Curry

Оглавление

Naben Ruthnum. Curry

Introduction

Eating

Reading

Race

Coda

Works Cited

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Exploded Views Series

Отрывок из книги

for Kay Ruthnum

My father, sister, and I had gone to Mauritius to visit my grandmother, discovering only when we arrived that she was terminally ill. Well, my dad and sister found this out, not me. I was too young to be involved. I was also relatively unconcerned; I didn’t know her, having met her only once, as a toddler too young to form memories. The only recollection I have of being in my grandmother’s presence took place shortly before her funeral, in her hospital room, where I pulled on the brim of my Bulls cap until my father took it off my head. We left a few minutes later.

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Curry can, and often does, tell a similarly loaded story, but one that goes beyond emphasizing aspects of a single persona: it carries a weight of meaning across the immense and indefinable South Asian diasporic culture. The familiar flavour is an aromatic but invisible link between the writer and the reader, the cook and the eater. In the steadily building mass of South Asian diasporic writing and discussion of identity, curry is an abiding metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecoming, and distance from family and country. This collection of dishes covers a lot of metaphorical ground. It relies on a non-specific blend, a combination that can be adjusted and spun multiple ways, and yet carries identifiable defining top and bottom notes of flavour. The exact ingredients often aren’t clear to anyone but the cook, and sometimes not even to him or her – the Indian ammas of recipes and diasporic novels are notorious for their freehanded dashes and pinches of ingredients, and the first- or second-generation protagonists of these novels are consistently grasping for a sense of identity and place as they try to get the recipe right.

Eating, reading, and remembering are all activities that begin domestically, perhaps especially in diasporic households, where home life can be all of life for kids who don’t insist on spending time outside or with friends in unregulated, non-learning-related activities. In the spirit of a book about curry and reading, I should be making a comparison between the bookshelves and the spice rack of a diasporic household, but there’s a crucial difference. I got to choose what I read when I was a kid, but not what I ate. From the outset, I avoided books with Indian names on the cover, with tangles of red silk and those fonts that designers love sticking above a picture of a banyan tree and a scattering of cardamom seeds. I demanded a justification for why we – amend that we to my parents; I wasn’t buying anything – bought so many of these books written by people from a country my parents hadn’t even grown up in, or visited. They didn’t bother offering an answer to my questions, which were, more truthfully, attacks. The back-cover copy on these volumes was, if not identical, repetitive. Well into my teens, I’d always opt for Roth over Rushdie, Nabokov over Narayan.

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