Coffee, Tea and Me

 Hospet was our launchpad for expeditions into different parts of Northern  Karnataka. We stayed at an upmarket hotel cum lodge, which had a choice of air-conditioned  and  parabola edged  rooms with french windows that allowed you  to look  outside. There wasn't much to see; one large multistoreyed building  with a large tree  and stretches of concrete terraces and water tanks but the room was airy and comfortable and had colour TV.
What we struggled with were  the beverages! Of course I use the plural we here when the truth of the matter is that my friend has surmounted the challenges that the absence of beverages  can set up. So while I complained that the morning tea looked like all the kitchen cloths had been boiled in it and  shuddered whenever I broke through the ugly brown encrustation to  encounter a thick viscous over-sugared brew,  she stoically sipped  black coffee without sugar, without even so much as a murmur.
My objections of course have a long pre-history. Despite growing up in New Delhi in a fresh-filter-coffee-preparing- family  and  subsequently marrying into yet another coffee filter entrenched family, I had unashamedly succumbed to the delicate flavours of Darjeeling leaf tea and was completely besotted by Runglee Rungliot, Razia Begum, Orange Pekoe and  for want of an alternative, Lipton's Green Label, which if fresh can make for a pretty decent brew.
Each morning at Hospet brought on the attendant trauma of terrible tea and I had not  brought along with me any tea in instant teabags since it is my unswerving belief  that bagged leaf teas never rise to any occasion.
 So there was nothing much to do except gulp down the ghastly liquid that postured as tea and comfort oneself  with the knowledge that the morning breakfast was more than suited to the requirements of   a royal delegation. We partook of  fresh iddlis and hot vadais and chutney and sambaar and pongal or special fried rice with a pineapple kesari to boot; all this around 7.30 am in the morning, before we embarked on our day's journey.
We got back on the beverage route when we drank thin highly sugared tea, atop a hill temple at Jatinga Rameshwaram   which, the officiating hosts told us to treat  as prasadam. Tea is psychologically required at moments like this, especially if you have ascended 708 not so easy  steps to view an Ashokan edict,  so we sipped the  brown, warm liquid that could  have easily doubled up as charnamrit.  We dealt with the problem of not having good tea in the evenings eventually by not drinking the beverage after disappointing experiments at roadside tea stalls.
By which time  a wonderful idea took possession of me. This was after all coffee country! You couldnt blame anyone for bad chai. The Western Ghats did not grow leaf tea and possibly the coffee bushes had subdued every bit of  the fragrance in all extant  teacrops. So, I decided to quit complaining about the tea and  ambitiously embarked upon drinking filter coffee, because there is something very compelling about the aroma of   roasting Arabica  and Robusta seeds, especially if you are at your wits end.  I ventured gingerly into coffee territory hoping to savour  filter coffee. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that you could not get filter coffee for love or money in most places.
Our hotel served instant coffee, so did the swankiest hotel in town. Local restaurants which swore by vegetarianism and filter coffee  provided  small tumbler davaras of thick chicory based brew that  had little to do with coffee grounds through which hot water had filtered.  At Lingsur, I ventured out at teatime to a nearby restaurant and ordered a coffee. What I got was ghastly frothy espresso, the kind that auditoriums in New Delhi have been serving since the 1970s, ( made with instant coffee powder) in the interval between two act plays.
 The young man at the counter told me that no filter coffee was available anywhere in Lingsur. When  I shared this insight with our guide Srinivas, who was subject to my daily  beverage anxieties, he averred that I could not hope to drink filter coffee anywhere in North Karnataka. This was a body blow! Now I knew who bought all the Bru coffee that was advertised on television channels! As an attempt to  reconcile myself to bad beverage days, I philosophically reminded myself of my grandmother who had her first cup of coffee at the age of thirty five because the only beverages she drank  until then were milk, buttermilk and   rice gruel or kanji.
 Expecting very little by way of beverage salvation, we travelled to Hirebenkal to view its spectacular megaliths.
At the end of a long day spent traipsing the  Hirebenkal valley, fortified with coconut water and bananas, we headed back along a circular route to our vehicle, marveling at the giant cacti bushes in bloom. One variety, often called the cowblinder cactus or the pear cactus was resplendent with yellow flowers and  pink lotus bud shaped fruit. One ASI official accompanying us, told us that the fruit were edible.  He broke off some fruit from  the cactus  with a stick and proceeded to beat all the thorns out of it, with his stick. I tried holding the fruit in  my bare hands and a shower of fine thorns  immediately attached themselves to my fingers. While I disengaged the almost invisible thorns, Khan sahib had divested the fruit of all its thorns and it was now ready for consumption. He lopped off the tip of the fruit and poured a crimson red liquid onto my outstretched palm. The liquid was sweet and had tart overtones, and  its rich colour was remniscent of the sweetened  syrup of the kokum fruit. Khan Sahib then squeezed out  an extremely delicious  deep crimson jelly  like substance with seeds that tasted rather like the passion fruit. The fruit of the cactus  was apparently a popularly consumed delicacy in the district.  The local name for this fruit was "Dabbagole Hannu" and  sweeter versions grew all over the place and  were a known  source of enriching  blood haemoglobin. We descended the hill accompanied by the lingering taste of the fruit.
As we moved past flat ground  our attention was drawn to a yellow flowering shrub that grew everywhere and  we are told  that its flowers were collected to make a drink  that was drunk in lieu of tea in the area. Khan sahibe didn't know its name and there was no means of finding out, so all I have is some pictures and much reduced tea and coffee cravings.

No Shoka with Ashoka

                                            Sunshiny sunflower fields 
                                                     
We visited parts of Northern Karnataka. Over the trip we replenished an old friendship with  long conversations. Our time together was punctuated with  field work,  periods of rest and quiet and the sharing of meals thrice daily.  My friend as Chef de Mission was revisiting Ashokan edicts and I was an attendant lord, if we eschew gender in this instance.Through these stone etched edicts, Ashoka  shared and  disseminated    personally experienced understanding and hard learnt truths  in the aftermath of the horrific Kalinga war.

The edicts were  at a considerable distance from one another. They are not particularly accessible to the modern tourist, used  to arriving at  destinations, accessing the site  and  heading to the cafeteria for re-hdyration. Srinivas and his Ambassador took us to most of the sites, but there was a lot of walking through field and rock to be done, occasionally bits of strenuous climbing through  both man made and naturally formed steps in the castellated hills that are part of the backdrop of Northern Karnataka.  The  hill contours  along the skyline are not smooth and undulating but are embellished with large rocks and crags , so much so, that these natural formations look rather like fortifications.
 The hills enclosed agricultural country and  the  abundant Tungabhadra and the Bhim  rivers ensured that  the land was rich in bananas and  lush green  paddy. We were at the beginning of the harvest season. Large mounds of rice were  spread out to dry by the wayside as were cobs of corn and  red chillies.  Walking for a few hours through the fields and rocks can build up quite an appetite.
For instant sustenance, we unpeeled pods of moong dal and tuvar in peak growth season and ate them with gusto. We saw the prosaic flatbean in flower  and  sunflower fields in full bloom We were  introduced to the joys of eating raw groundnuts, freshly  uprooted from the ground. We chewed upon juicy dark purple sugarcane stems beside the grove where Vaali, the Kishkinda monarch battled brother Sugreeva in ancient lore. One memorable moment in our food forays was when we encountered a double row of  magnificent tamarind trees..The bagful of green tamarind fruit  we gathered from the stately green trees lasted  over the next few days.Living in the city and dealing with produce that comes in plastic bags  off  supermarket shelves, it was a  unexpected reconnect with the source root and a continued visual treat.

corn cobs and red chillies drying in a field and  
areca nut  spread out to dry in the picture below.

Fruit Of The Palm

Yet another wonderful thing I want to remember is savouring mangosteen after many years on the  way to  Calicut Airport the day we were to return to Delhi.. Under large shady trees, there are any number of vendors doing  brisk business.  Other than the brine fruit carts and  and piles of clam shellls, small waysisde stalls selling sundry snacks dot the journey.  The most welcome is the coconut seller who sits beside a small built up territory of green coconut and deftly swings his scythe,  lops off the head of the coconut and hands out  an instant packaged thirst quencher with a  long plastic straw tucked in for convenient sipping. If a coconut  that falls to your lot also has flesh,  he deftly fashions a spoon from the side of the  green shell which he splits  into two, handing over  two half cups of  really delicious still unformed coconut.This is an old  familiar ritual readily recalled.
Mangosteen, however, was always brought home and eaten, so eating it on the street was a novel experience.
The mangosteen is also a fruit of another palm, and is a little smaller  than the green coconut, rounder in shape and deep purple brown in colour.  It is slit open, again with a scythe and reveals six or eight little sacs filled with a juicy white fruit, resembling perhaps the litchi. There is a thin white outer skin that needs to be peeled off, to get at the soft interior, which is seldom sweet, but approximates to  a more delicate variation of the water chestnut. The mangosteen is called nongu in Tamil Nadu and my nephew assures me that this palm is not cultivated anywhere in  Calicut. It is probably true for I have only seen abundant  coconut palms and betel nut palms.
 I struck up a conversation with the young lad who  efficiently cracked enough  nongu to feed all of us. He had boarded the  bus from Pollachi in nearby Tamil  Nadu to station himself off the highway to Calicut airport in order to sell his produce. Nongu is abundantly available in the summer months  all over South India.
To find it in  November is a bit of luck and I admired this enterprising  lad, who had  carted a sackful of nongus and leaves and a large container with nongu juice, having prepared a sugared drink with the fruit for those who wanted it.  When an order was placed, he picked up one set of palmyra leaves and quickly knotted the slatted ends to make a very pretty bowl. Into this green boat-like container, he slid in the scythed fruit and extended the bowl to the mangosteen muncher.  The  green bowl   not only held mangosteen fruitbut also proved to be an extremely handy receptacle for partaking of  mangosteen juice.

 I carried my leaf fashioned bowl back home to Delhi because it was so hardy and an important reminder that  the best designs were creative and grew out  of functional requirements.  This was a very holistic and eco friendly use of  natural resources, aesthetically presented. How I hope that the nongu will not be subject to the  tetrapack suffering that has befallen the coconut. 

Nuts About Fruit

I reached Calicut a day before  Eid and  stayed on a day after The Revathi Pattathanam festival at the nearby Thali temple where the descendant of the  Zamorins continues to  honour scholars and philosophers. Calicut or Kozhikode as it is now christened has hosted a multiplicity of cultures for exceedingly long centuries. It continues to be home to several communities and boasts of a multiplicity of religions and cuisines. When the plane touches down at Kozhikode airport , the landscape is predominantly green, with cottages discreetly tucked away beneath trees. It is only when you drive into the heart of the city and its commercial centre that you see the ascending buildings and the newly positioned malls, conspiring together in recently conquered space.

This time, there was no sadyam feast to partake of, so we sampled local fare in different parts of the city. One mall I visited served traditional Kerala cuisine, ranging from idiappam( rice noodles) to chilli katta (steamed, chopped and garnished tapioca served with  hot green chilli and tamarind chutney) and a range of pradhamans(kheers made of cereal, lentil and fruit). All these foods were  reasonably priced and unbelievably inexpensive by Delhi Mall standards, so we ate without wincing and flinching at prices after a very long time.

My favourite  moment in Calicut was the discovery of an amazing  fruit snack selling in different parts of the city. We first noticed the carts along the road adjoining Calicut beach. Large jars were arranged all along the cart. These were filled with cut and whole fruit that  were immersed in what looked like brine. At  first glance these recalled  decorative salad jars with chunks of fake carrots soaked in fluid that form part of most Italian Eatery decorations. These however  were meant to be eaten. Sliced pineapples, mangoes, carrots, beetroot, cucumber and whole guavas, large bers and gooseberries(amla) were  the  standard offerings on display. In a country where potable water remains an everyday luxury, anxieties regarding  the liquid immersed fruit immediately surfaced.

 We dispelled anxiety  with the aid of our new scientific learning. The jars sparkled and the brine water was not clouded over. The fruit immersed in it looked fresh and  inviting and a great number of people eating it seemed happy and healthy, even by our  exacting standards of finickitude.   The vendor used a pair of stainless steel tongs and fished out a piece of fruit which he handed over to the buyer, deftly opening and closing the lid in the course of the transaction.  We began our exploration with sliced cucumber and  whole ber. Each piece cost us the princely sum of one rupee and tasted delicious. The brine water also had vinegar and chopped green chilles which lent a piquant flavour to the cucumber and the ber. When we asked for  gooseberries, the vendor told us that they weren't ready yet.

 Over three days, we sampled the fare from several carts and discovered the delights of this delicious, inexpensive and fast-moving snack.. The nature of fruit is such that if left alone in brine and vinegar it begins to putrefy. Most vendors we spoke to said that they were sold out at the end of the day and that they renewed their fruit stocks every other day.Slices of pineapple, raw mango and whole guavas cost three rupees apiece, and  the pineapple slices won the palate vote, closely followed by the guava. Conversations with vendors at locations such as Bathord, Bangladeshi Colony, Mannanchira Maidan and  Pulimode  have led me to conclude that this fresh pickled  fruit'n'vegetable combo is the special preserve of  communities that consume meat and fish, who have evolved this cottage-industry technique of ensuring adequate  fruit and vegetable volumes in their daily diet.
Traditional food options no longer form part of the everyday food currency of the big city. Invaded by the global endemic of  uniformly prepackaged, processed and sanitized foods, such fare is a poignant reminder of patterns of eating and consumption that we have shrugged off nonchalantly.  Assuredly,  it will take  Walmart and Carrefour  a very very long time to  sustain or carry forward such practices and customs,  let alone replicate them. We seem to be doing pretty well without them!


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This is  from a street vendor's cart on the way to the Airport.

November Nostalgia

I visited Calicut  and spent three palm-fringed days on  my sister-in-law's porch, soaking up the sun, idly watching birds, insects and butterflies flit by in the mittham of the house. Of late the garden has been left to itself, but  Kerala is God's own country and ungendered God  likes green, so along the laterite brick walls and all around the courtyard green abounds. Little pilea( microphyllia) perennials  that I struggle to keep alive in New Delhi  grow confidently in every little crevice in the wall. The ornamental palm put in the ground is scripting its own narrative, while the peace lilies have gathered several followers around themselves.  Unnumbered little fish swim in the secluded kollam and on the  ancient  mango tree, tiger ants (actually they are called puli  locally, which could translate either  as "sour'"or "tiger". The ants  are brown in colour and nest in large trees, so tiger seemed rather appropriate...possibly these are weaver ants?) march in single file  to reach their nest, which incidentally is lots of leaves welded together . From a distance of ten feet the leaf cluster looks rather like a large green  mango, but  if you stand beneath it, you can see that it is made up of leaves and  ants swarm in and out of the ribbed leaf edges of their nest.
When not tracking ants, the eys is caught and held by the brilliant pagoda flower. I have seen this plant in manicured gardens in Goa. In  Calcut, it grows everywhere with abandon. Once a plant has reached a sufficient size and flowered, it stretches its roots and sends up feeder plants on either side. This is a farly efficient  propagation system and the plant grows easily , in fact anywhere there is a patch of soil, the pagoda sets up home.
 The flower of the pagoda is its crowning glory. It is a wonderful tomato red, and  grows in a formation of tiers. I think this plant  was the inspiration for the Kerala craftsman who made the tiered  deepa aradhana lamp which is used for arati by the priests in the temple.When this lamp is lit hundreds of little flames flicker and the golden orange glow replicates precisely what is embodied by the  pagoda plant in full bloom . Each flower has snaky light coloured filamants that look like individual tongues of fire.

 I wonder idly how Wordsworth would react to the pagoda flower.  The meanest flower that blew, led him on to thoughts that lay too deep for tears. The pagoda plant would have transported him to another realm and possibly more magnificent poetry. Yet, in the green plenty where it grows , with what nonchalance the pagoda has established itself. Just goes to show how tropical vegetation is a gift generously bestowed all the year round and something that is taken so much for granted.!

The pictures of  the pagoda plant with its extraordinary crown of flowers that I took  in Goa a couple of years ago.

Makin' Ajay and Manning Shankar

I was reversing my car up the slope in the  parking lot at South Campus when a friend who graduated with top honours from an elite women's college called on my cell phone and asked me to  explain the meaning of the word "dichotomous." Conditioned by years of  explicatory teaching and numbed by being the at-home- thesaurus, I stepped on the reverse gear and proceeded to explain wondering why she didn't consult the dictionary, because people asked on the off-chance tend to be woolly? Her chuckle made me realize that this was a trick question and  with a little prodding, the paisa eventually dropped.
In karmic evolution the  anxieties  one is visited by remain the sum total of one's misdeeds, both in this life and in previous ones. Of course, we also need to  propitiate our blood ancestors, but in secular life, we are called to account for each and every gaffe and social misdemeanor that our seniors in  academic institutions  effortlessly  execute.I shifted to first gear and drove the car back into the trough that I had been struggling to lift  myself out of. We had a long exchange, this friend and I, over Mani Shankar's repartee that was not merely out of place, but also completely off the point.
The truth be told, Mani Shankar has always been articulate enough, in all manner of forums, that India could not  afford the extravagance of the commonwealth games and  he was absolutely correct on that point, never mind the fact that nobody in his party cared very much about his views on the subject.Yet what is intriguing about this whole exchange  is  that the entire debate has hinged around whether Mani Shankar Aiyar's elite arrogance is misplaced and out of date. In fact Swapan Dasgupta continues the debate in this vein in his 30 September article where he launches forth on wit and understatement as the privileged space occupied by the inheritors of the Nehruvian tradition, wherein  he places both Mani Shankar Iyer and himself, a bit too quickly, methinks.
 Swapan Dasgupta,  authoritatively pokes fun at  "puerile"  undergraduate Stephanian clubs such as the  no longer extant Wodehouse Society. Maybe they should hand wrestle over the fine points of Narendra Modi's   hostility to the upper cadres of the Gujarat RSS under Dasgupta's  super-'vision'? This would go well with the cultural pundit  aura  Dasgupta has appropriated ever since his strident  declaration a few years ago (in the wake of the controversy over the film Fire,) that lesbianism  was a foreign import, brought to India's  hallowed shores by a whole lot of disreputable people, presumably elite anglicized women?
 Rather than reiterate that Mani Shankar  is maliciously witty and  speaks better English than most people, it is time to ask why Mani Shankar  never considered stepping down or resigning from official positions and continued to be "obstructionist." The schism between  his words and  subsequent action  could definitely be termed "dichotomous" in this instance. Could we communicate to  him  that there is a consensus on Maken's appropriate and advised use of  both words  and he should now labour to provide a detailed explanation?

I recall Mani Shankar's effusive oratory in Parliament, asking for Connaught Place and Connaught Circle to be renamed as Indira Chowk and Rajiv Chowk, immortalizing through architectural symbol  the cradling of the son in the arms of his mother. That chowk indicates a square shape while  the circle represents a different geometrical figure altogether, was merely inconsequential detail. His suggestion was implemented by those who should have known better  in order to ensure that everyone who knows their Hindi could cringe  whenever they saw these signboards in time and times to come.
Language effectively records the gulf between speech and action and  thrusts the underlying thought into our faces. It did so powerfully in Narendra Modi's recent fast purportedly for communal harmony. Yet this man, the proverbial cat at Haj,  refused to  wear a cap proffered by a visiting maulvi. That one gesture effectively dismantled the horrendous charade of  fellow feeling he tried to construct and left him completely exposed. Thankfully language retains the power to do that most  of the time, be it the case of superannuated Stephanians or regional satraps running amok.

August Occasion

Of  all the views that windows can provide, looking out into a leafy tree from a bedroom or a study window, is something to be grateful for. The dense foliage provides a curtain of green, shuts off the household on the opposite side of the street that you may have no desire to watch and provides a world of soothing green through which one glimpses the sky.

 A flamboyant Silk Cotton tree grew in front of our house a few years ago. Every March having shed all its leaves earlier, it stretched out against the blue sky and exhibited its large deep orange flowers to the world. Each flower had its own little green holder and the display against the bare branches  was like an enormous breathtaking  ikebana. It attracted its share of birds and people, but one stormy summer, unable to compete with concretisation, it loosened its roots, gave up its will to live and leaned against the street's overhead wires, ready to leave. 

Irate residents whose power supply was  short circuited  since the tree grew outside my house, rang our doorbell. Offering consolation as we mourned the loss of the tree, we contacted DESU and then diligently pleaded with the forest department to help us.  DESU responded  immediately and fixed the wires, but the tree teetered precariously. Many phone calls were followed up by  escorting FD officials to the site  for inspection. Eventually we received a sanction, authorizing us to cut down the tree. For a sum of money the tree was chopped down in a couple of hours and then carted away as well. The process took a week but at the end of it, the silk cotton was sorely missed by us and our neighbors, after the resumption of  the electric supply restored their equanimity.

Maybe it was  collective longing that allowed the seed of a mulberry to sprout and grow, but six months after,  a mulberry bush,  began growing a few yards away. The nursery rhyme that talks about people going around a mulberry bush, didn't encourage us to think of the young mulberry as having any tree potential. Yet in less than three years, it was a large tree, moving quickly from its slender bush like form to a stately height,  well over  thirteen feet with a canopy of leaves on the street.

  I know of no paeans written to the Mulberry Tree. Even the nursery rhyme  only suggests a nondescript bush in the landscape. The tree in lived experience, sets up a whole series of narratives.  In early December it switches off its photosynthetic processes, so by the end of the month the tree is covered with yellow leaves that are sometimes the only source of colour during sun strapped Decembers at Delhi.. 

The leaves drop quickly off  in January and the tree is bare for a few weeks before the stems  quiver with bursting nodes and  suddenly, magically almost overnight fresh  little  green leaves appear. While the leaves captivate with their new leaf green, the mulberry goes  into bloom and  soon thereafter  little green fruit make an appearance all over the tree. This mulberry has purple berries  and  hordes of visitors, feathered and  on foot, some  with school satchels, others with carts and cycles  stop by to partake of the abundant bounty. The ground outside is stained purple and so are the bird droppings all around the house.

Watching the rain pour itself out on the leaves is another activity that provides for hours of unending reflection. Today I was privy to  yet another of the mulberry's secrets. A little bird around four inches in length with a long tail had been around awhile, but suddenly there seemed to be more of them.  They darted about each morning, little enquiring long tailed bundles of yellowy green, and they seemed to take in all the details of the tree shaded potted sit out. 

 I was diverted by a movement in the tree and on close observation  from an upstairs window saw that it  came from  the  inside  of what resembled a bunched up leaf cluster. This  cunningly stitched nest that the greeny yellow birds had  put together, high up in the tree which is now well over twenty feet,  was quite difficult to spot. I have watched these birds before, soaking in the  sunlit air before  the onset of the evening. The mother and her four fledglings sat on one branch while the father perched guard over them on another overhead branch.  I did not know then that these were tailor birds or that they stitched mulberry leaves to build their nest.