Читать книгу Be My Guest - Priya Basil - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWe begin as guests, every single one of us. Helpless little creatures whose every need must be attended to, who for a long time can give nothing or very little back, yet who – in the usual run of things – nevertheless insinuate ourselves deep into the lives of our carers and take up permanent residence in their hearts.
Our early dependence is indulged in the expectation that we, in turn, will become dependable. Maybe reaching adulthood really means learning to be more host than guest: to take care more than, or at least as much as, to be taken care of. Implicit in this outlook, it seems to me, is still an assumption that each person will, eventually, become a parent – the ultimate role, at least in cultures where the nuclear family is considered the foundation of society. A role I decided to forego. A choice that left me questioning what my part can be in the life-play of hospitality.
Whether you have your own kids or not, it’s hard to avoid the general shift from guest to host, which is the hallmark of maturity. This switch is perhaps most challenging in relation to our parents, from whom we can’t help forever expecting certain protections and ministrations.
Nobody in the world welcomes us quite like our parents do. The reception, if we’re lucky, is a simultaneous cosseting and taking for granted. An experience that’s, at best, comforting and exasperating in equal measure, unique in its loaded history of give and take, its private parameters of permission and expectation. Mothers, of course, host us as no one else can – in their bodies. A nine-month gestation. Guest-ation?
‘THAT’S NOT ENOUGH!’ I stare into the brimming pot of kadhi, a creamy curry made with gram flour and yoghurt.
My mother ignores me, goes on stirring the turmeric-tinged sauce.
‘I could eat that all on my own – for breakfast!’ I’m aghast at the prospect of running short of one of my favourite dishes in the world. Give me a ladleful of this atop a mound of freshly boiled rice and I will take it whatever the hour, over whatever else is on offer. There have been times when I’ve eaten kadhi at every meal for days on end. Why on earth has my mother made so little?
‘Eyes bigger than stomach,’ she sighs.
Her words are the oldest censure of my eating life, the most frequent, and the most unheeded. They have little to do with the size of my body, which is slender, and everything to do with the size of my desire, which is vast, unwieldy, panoptic. Mum plunges the wooden spoon deep into the pot for a last stir. The paddle emerges coated with translucent slivers of onion, specks of tomato, a scattering of coriander leaves. My mouth waters, all reason drowns. I start scheming strategies to control how much might be eaten by our imminent guests. We have to use the small bowls to serve. And Mum shouldn’t insist on extra helpings. And whatever happens, she can’t offer anybody a portion to take home.
‘Stop being so silly,’ Mum says. ‘There’s plenty here. And anyhow, I can always make more for you.’
But it doesn’t matter how much she cooks. She can never make enough. Not for me.
Mine is perhaps an odd strain of a common affliction, a variant of the consumption epidemic ravaging our capitalist societies: those of us who have the most still want more, much more, than we need. Could it be otherwise in a system premised on the false conviction that our existence as we know it depends on the continuity of one thing alone: economic growth? Our appetites must keep increasing to propel the economy. Eyes bigger than stomach – the refrain that sums me up also epitomises our contemporary condition. But are there situations where greed, if not excusable, is understandable, and maybe even necessary?
Kadhi is what awaits me every time I go see my mother. Mostly in London, but wherever she happens to be – Australia or Kenya, the countries where my siblings live – whenever I come, kadhi is cooked. It is what I take away from each visit as well; my mother prepares and freezes batches of the tarka, the spicy tomato base at the heart of much North Indian cuisine, the most time-consuming aspect of the dish. Roasting spices, browning onions, reducing tomatoes – this alone can take up to an hour, before the main ingredients of the dish are added and the whole mixture cooked further. In the case of kadhi, the tarka is a mix of whole fenugreek and mustard seeds, ground cumin and coriander, curry leaves, onion, garlic, turmeric, green chilli and tinned tomato. All I have to do at home in Berlin is heat up Mum’s tarka, add yoghurt and flour, sprinkle fresh coriander to finish, and I have the taste of another home, the feeling of time turning in slow, savoury spirals. Each bite holds the flavour of the past and the present, a lifetime of my mother’s love, her unstinting hospitality.
Things my mother has long done for me almost effortlessly become, with age and illness, more burdensome for her. This has not curbed her generosity, but every gesture costs her more. I suspect I began to notice the change long after it had started to happen. One day I went home and there was no kadhi. Mum was all apology. She had bought the ingredients, but had simply not felt up to cooking. ‘But I’ll do it now!’ she said quickly. No doubt my face had betrayed my disappointment, which was not just about the setback to my stomach – substantial though that was – but the letdown of love. I knew that my mother would do anything for me, and the fact that she had not managed this relatively small task pained me. If even her boundless adoration, always ready to express itself, had not succeeded in pushing her over the threshold of limitation, she must be really unwell or really old. I felt her mortality, a frightening chill. She had never seemed so fragile, not even lying in a hospital bed, not even when she was totally grey from depression. I felt tremendously sorry for her – but also for myself. And I became angry, because my sense of what was most dependable in the world had been shaken. ‘It won’t take long.’ Mum set a pan on the hob, started rifling for ingredients. I protested, both earnestly and falsely, that it wasn’t necessary, I could wait, kadhi didn’t matter. ‘If you help me with the chopping we’ll be done before you know it.’ The sound of her voice was accompanied by the static of mustard seeds popping in hot oil, releasing a smell that pierced my nose as sharply as the tears welling in my eyes. ‘It’s the onions,’ I insisted to Mum when she noticed. It was not the onions. It was life, tipping the scales of give and take.
THE WAY WE COOK for and eat with others is one of the more tangible, quotidian ways of measuring generosity. The type and amount of food offered, how it’s served and to whom – these things define hospitality at the table, and beyond. Around the world, more people may be spending less time cooking – in the UK, US and Germany right now it’s between five and six hours a week – and eating. In my family the ratio of food–time to life–time remains high, though, of course, we consider such a distinction spurious, because for us food is one of the most intense ways of living. We visit supermarkets as others do art galleries. We cook as others run marathons. We offer, at one spread, flavours of a number and variety that others might only encounter in a packet of pick ’n’ mix.
Our family line of food fanatics may well stretch back over generations: the greed-gene honed over eons, mutated to fixate on the gratifications of grub at the expense of everything else. However, for me, it all begins with my maternal grandmother, an ardent eater, force-feeder and devout believer in the stomach as the only way to the heart: Mumji almost everybody calls her, the motherly moniker perhaps partly an acknowledgement of her role as arch-feeder. Her cooking swells sympathies and bellies, raises tempers and temperatures, sends some running and brings others back begging for more. She wields ingredients like weapons and has made food the front line in a fight for first place in the affections of the family. At her hob or her table, hospitality often holds hands with its brother word hostility. Both are birthed from ghos-ti, their ancient Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger – the trio of roles through which we shift all our lives. So apt that this inescapable flux was once contained in a single word.
FOOD HAS LONG BEEN wielded as a form of power, a potent means of commending or condemning, of flaunting extravagance and displaying largesse. Ancient Roman history is replete with tales of excess, feasts as the stage for vanity and vengeance, like the notorious Emperor Elagabalus whose legendary spreads were spiked with sadistic surprises: at the end of a lavish meal that might include nightingale tongues, parrot heads and peacock brains you could be escorted to a guestroom for the night, only to find a tiger inside ready to devour you.
Every century and every territory has its fables of exorbitance: the Manchu Han Imperial Feast hosted by Kangxi, the fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, where 108 courses were served to more than 2,500 guests. The hundred-dish spreads laid out regularly at the behest of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. The fifty-course banquet that marked the wedding of Marie de’ Medici to Henry IV, King of France, in Florence at the turn of the seventeenth century. The night in 1817 when the future George IV of England held a dinner in honour of the visiting Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, where 127 dishes, prepared by Marie-Antoine Carême – then the greatest and most expensive chef in the world – were served. The eighteen tonnes of food flown to Persepolis in 1971 for a three-day celebration, apparently ‘the most expensive party ever’, held by the Shah of Iran to mark his country’s 2,500th anniversary. Such occasions hint that excessive hospitality can be a form of hidden hostility: feasting as a friendly warning of the host’s means and power.
While some have been subjected to extravagance, food has also always been punitively withheld from others, sometimes on an enormous scale and with horrific consequences. Since grain became a free-market commodity in the nineteenth century, profit has often been prioritised over humanitarian protection. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis describes the extreme weather fluctuations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that led to severe drought and monsoons in parts of the global south, including China, Brazil, Egypt and India. Davis shows how colonial administrations exploited these natural disasters to trigger and exacerbate famines that led to mass deaths, which weakened the affected lands and therefore strengthened foreign control.
When drought hit the Deccan Plateau in 1876 there was actually a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. Yet the viceroy, Lord Lytton, head of the British colonial administration in India, insisted the surplus be sent to England. Almost simultaneously, Lytton was planning a spectacular Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India. Its climax, Davis writes, ‘included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas, the most colossal and expensive meal in world history’. During the course of that week, Davis adds, an estimated 100,000 Indians starved to death in Madras and Mysore. At the height of the Indian famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 tonnes) of wheat. Peasants starved, but government officials were directed ‘to discourage relief works in every possible way’. Davis’s book exposes Western imperialism at its most deliberately inhospitable: destroying people by keeping their own food stocks from them. Suffering colonised subjects were treated not like enemies or strangers, but as if they were not human. By 1902, between 12 and 29 million Indians had died as a result of British policies in the face of famine.
Power often asserts itself through excesses of both hostility and hospitality.
I IMAGINE MUMJI FIRST truly understood the power of food in her own small way after she used it to save her future husband’s life. Soon after their betrothal in India, in the summer of 1947, my grandfather, Papaji, got caught in the brutal upheavals of Partition. He had travelled from Amritsar to Lahore, intending to head on from there to the village of Gujranwala, where he’d been born and where his family had lived before migrating to Kenya in the 1930s. The borders arbitrarily drawn up by the British as they withdrew from India in 1947 left Gujranwala part of a new country called Pakistan. Papaji became one of the millions displaced by the chaos that accompanied the division of India – considered predominantly Hindu – to create Pakistan – conceived from the outset as an Islamic republic. This led to splits along ethnic lines across the whole subcontinent. The announcement of the new borders on 17 August, two days after the declaration of independence, triggered a mass movement of people who, fearful of what the change might mean, sought the supposed security of being amongst their own kind: Muslims in India headed to Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs in the territory that had become Pakistan left for India. Around 15 million people were uprooted. Communal violence erupted between all groups and up to a million died either in the fighting or from one of the diseases that were rife in the hundreds of refugee camps at which so many ended up. Papaji was stuck in one such camp for several weeks and caught typhoid. Eventually he managed to travel, with the help of a relative, back to Mumji’s family home in Amritsar. He arrived utterly wasted, hardly able to walk. She had to save him. He was her only chance to escape an existence marred by a youthful mistake: a brief love affair that had ended in pregnancy and an illegitimate child. Papaji, having come from abroad, knew none of this – yet. She needed him to get well so she could get away. And so she cooked.
She painstakingly prepared all the most restorative foods, like khichari, the classic Indian comfort food, a one-pot meal of rice and lentils cooked for the ill with almost no spices so it’s easier to digest. Mumji laced hers with fat dollops of butter to help Papaji gain weight faster. Soon she had him on panjiri, a delectable crumble of wheat flour, nuts and spices browned in ghee, traditionally given to nursing mothers as a nutritional supplement. Spoonful by spoonful she restored him to health. Months later, when he was fine again, they were married and travelled together to Kenya. There, Mumji often told the story of how she had saved Papaji, but other rumours were already circulating about who had really saved whom. So many hearts to win, so many tongues to still! How would Mumji manage? As with many women of her background and era, her means were limited. Food was one force she could harness, and so the kitchen became her combat zone. She would destroy any doubts about her past by cooking up a most flavoursome present.
IN ENGLISH TO COOK something up means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I’m perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the entire universe and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything.
Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You’re invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.
A RECIPE IS A story that can’t be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks by cuisine and you’ll find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of ingredient quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – ‘Julia’s Apple Tart’ – or in a sub-line – ‘Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’. Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially nowadays, with online food blogs abounding and all kinds of once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket. Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it’s tradition.
No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. Hummus in the Middle East may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dip, a group of Lebanese hummus-aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their ur-hummus credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you’ll need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household. A year after the Lebanese set their hummus record, the title was taken by a group in Israel who filled a satellite dish with four tonnes of the dip. Months later the Lebanese managed to top that and reclaim the Guinness World Record title. The dispute continues, a mild incarnation of the greater, more intractable regional conflict. I should probably refrain from dipping my finger into such loaded contests about the humble chickpea, but I adore hummus, and my favourite version is one made by a Palestinian friend – without a trace of garlic. And, of course, she is certain hummus was invented in her village.
IN THE EXTENDED FAMILY household in Nairobi where Mumji lived with Papaji during the first years of marriage, there was culinary competition of a very different sort. Food was complimented as people never could be. Papaji’s family were a reticent bunch. Their approval, if it came at all, took the form of a cheeky pinch or punch. Fortunately, appreciation of edibles did not need to be expressed in words, it could be conveyed in sighs of satisfaction and second helpings and – from the ladies – sidelong requests for recipes. The latter were never obliged: Mumji evolved a repertoire of tactics for rebuffing them. ‘Forget the recipe! I’ll just make it for you again,’ she promised her preferred people, while those she liked less, but dared not risk alienating were told, ‘There is no recipe, you just have to watch me make it.’ Needless to say, the occasion would never arise. Even in the communal family kitchen she contrived to guard her methods from her in-laws. If she was ever cornered into explaining how to make a dish, she deliberately left out key ingredients or crucial steps. Even – especially – with her own daughter, my mother. Recently Mum asked Mumji to show her how to make gulab jamuns – small, deep-fried balls of milk solids soaked in sugar syrup. ‘You can buy the ready mix at the Indian shop,’ Mumji said. ‘Have you ever done that?’ Mum wondered. ‘Of course not!’ Mumji replied, and changed the subject.
There’s someone else in our family who can’t share recipes – Mumji’s youngest son, an exceptional cook in his own right. The difference is, he’ll do his best to tell you, but he’s so inventive he can barely keep up with himself. He’s one of those people who can rustle up a magical meal from the most mundane ingredients, all without planning ahead or consulting a cookbook. When he founded Foodloom, a catering company he ran with my mother in the early 2000s, they carefully noted details for every signature dish they developed together and still no recipe was ever definitive. However perfect it seemed to us, my uncle had another idea for how it might be improved. I spent periods working for the company while writing my first novel. Whatever job I was assigned, I felt my ultimate duty was simply to eat that exquisite food. I was the kitchen assistant who licks the smidgen of sauce left in the pan, the waitress who gobbles the last samosa on the tray.
Mumji, amazingly, has never even owned a cookbook, which might also account for her caginess about recipes. Alongside her reluctance to share details of her dishes, she is averse to any assistance with making them. Even now, in her late eighties, she doesn’t want help in the kitchen. This is not simply down to control-freak tendencies and a fierce habit of independence. It’s because she needs to commandeer any praise that the food will elicit. Every compliment and thank you has to be hers. All of it. Every last word, every sigh, every burp. All hers. Only hers. And there’s never, ever enough.
‘She’s an amazing cook,’ friends and family say about Mumji, before grudgingly adding, ‘but she never shares a recipe.’ Perhaps for this reason, Mumji has no really close friends. It’s probably also why she finds it hard to ask for recipes. Instead, she eats with sharp attentiveness, turning food over with her fingers, scanning, sniffing and sucking in search of spice traces. Sometimes, she delves deeper with seemingly casual questions: ‘Some people put ajwain in everything because it’s good for digestion – what do you think?’ Afterwards, she’ll remark to us how disappointing the dishes were: ‘Jassi has no idea about what flavours go together! Who puts sweetcorn with fish?’ Or, ‘John really fancies himself a chef, but he doesn’t have a clue! Did you see the number of cloves in that chicken?’ Soon, if not the very next day, the family might be treated to a variation on a dish recently tasted somewhere . . . at Jassi’s or John’s?
You can feast on Mumji’s food, but rarely do you get to do so with her. The first time my husband dined at her table – an invitation that finally came more than a year after we’d met – he followed the example set by the rest of us and filled his plate from the spread laid out for his welcome. But when we started tucking in, he waited. ‘What about Mumji?’ He pointed to the empty chair. ‘She’s not coming yet,’ I told him. ‘Just start,’ the others said. Still he hesitated, disabled by a decorum that dictated you don’t begin eating until everyone is seated and served. A few minutes later, Mumji entered the dining room bearing a fresh batch of chapatis. Apron sprayed with flour, cheeks red from heat, she went around offering the rotis, but stopped short at the sight of my husband’s untouched food. ‘Eat!’ she ordered. And when he tried to explain she cut him off: ‘I’m working hard so you getting everything hot hot hot, and you letting everything go all cold. Eat!’ He obeyed and, ever after, reluctantly accepted her peculiar protocol.
Part of Mumji’s purpose in serving is to survey how much people are ingesting. She keeps a mental tab on the amount of helpings taken, the bowls of dhal re-filled, the number of rotis eaten. She remembers how much you had last time and is upset if you don’t outdo yourself at each subsequent meal. When my brother and cousins were teenagers they could easily consume many rotis apiece. Mumji would gloat and report, as if some world record had been broken: ‘He dupped eleven!’ There is a special word for it because, of course, nobody just eats her food, they dupp as if it were their last meal on earth.
Dupp, a slangy Punjabi sound, which I like to believe Mumji invented. To dupp is to eat with abandon and to excess. It’s a wonderful, reckless activity that often comes with the high price tag of remorse and indigestion. This does not deter dedicated duppers. Nowadays each boy, as Mumji still calls them though all are grown men, might manage six rotis – a healthy appetite by any standards, but Mumji, still nostalgic for the heyday of dupping, continues to roll out dozens of flatbreads. They puff up on her small cast-iron thava to sighs of disappointment and mutterings about how these days everyone is on a diet. She cooks for the moments when someone’s appetite will breach the quotidian limits of consumption and she can rejoice.
In contrast – possibly even in reaction – to this, my uncle’s philosophy at Foodloom was leave them wanting more. This didn’t mean guests were underfed, simply served enough – an aberration in a family for whom eating meant being stuffed, almost suffocating from surfeit.
Descending from such a tribe, it’s no surprise that for a long time food for me equalled going overboard: over-buying, over-catering, over-eating. Change came slowly, through a mix of choice and chance. Truth be told, mostly I’ve been coerced into having less by circumstance – periods of lower income, spells of illness. But that covetous core, eyes bigger than stomach, the part of me where greed always trumps need, remains alive and well, and constantly craving.
BEING ASKED HOW YOU made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way have extra layers of flavour even before they’re cooked, for they come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations.
Recipes can be both conduits of continuity and channels of change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered . . . recipes are records – fragile, enduring – of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly ‘authentic’: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality.
Food was amongst the first commodities to be traded globally and this led to many cultures adopting foods that originated thousands of miles away. I always thought of chillies and coriander as quintessentially Asian ingredients. Only recently, eating dishes rich in both cooked by Brazilian friends, did I learn that they arrived in Asia in the sixteenth century with Portuguese explorers, who’d encountered them in Latin America. Before that Asian cuisine used white or black pepper to add spicy heat. Chilli was substituted because it was easier to grow and therefore cheaper.
The history of food is the history of globalisation. Every ingredient, however genuinely local it might seem, has behind – and, likely, ahead – of it a trail of travel and transformation. Still, we can’t help but cling to a dream of original provenance. The very name of a dish can affect our appreciation of it. ‘Give it an ethnic label,’ says experimental psychologist Charles Spence, ‘such as an Italian name, and people will rate the food as more authentic.’
WHEN I WAS SMALL, if my parents even casually mentioned the possibility of another sibling, I threatened to run away should it ever come to pass. I couldn’t express it as such, but I felt there was no room for anyone else in our household, that there wouldn’t be ‘enough’. What exactly I’d be deprived of I couldn’t have said. Our unit of four was privileged in many ways, my sister and I did not lack for anything, certainly not materially. Yet insecurity pervaded my childhood.
Inequality was rife in the Kenya of the 1970s and ’80s in which I grew up. There was a chasm not just between rich and poor, but between black and non-black. The country had achieved independence from the British in 1963, yet remained steeped in vestiges of colonialism, not least a sordid legacy of racial hierarchy. Social interactions between different coloured people were limited. The well-off Indian community, which my family was part of, kept mostly to itself. Such exclusiveness could not spare anyone the wider reality: it was there in the shanties you passed on the way to and from your fenced-off mansion. In the young faces you turned away from when they approached your car at the traffic lights, empty palms outstretched at your window. It was there in the risk – actual, but also imagined and exaggerated – of being robbed that led to a vigil of locked doors, changing guards and perpetual suspicion. It was there in qualms about the sun, which could quickly darken your skin, and thus, it seemed, your value. Everybody around me wanted to be paler, because white people were considered better, even if they too were despised for their ‘loose’ ways and the power they’d lorded over us in former days. Small wonder then that fear dominated my youth. It was like a tinnitus, an indistinct buzz – sometimes loud, sometimes low, always present. A symptom, I would understand only much later, of sensing injustice but not being equipped to confront it, let alone try to do anything about it.
Yet there were instances when the differences and their attendant anxieties dissolved. It happened when your nanny ate fat slices of homemade pizza with you while your parents went out to a party. When you bought corn on the cob from a street vendor and each yellow kernel, roasted brown and infused with charcoal fumes, tasted mildly smoked, and afterwards the scent lingering on your fingers was the smell of the evening near a shanty town as hundreds of jikos were stoked into action to heat up hundreds of dinners. When the ice-cream seller rang his bell and kids from all over would gather round his cart clamouring for a Red Devil. The lollies would stain your mouth, tongue and teeth, so that for hours after eating every one of you, whoever you were, resembled a vampire freshly feasted on blood. It happened at inter-school tournaments, where there was an almost democratic mingling when someone passed around a pack of Mabuyu, candied baobab seeds. The pinky-purple candy, possibly the cheapest, commonest confection in Kenya, came in clear, unbranded little plastic bags, with no hint of an ingredients list to betray the vast quantity of sugar required to make the salty-sweet nuggets that furred your mouth and left you fiercely thirsty. The Marmite of Kenya: people either love or hate Mabuyu. I couldn’t stand them, but ate them now and then out of a desperate wish to have something – anything – in common with everybody else.
My family’s circle of friends, though all Indian, was religiously diverse. We would regularly get together with Hindus, Muslims or other Sikhs for what the adults called ‘kitty parties’, where each family would bring a dish. Such events took place over all kinds of occasions, from Eid to Diwali to Vaisakhi to Christmas. Sometimes there was a karoga, the Kenyan–Indian equivalent of a barbecue, then all the dads would take centre stage for the cooking, bottles of Tusker in hand, proudly performing the hospitality that was usually the unremarked domain of women. The dads could just karoga a bit and get all the credit, while women like my mum could gain attention only through organising elaborate charity balls or preparing sumptuous dinners.
Karoga means ‘to stir’ in Swahili. Over the course of a few hours, a meat curry is cooked outside on a huge cast-iron thava, the pan set over a charcoal-fuelled jiko. All the ingredients – meat, onions, spices, tomatoes – are chopped and prepared in advance so that the men – it’s usually just men – can hang around the thava and sip beer while slowly simmering and stirring the curry to completion. The running joke is that the more alcohol is imbibed, the better the food tastes, at least to those who have – or are – drunk.
It’s said the tradition dates back to the early twentieth century when Indian workers, brought over by the British to build the Uganda Railway, started cooking their meal while on the job. They’d add different ingredients, stir each time they passed the pan, and after a few hours they’d have a fragrant lunch. A charming tale, though one that’s hard to believe given the terrible conditions under which workers laboured to build the Lunatic Line, as the railway was dubbed. It’s unlikely there was time for slow-cooking curries during a building process marked by all kinds of disasters, including attacks by wild animals. Four Indians died for every mile of the track, which cut across the country, from Mombasa at the coast to Lake Victoria near the border with Uganda.
Karoga is no longer the sole preserve of Kenyan Indians; it has gone mainstream. Restaurants across Nairobi are now dedicated to this ritual, which has managed to override cultural boundaries in a society still scarred by racial difference. It could be because the karoga clubs offer a situation where you are served, but still cook yourself; you pay, yet work. Without the clear dynamic of host and guest maybe everyone’s skin colour matters less. The majority of establishments offer halal meat. Many Kenyans – over 80 per cent of whom are Christian – are reassured by the label, which they see as a guarantee that they won’t get dog or donkey meat in disguise. Alcohol remains an essential part of the karoga experience and that may be the real key to karoga kinship.
FOOD CAN DIVIDE AS much as connect. Even where a group is relatively homogenous, difference can suddenly sizzle, like water splashed on a hot griddle. I saw this in my father’s annoyance that our Muslim friends didn’t eat any meat dishes at our house – because they, rightly, assumed it wasn’t halal. ‘That’s it! We’re not inviting them again!’ he would rage as my mother put away excess leftovers of chicken, which the guests hadn’t touched. ‘Who do they think they are? I don’t want to see them any more. Do you hear me? Never!’ Quick to anger, my father also calmed down pretty fast. Next time we were on the way to visit Muslim friends he’d swear that he wouldn’t have any meat they served – because he knew it would be halal. By the time we were around their table, his misgivings would have disappeared and he’d tuck into whatever was on offer, extending compliments and having seconds. Years later, after my family moved briefly to London, my parents themselves sometimes bought meat from a halal butcher in Tooting. What was the alternative when certain dishes, like lamb pilau or samosas, turned out much better made with the less fatty meat, which just happened to be halal?
There’s nothing like desire – whatever its object – to help us forget our compunctions. Food can make some of us compulsive and thus push us past certain limits – of propriety, of decency, of sanity. Whenever this happens to me, my husband says I get ‘The Look’ – a tense, hunted, frenzied expression that announces greed has taken hostage all sense. Often at pains to appear polite and decent, I have consigned manners to oblivion and chased canapé trays at parties, helping myself to handfuls at a time. Normally eager to avoid the cold at all costs, I have pulled on coat and boots and headed out into the midnight snow to buy a packet of crisps. Generally disposed to honesty, I have lied that there are no leftovers only to secretly scoff them all myself. I never understood the restraint practised by believers whose faith imposed food restrictions. How could they resist?
If only my best friend tasted bacon, I was convinced she would be converted to pork regardless of her loyalty to Islam. One of my more ignoble childhood pranks involved disguising some ham in the food we served her and then trying not to gloat as she ate, exclaiming how delicious it was. Only after she’d finished did I reveal my ploy. Her utter mortification unsettled me. The taste had changed nothing; indeed, the fact that she’d liked it made her feel guiltier. I felt bad too, though that didn’t stop me from trying the trick again, as if I might still tempt her out of her convictions. For long afterwards, a question puzzled me: how did ideology have the power to proscribe pleasure? Then, in my thirties, I became a vegetarian and finally grasped, in my own way, how a belief could not just curb but entirely cancel out certain cravings. The impossible happened: I could pass over food I’d once adored without a pang. If belief is a choice, keeping faith is when a choice becomes habit.
My dad may have forgotten his grudges in the face of an aromatic lamb dish, but there were deeper differences that he could not dismiss. Some distinctions, it seems, won’t be bridged, some borders won’t be crossed, no matter how many meals are shared with others, no matter how many foreign delicacies are consumed. That’s why, though some of their closest friends were Muslim, some of their dearest in-laws white, my parents warned that my sister and I should never become romantically attached to a Muslim, or a black person, or a white (in that order). Of course there was no logical explanation for this racist rule. The best my parents could manage was that it was against our religion.
Looking back, I think we saw ourselves as victims and therefore somehow absolved from any duty to others, however much worse their plight. On our tables there was plenty, but our minds were impoverished, our imaginations limited. We prided ourselves on our hospitality, but had little sense of just how far the act could stretch – and in the stretching, who it might enable us to become.
PERHAPS BECAUSE OF MY cravings for security and certainty, I’m no neophile when it comes to food. As a child this meant always ordering scampi and chips at the Carnivore restaurant on Sundays. Eating only the orange Smarties. Asking for my mum’s devil’s food cake on every birthday. I would even pester my friends to get their mothers to make things I liked if I was visiting: Aunty Sajida’s mince and potato koftas, Aunty Bubbles’ risotto. At the same time, I suffered from food envy: the meal of my fellow diners, or strangers’ dishes on an adjoining table, would tantalise me. It was as though I wanted something else – but not on my own plate, or of my own volition. One way around this was to try, where possible, to taste everyone else’s fare. ‘No, you can’t have a bite!’ my sister would snap, on principle, whenever my fork hovered towards her dinner.
