smoothly draped saris, to marvel at her straight profile and black hair, to admire her floating footsteps and the shine of her smile. Now nearly 90 years old, Meme no longer treads the ground lightly as she did in the days when her feet were adorned with silver anklets. She does not complain about her arthritis, but her discomfort and pain are evident in her slow shuffle, in the curls and twists in her toes, and in the unsteady movement of her hands.

(more…)

There was a sneak preview of The Golden Compass at Cannes, The Guardian reports. Ooh, I’m so excited to see this movie! Nicole Kidman seems like a perfect choice for Mrs. Coulter, and little Lyra is played by a newcomer, Dakota Blue Richards. [Read the article.]

Also, check out the movie web site. Very cool.

I can’t wax excitement about a movie based on the book without paying homage to its brilliant author. Here’s an interview with Philip Pullman that I particularly appreciated.

“How do you write?” he was asked. “I go to my table and sit down and pick up my pen, and write three sides of narrow-lined A4 paper – and then I stop,” he answered. [Read more.]

And, if you haven’t read The Golden Compass, you have a little over six months to do so before the movie comes along. Hop to it.

There are a couple of movies that are on my radar, more out of curiosity than because I expect anything spectacular out of them:

Provoked – starring Aishwarya Rai and Naveen Andrews (from Lost). This is based on the true story of a woman named Kiranjit Ahluwalia who, badly abused, ends up in prison for murdering her abusive husband. Her case was instrumental in changing domestic violence laws in Britain. I think this screened at Cannes earlier this month, and I saw a review of it on Ebert & Roeper (they gave it a thumbs down), but I remain interested – because of the subject matter.

The new Nancy Drew movie. I’m going to be one of those 90-year olds who gets all excited when she hears the words “Nancy Drew.” I just know it. So, granted that I’m not sure how I feel about having Nancy move to Hollywood Hills, but I can’t let this flick come and go without checking it out, can I?

And, while I’m at it, I’m going to try and get my hands on this book: Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak:

[a] behind the scenes of the girl sleuth’s creation, her transformation as different writers took on the series, and the publishing phenomenon—the highly productive Stratemeyer Syndicate machine—that made her possible. Rehak’s most ambitious choice is to reflect on how Nancy Drew mirrors girls’ lives and the ups and downs of the women’s movement.

I was reading a fascinating article “The Meaning of Life: What Milton Bradley Started,” by Jill Lepore in this week’s The New Yorker. It traces the history and philosophically somewhat chequered past and present (no pun intended!) of The Checkered Game of Life.

In my reading, I came upon this fun fact:

The genealogy of the Checkered Game of Life stretches back centuries. [Milton] Bradley’s invention is descended from a family of ancient Asian games–members of a genus that R. C. Bell, in his amazing compendium “Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations” (1960), labelled “square board race games”–whose common ancestor is probably a thousand years old. In India, Jnana Chaupar (the “game of knowledge”) is played much like the Checkered Game of Life: land on a virtue and you get to climb a ladder toward the god Vishnu and karmic liberation; land on a vice–or a karmic impediment–and you’re swallowed by a snake. (Beginning in 1892, Jnana Chaupar was sold in Britain as Snakes and Ladders; in the United States, it survives today as Chutes and Ladders.)

I was thinking as I read this: How wonderful would it have been to know that the game I was playing during my childhood in India actually has deep roots that go back 2000 years?

Turns out that the author and Ayurveda practitioner, the late Harish Johari actually revived Jnana Chaupar in the 1980s, rechristening it “Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge.” In a profile of Johari titled “Ayurveda’s Renaissance Man” in Yoga Journal (1991), Richard Leviton writes:

Gyan Chaupar, or Leela, invented by the Hindu sages [is] a game of self-knowledge based on the Vedas, Puranas, and Smirtis, texts of the Hindu tradition. Back in the 1970s, Johari resurrected this old game of the savants from an 1840 version and provided commentary linking its 72 key Sanskrit terms with Western psychological concepts. He published his commentaries in the book Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge.

As a game of self-exploration, Leela uses a 72-space playing board, each space representing a state of being. Movements toward Cosmic Consciousness, the goal, are beset or blessed by arrows and snakes, according to the karmically weighted throw of the dice. There are no winners in Leela, only cosmically enlightened ones, and the game ends when the player “becomes himself, the essence of play.” When a player lands on an arrow, it’s like passing “Go” in Monopoly; you are propelled forward in your spiritual aspirations. But if your dice dumps you on the head of the biggest snake, representing tamas-guna (the force of inertia), it’s more like Monopoly’s “Go Directly to Jail!” Snakes symbolize the delusion of materiality, so the player is regressed almost to the starting position.

Detachment is a recommended playing skill in the game of Leela, says Johari. “The creators of this game saw it foremost as a tool for understanding the relationship of the individual self to the Absolute Self. And the purpose of this game we see as nothing less than the liberation of consciousness from the snares of the material world and its merging with the Cosmic Consciousness.”

I was tempted to buy the board game, but wasn’t able to find one for sale for less than $163. I’ll keep looking.

Meanwhile, more about the neat history of The Indian Game of Snakes and Ladders, by Andrew Topsfield in the journal Artibus Asiae.

Here’s a piece I wrote about my mom a while ago. I dug it out and reworked it a bit today, in honor of Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day!

———-

Secret Cheesy Adventures (with Mom)

If we could, my mother and I would eat cheese everyday. Sadly, our family has inherited a propensity for high cholesterol and we have no choice but to control our intake of our favorite food. On weekends and vacations, however, my mother lets go. She eats chocolate and cheese, without counting or feeling guilty, giving us an unspoken license to also let loose and to throw our cholesterol restrictions to the dogs. On a recent trip to DC, Mom and I made a pit stop at Whole Foods. Famished and exhausted from having spent the day at the hospital with my uncle who had just had a pacemaker procedure, we did justice to the cheese samples on the floor, taking more than one toothpick full of our favorites, the smoked Gouda, the herb Camembert, the Parmigiano Reggiano.

A little piece here and there will not hurt us, we seemed to be saying to each other with each bite that we took. When we walked back out into the parking lot, we carried bags of fresh fruit and vegetables and returned to our healthy lifestyle.

Back at my uncle’s home, we took small bites from the cheese slices served to us on the dining table. “Oh no, not too much cheese for me,” we said. Our cheesy adventures are our little secret. We indulge in them in our mutual moments of weakness and strength, celebration and sorrow. Cheese, we have come to realize, is the all-time feel happy food. Fondue, crepes, grilled cheese sandwiches, baguettes with brie, mac & cheese, the list can go on and on. Each of these is a harbinger of smiles and laughter, deep conversations and fond memories.

Sunday night’s dinner was our most recent secret adventure. It marked the collapse of our longest (two week) cheese boycott in months and took place at Cinco de Mayo (La Batalla), an unassuming and delicious new Mexican joint a few minutes drive from our family home. Limited by the vegetarian non-selection, we forgot all about the big dangerous C (as in cholesterol) and indulged in all the delicious little c’s (cheese, chips, coke).

The pick was Mom’s. She is an expert when it comes to casing out new local dining joints and is one of those people who judges places based on their names, whose attention is grabbed by anything with a catchy title and exotic connotation.

Take the pizza place, Three Brothers from Italy, which she was dying to go to a few years ago. In her vivid imagination, she saw three chubby men in white aprons spinning pizza dough on their forefingers, stirring spaghetti sauce with their white-haired raspy-voiced mother looking on. When we got there, she was disappointed to find the standard slices of pizza being served up on paper plates by skinny teenagers. The three brothers, I told her, must have sold their place a long time ago.

Thankfully, Cinco de Mayo lived up to its name. Located on the long-winding Washington Avenue in Bergenfield, New Jersey , a town with a large Mexican, Filipino, and Indian population, this is a down-home diner where a long countertop and silver stools face a grill on which Authentic Mexican food is cooked up fresh and hot from morning to night. Every few minutes, a jukebox blares loud Spanish music, interrupting the murmurs that fill the rectangular room. The kitchen is open and the owner, a short Mexican man with a huge belly and a friendly smile, watches over his customers, making sure that they are enjoying their meals.

When we sat down, Mom and I were nervous. The menu, primarily in Spanish, did not seem to have any vegetarian options, apart from the guacamole and tortilla with refried beans appetizers.

“Do you have anything vegetarian?” Mom asked.

“Do you eat chicken?” the owner asked.

“No.”

“What about fish?”

“No.” We smiled and I crossed my fingers that we wouldn’t have to leave and go out searching for another place.

“Number Seven,” he pronounced, reaching out to reclaim our Specials of the Day menu cards. “You won’t find anything on this.”

Mom and I looked down and found number seven. “Vegetarian Platter,” I read out loud. “Avocado burrito, Chili con Queso, and Cheese Enchilada.” So much for my diet and Mom’s cholesterol count. We cleverly avoided this fact and made a go for it.

My mother made eye contact with the owner. “We’ll have the vegetarian platter,” she told him. “We’ll share.”

I love sharing food with my mother. We have the same taste and enjoy digging our forks into the same plate, chatting over small bites and sips from tall plastic glasses filled with Coke and ice chips.

We were delighted when our waitress, a curly-haired teenager with pretty silver-blue eye shadow, brought over a huge plate of home-made tortilla chips and spicy salsa in which chunky tomatoes and bits of coriander swam next to each other. I let Mom taste it first and watched as her eyes lit up.

“These chips are very good.” She pushed the plate toward me, inviting me to try one. I took that as my license to enjoy the meal and to forget about my no fried food, no cheese, no carbs diet.

When I put my first tortilla chip in my mouth, my resolve to lose weight was crunched away. “You know, I’ve been using the exercise ball to do abs,” I told my dining buddy, as if to remind myself that repeated abs and workouts would cancel out my poor eating habits. I went on to nibble away at most of the chips. Only later, when my stomach was bursting and I had to walk for 25 minutes in order to breathe properly again did I realize the slow and steady manner with which Mom had eaten her chips. Unlike me, she knows when to stop eating, when to say no, and how to exercise.

This month, my mother turns 66. You wouldn’t know it. She can do difficult courses on the treadmill, beat me in bowling, and keep a hoola hoop going around her waist. She is on her feet all day long … and her figure is one that I have already begun to envy. My mother also has a willpower that I admire and understands the meaning of “show, don’t tell.” Instead of telling me to eat less or to exercise more, she shows me how by giving me tips for cooking with no oil, eating all good things in moderation, and by setting an inspiring example through her well-oiled schedule of daily walks and exercise.
Even when our entree was served to us, Mom removed the excessive cheese that was melted on top of our cheese-stuffed tortillas and swept them to the side with her fork. She chewed carefully and substituted the cheese with the kicked up salsa. As I ate her leftover cheese, it struck me that Mom is a cautious adventurer, who knows how and when to draw the line.

Without her, I would surely drown in the dangerously delicious currents of my dangerous appetite. She truly is the perfect person with whom I can (and should) indulge in my secret cheesy adventures!

More about Cinco de Mayo (La Batalla)at Off the Broiler’s fabulous photos and review.

I’m back from Chicago, on a one-week vacation, and have a yard-long list of things to do before going back to work next Monday. I wanted to write all about the Kriti Festival, but now it feels too late. So, I’ll refer you to the pretty thorough summary at Lotus Reads.

Highlights of the festival, for me, were:

Anita Desai’s keynote address, which was replete with references to classic and contemporary poets and focused on what it means to be an immigrant writer.
What Anita Desai is reading right now: Lots and lots of poetry and Orhan Pamuk.

Breakfast with Anita Desai, where I had the chance to speak to her about my challenges of making time to write. I got some great advice from her, which I have to just put into practice over the next five years. She very simply said, “If you have something you want to write and finish, you just have to make the time and commitment to do it.” Nothing new or complicated there, but to hear it straight from her, that was something else. There is something I want to write and finish, and I most certainly returned from Kriti knowing that the time to work on it has arrived.

Ligy Pullapaly’s film Sancharram (The Journey). This was a beautiful film in Malayalam. Set in Kerala, it’s a coming-of-age love story about two young girls, childhood friends and neighbors. The screenwriter and director Ligy is an attorney who wrote the film in English and had it translated into Malayalam. Wow.

A fascinating panel I attended:I Don’t Want to Be a Doctor (Lawyer/Engineer/Etc.) Anymore! What do you do when you’ve succeeded in a South Asian-parent-approved career — and realize what you really want to do is be a writer or other kind of artist/performer? Can you do a 180-career-wise? Are there ways to incorporate the arts into a busy work/family life? Those who have done it tell their tales! Panelists: Rachna Vohra, Ligy Pullapaly, Prema Srinivasan, Anil Menon, Archana Chowhan, and Monica Pradhan.

Rachna is a Montreal-based editor and writer who used to work in the technology field. She used to make lists of mistakes in the books she read and send the suggested corrections to publishers. One day, one of the editors at a publishing house asked her if she would like to work on a manuscript. What a great story!

Monica Pradhan has an MBA and worked in the investment banking/business area for many years, until she decided to give it a go as a full-time writer. Her first novel The Hindi Bindi Club just came out this month, and I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s a multi-generational novel about daughters and mothers, plus recipes.

Voices of Resistance was a multi-arts political show by local Chicago artists, sponsored by SAPAC. The highlight for me was the poetry performance by imi rashid and sarwat rumi, accompanied on sitar by nikhil (i don’t remember his last name.

I really enjoyed being on the following panel with Rachna Vohra and Marina Budhos:
Recommended Children’s Literature
Writers and editors discuss what writers they love to read, and what makes a story stand out as exceptional children’s literature.

Preparing to moderate this discussion gave me a chance to think about all the great books and resources out there that I’ve had a chance to discover and appreciate over the last couple of years … and, in recent months, to write about here, at this blog.

You know, as an editor of a magazine for middle and high school students for the past 3 years, I have to walk a fine line everyday – how do I capture the attention of readers and educate without sounding too dry or too much like a typical textbook?

A good story, I’ve learned, opens the doorway to learning – it blows a breath of fresh air into the imagination. And, in the case of students and classroom learning, it also has the power to enlighten and break stereotypes. In my opinion, that’s not something we need to necessarily set out to do. If we tell a story authentically, that will just happen. Most certainly, Ask Me No Questions, by Marina Budhos is a book that falls into this category, so, naturally I was honored to have the chance to discuss kids lit with her. And, Rachna’s The Acorn and the Caterpillar is a fable about death – for kids and adults. ….Which leads me to the conclusion that the best children’s literature is what adults can also enjoy, appreciate, and learn from.

I should have taken more notes and written about the Kriti festival as soon as I came back, but I didn’t … so, I’ll end my very incomplete summary with a HUGE thank you to organizer Mary Anne Mohanraj for bringing together such an teriffic gathering of literary and arts afficinados from all over North America.