The Pleasures Of An Indian Gooseberry

Love is not hatm d go round

Iwent to a women’s coll ge called Mount Holyok My best friend there w s an orange-haired pain called Jennifer Harris. he and I stayed in touc long enough for her to isit me in New York wh had my second daughter. nnifer too was married then, to her girlfriend, Sara (who I also knew). They had a baby boy together – J nifer carried the baby.

This bit of personal history is perhaps why my niece, Sumi, called me to brainstorm ideas for how to get our closest relatives to attend her upcoming wedding with her short-time girlfriend, Kalyani Sharma, to be held in Kalyani’s home in Long Island.

“I want my wedding to be beautiful,” said Sumi. “I don’t want any of those snarky, judgy comments that our family is famous for. How to pull this off ?”

Frankly, I couldn’t understand why Sumi wanted our conservative, cacophonous, embarrassing, politically incorrect relatives at her wedding. Weren’t she and Kalyani fighting enough battles already? They were gender-fluid brown-skinned immigrants in a polarised land led by an orange-haired bigot.

“That’s precisely why I want to keep in touch with my roots,” said Sumi.

Having been an immigrant myself, I understood immediately. When you move from your hometown, whether to Mumbai or Montreal, there are many aspects of your homeland that you can duplicate: food, clothes, music and movies. But you cannot recreate your relatives.

What happens when you live away from home is that you tend to choose friends who are just like you. People who belong to your social class, watch the same shows, have the same political beliefs and interests. Soon your life becomes an echo chamber. You only hear your own thoughts. There is a beauty and harmony in this. But this is also the quickest road to intolerance.

Your relatives though, are another kettle of fish. If you are Indian, you probably have whack-jobs as family members. Interacting with them is an exercise in cultivating the tolerance that India is famous for, and I might add, is in danger of losing. Tolerance as a virtue is eroding globally.

The wedding would be held in Kalyani’s home in Long Island, with her brother officiating as the priest. The couple’s friends and family would be in attendance. Our extended family was the wildcard.

“A lot of our friends here are gender fluid questioning artists and activists,” said Sumi. “I want my worlds to collide: Palghat meets Paco, my best being (not man or woman).” After much discussion, Sumi and I hit upon the solution. The next day, the whole family received an email with a single photo. Two brown hands, each with the words, “She said yes.”

ON THE

Underneath the invitation to the wedding was a single line in eye-popping bold print: “Food catered by Noorni Natarajan.”

That was all that was needed for some 50 of my relatives to pack up en masse and land in Long Island, basically salivating. And you know what, I didn’t blame them. I would travel to Antarctica to eat this food.

You see, Noorni Natarajan (also known as Noona), has churned out feasts of uncompromising quality for most of his 60-odd years, beginning as a cook in his native village and then moving to New Jersey in the ’80s. His food was tasty, consistent, and importantly for immigrants, transported the eater back to the homeland, which, for us, was a patch of land in the border of two South Indian states: Kerala and Tamil Nadu. We called this region Palghat but it was more than geography. It was a confluence of identities and cuisines. For people from Palghat, food was more than nourishment for the soul. It was a source of pride, and a pledge of loyalty to cooking techniques, red rice and elephant foot yam (Amorphophallus paeoniifolius).

Take for instance, a simple dish that we call Nellikai Arachu Kalakki, which literally translates to Amla

Grind and Stir. The name of the dish suggests its making technique. It has just four ingredients: ripe gooseberries (amla), coconut, yogurt/curds, and green chillies. That’s mostly it. A few sprigs of curry leaves fried in coconut oil along with some black mustard seeds for the garnish. But the sour, tangy taste of this dish makes my heart sing. Eat with hot red rice and a dollop of ghee or better yet, coconut oil. It is divine. Also relatively unknown. Try getting this in Mumbai or Delhi, even in a South Indian restaurant. People cannot pronounce it much less make it. Noo-na listed it as a key highlight in his wedding menu, alongside other unpronounceable dishes such as puli-inji, chenai-eriseri, chepankizhangu-puliseri, koorkan-kizhangu-mezhukkuvaratti (yes, that’s one name), and paal-adai-pradhaman.

No wonder the relatives toed the line. And how smart of Sumi to figure this out before her wedding.

All you may need is love. But sometimes you need food to facilitate the love.

When you move you can duplicate many aspects of your homeland .... But you cannot recreate your relatives!

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LG ROLLABLE TV XIAOMI MI MIX ALPHA

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Foldable, curved, bendable. Screens seem to have taken a new avatar completely. And while some made phones and laptops with foldable screens, LG went the whole hog and actually created a rollable screen TV. Press a button and the rolled out screen curves in from the top and opens up flat. It takes up no space when rolled in and becomes a giant TV when rolled out. The future is here and rolling towards you at a frantic pace.

This Xiaomi phone may well be the most split-personality phone ever. It starts with a screen that wraps from the front right to the back. One piece and seamless. The only question. Why and what for? How do you use it? What do you do with apps at the back? How do you hold it? What about the fragility? Drop this one and it’s a goner! And you can’t even put a back cover on it, can you? Full marks for innovation on this one, zero for reality and actual usage.

MATEO SMART BATHROOM MAT

Let’s wrap it up with something both weird and yet very useful. A bathroom mat with more tech in it than a computer. It can give you a treasure trove of health data including weight, posture and body composition. The mat comes with 7000 dot-pressure mapping and can recognise each family member and deliver the body metrics with advice. End of the era for the regular weighing scale.

That’s the best of CES 2020. Next time, back to jaw-dropping regular programming. See you then.

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you may need is love. But som acilitate the love.