Craving the days of feasting in India
LIKE a pendulum, my mind swings between Desmond Tutu and idli sambar.
More in a moment about the popular South Indian cuisine that I am craving.
When Archbishop Tutu breathed his last, I posted on Facebook: “The last candle of conscience in South Africa has been snuffed out, and we must battle our way in darkness. Thank you for speaking out, Arch. I wish you restful eternal sleep.”
The ordained servant of God had been ailing for some time. He had lived a long life spanning 90 years. I accept he had to finally discard the purple robe for good. After all, he was a mortal and could not be expected to live forever.
Nonetheless, I am sad that the beloved theologian who was the moral compass of a country that he named the “Rainbow Nation”, will no longer speak truth to power, whatever its creed or colour.
There is nobody else who has the pluck he had. Famously outspoken on gay rights, fearlessly lobbying for Palestinian statehood or calling out the ANC on corruption, the Archbishop’s campaigns must have had many of his political adversaries wishing the world was rid of “this turbulent priest”.
While I ushered in the New Year by following the funeral proceedings on television, I also lamented missing out on my annual year-end holiday to India.
For the past two years, Covid-19 has seen me locked down at my house during December. Otherwise, I would have been relishing the December Music Season in Chennai. Also known as the Margazhi Kutcheri Season, this is the performing arts season when amateur and established artists across the globe visit the coastal capital of Tamil Nadu to take part in a celebration of classical music and dance hosted by scores of sabhas (organisations) for two months.
A side attraction to the music is the feast of epicurean proportions especially prepared for patrons of the arts at the sabha canteens.
For a few rupees, kalyana sappad (wedding-style lunch) is served on banana leaves with a diverse menu comprising steaming hot rice, different types of rasam (king soup), sambar (dhall), vegetable curries, mango and lime pickles, and a sweet such as payasam or Mysore pak prepared with pure ghee.
For the past few weeks, I have been dreaming of the breakfast I have been missing out on in Chennai. Nothing screams “good morning” quite like some crispy vadas, dosas, upma and appam with spicy sambar. And, of course, no Chennai breakfast for me is over until I have sipped at least four dabaras (stainless steel or brass “tumblers”) of Madras filter coffee. Madras filter, or decoction kaapi, is a chicory-laced coffee – the lifeblood of Tamilnadu – poured into furiously hot milk.
When attending music concerts in Chennai, I also make sure my backpack has an adequate supply of traditional Indian brittles made with jaggery (a kind of brown sugar made from sugar cane juice). I enjoy peanut jaggery balls, sesame jaggery balls, roasted gram balls and puffed rice balls.
As a visitor, I stick to bottled water. Usually, I also carried chilled mango juice to music and dance concerts in Chennai.
Stuck in Durban with the TV remote, unexceptional snacks, sanitiser and masks, I have also been yearning for mulligatawny soup, which I have written about before.
My favourite item on the menu of the Vrindavan Restaurant at the New Woodlands Hotel in Mylapore, Chennai, which I can revel in each evening of my holiday, is a double helping of piping hot and spicy mulligatawny soup with dollops of fresh cream, steamed rice on the side and toasted garlic bread.
I jerk myself out of the gastronomic stupor by remembering that If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
South Africa only lifted the curfew and further eased lockdown regulations on New Year’s Eve. It will still be another few months before regular international flights – with decent airfares – resume. Until then, I must gorge on idli sambar, peanut jaggery balls and mulligatawny soup in my mind’s eye.
Meanwhile, we must remember that despite all the doom and gloom of the past two years, better times will be sure to return.
The bombs that shattered Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II also ushered in benefits for the birth of the atomic age. Atomic energy can be a greater force for good than for evil. We have seen radiation curing cancer. Atomic power helps our energy production.
There will always be pandemics. New vaccines must be invented to cope with the mutation of viruses.
Through the ages, the way has not been smooth or straight; it has been broken periodically by failures and mistakes, by crushing setbacks and catastrophes, by dark periods of war and depression. But always, irresistibly, the element of progress has been at work.
Always, out of every great struggle or disaster, has come a new dawn, a rebirth of life and spirit, the powerful surge of progress carrying man onward and upward again.
We must develop the courage to lift our eyes above the agony of the moment. We may then see a world in which the forces of applied science offer new opportunities for healthier living, and where the diffusion of knowledge provides a freedom and richness of spiritual, cultural and economic attainment.
The hopes for the world rest on the flexibility, vigour, capacity for new thought and the fresh outlook of the young.
Personally, I have experienced that with age grows caution; an overly consciousness of difficulties, enmeshed in the conflict of personal problems and changing sense of values.
I do not have the energy to be entrepreneurial. But the youth of today must always carry the burden of enforcing and realising bold decisions. Older men and women, drawing on years of experience and knowledge of the world, may fix the line we must attain, behind which we may not compromise. But it is the young who must maintain that line.
The future is the special domain of the young.
Schooled in the lessons of the past, undeterred by the present, they must look ahead with confidence. Happy New Year.