Dishing it up smartly
Thriller writer chews over the cultural significance of curry.
Curry, as distinct from Curry, is a work of fiction, Naben Ruthnum explains in this brisk, discursive examination of the problematic nature of diasporic culture.
It’s problematic, he suggests, because of how “brown people” (he means those who look Indian to those who are not Indian) and brown writers in particular respond: by enacting the role of the disassociated cultural refugee, who engages in the comforting and sentimental nostalgia of rediscovering his or her roots. In the imaginative return to the “solid subcontinent”, their shaky presence in the “wavering West” is steadied.
Ruthnum, who writes thrillers under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley, was born in Kelowna, Canada, where “as a child, I noticed the noticing, the whipped-around heads at the melanin flood my family represented when we entered any public space”, but his ancestral roots are in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean.
The food he grew up with was different from the dozens of cuisines in the Indian subcontinent, which are themselves the product of conquest and assimilation (chillies are not native to India, but came from the Caribbean in the 15th century by way of the trade-savvy Portuguese). And those cuisines, and Indian home cooking, are utterly different from the bland “ever-inauthentic mass of dishes” in the Indian restaurants.
Ruthnum weaves these threads into a trio of interlinked essays under the subject headings in the subtitle, in which he reports on his reading of dozens of bad “homecoming-comfort-authenticity” stories that he calls, with a dismissiveness more affectionate than scornful, “currybooks”. In the third (and best) section, he ruminates thought-provokingly on the nature of race and ethnicity – and why they are not the same thing.
It’s a fresh and exhilarating work by an accomplished young writer that neatly suggests that the diaspora, like the curry, may not exist.