Eating out!

We used to travel quite a lot when we were small. Every two or three years my father got transferred and so we had to pack and move to the new place. Besides these travels we used to go to our native place almost for every school holiday. Added to these travels, my parents, especially my mother, loved travelling and took us on trips to new places for sightseeing every other year, as described elsewhere.

After my childhood, the same pattern repeated albeit in a grander scale as my husband and I were moving between states rather than districts. Our family covered the sightseeing tours offered in the faraway places in the last year before we moved to a new place. In between we had to make a long trip to visit our native state for weddings in the family or celebrating festivals together.

In all these trips, one aspect of the travel has changed through the years. My mother used to take a stove and flour in the car boot, to make wheat, ragi or rice dosa. This way we were assured of hygienic meals wherever we put up for the night.

For the first day of our journey we used to equip ourselves with lots of rice and pickles. Tamarind rice always won hands down in my mom's list as it could keep even for two days. Idlis with milagai podi was the favoured choice for breakfast or dinner that day.  She used to pack a bundle of dried banana leaves to serve them on for the numerous members of our large family. Two ground sheets were packed for us to sit in the shade of a tree on the roadside in case we hadn't reached our destination before mealtime. At that time I used to complain about the cold idlis, the wrinkled dry leaf that served as plate and the ants that tried to crawl on to our picnic sheet. In retrospect I realize we were following a 'green' way of life with disposable organic packing materials!

The hotels we ate in served food on green banana leaves, used only once and readily disposable as wandering cattle 'recycled' them as their food at the back door ofthe hotel! We trusted enough to drink the water they served. Maybe pollution was not a problem back then! In fact till we moved to Chennai we never boiled drinking water, using 'thetankottai' to get clear water from river water.

By the time I got married, the travel meals consisted of food packets prepared for the three meals of the 24 hours journey by the loving relatives in whose house we were staying. I can never forget how my mother-in-law got up at 4 o' clock in the morning to make parcels of idlis for breakfast to eat on the train and packets of lemon rice, curd rice, potato curry and pickles for lunch! She really spoiled us daughter-in-laws by behaving more like a mother to all of us:-)

Sometime during this period the Indian trains served hygienic albeit tasteless food from their pantry cars. This prompted us to tell orrelatives not to go to the troule of preparing meals for our train journeys. But we did miss the tasty home food as we ate the insipid train food!

Nowadays, hygienic  and tasty food is available in the motels and inns on the roadside and packaged drinking water is everywhere. The train food has improved cosiderably too. The idea of eating only home made food has given way to eating out as often as possible even when we are not travelling. What a sea change in a few decades!  Already ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat food packets are available in all the grocery stores. At this rate in another few decades there would be no home cooked food at all and the only people who cook their own meals would be health freaks who like to eat only 'fresh' food!

Dog's years?

When my relative turned forty her husband presented her with a gold chain.
When he heard about it my husband quipped, ' naarpathu vayasile naai gunam'*so a chain is a very appropriate gift!'

* It is an idiom in Tamil meaning, At forty man's character resembles that of a dog, with barks and bites an everyday occurence.

TLC for Teeth!

I was getting the breakfast ready and peeped out of the kitchen to see if the family was ready to have hot dosas as they don't eat cold ones.I saw my husband brushing his teeth and turned away saying,'Oh, you are brushing your teeth?'He spat out the foam and started saying something. I waited to hear what important info that couldn't wait till he finished brushing.He said,'No, I am just caressing them one by one!'

Sports Day at Antsville!

One day I was drawing the anti-ant chalk pesticide along the sides of the wall in the living room and said to my husband,
'I keep drawing these lines (Lakshman Rekha brand pesticide chalk stick) but the ants keep crossing them!'
My husband said,
'Maybe they think you are holding a hurdles race and drawn the lines for them to jump across!'

From the mouth of babes....

My daughters have picked up/inherited sarcastic wit from their father. As a result they would reply to some of my questions in a roundabout way which simply wouldn't reach my brain and I would take them too literally for their comfort. Then they would be forced to translate the same into a straight statement which is maddening for them!
Once when my elder daughter was in elementary school I was packing her lunch. She asked me to pack some halwah (Sweet) brought by her uncle on his visit the previous day. I asked her, "Why?"
She replied, 'See you have packed Idlis for my lunch. If I mix it with the Halwah and make a paste of it for lunch it tastes divine!'
Taking her literally, I replied innocently, "Oh, I see. This is a new dish I have never tried out myself. Should try it sometime." And proceeded with packing some halwah.
My daughter stood there silently for a few minutes overcoming the dumb reaction to her sarcasm and then burst out to say, "Mummy, I just said that to tell you 'what a question, I just want the halwah as a snack for the rescess!"
I replied, "Then why didn't you just say so?"
By this time she had started laughing: "And please don't try out the 'new dish!' "
My co-sisters (other daughter-in-laws in my husband's fsamily-he has three more brothers besides his only sister-all of whom are masters in this art of sarcastic wit, thanks to the genes passed on by my late father-in-law!) would discuss this aspect of our daily exchanges in our families and we would have a hilarious time recollecting the happenings at each one of our homes which would have the same tone to them. Juxtaposed with a very literal mind, the sarcasm often fails to have the desired effect! This way we outsiders act as a buffer zone for their wit which would have otherwise become too sharp for comfort in their interaction with society at large. So we say to ourselves modestly, in defence of our being very slow on the uptake of their wit:-)

Armour against sarcasm!

The tendency to express anything sarcastically sometimes backfires. To understand any clever remark that has a figurative meaning you need an audience that has a modicum of intelligence. Which is unfortunately missing in a section of the population at least. This has led to many a hilarious situation in our daily lives among the general public apart from the setting of our family.Once we were travelling to Kumbakonam via Chidambaram, the temple town. We had stopped at a small hotel in the town to have our lunch. The waiter spread out washed banana leaves which serve as disposable plates in South India. He then kept stainless steel glasses for water to drink, before everyone seated. Unfortunately he had skipped my husband's place and gone back to bring the water jug. He then proceeded to pour water into each tumbler.When he came to my husband's place, my husband asked him "Where is my water?"The waiter blinked to see that there was no glass in his place and being the dumb person he was,said:"Where should I pour the water?"My husband replied angrily,"Pour it on my head!"Whereupon this man actually started to tilt the jug above my husband's head and I stopped him just in time saying,"He is angry and so he said like that! Don't you realize that? Just bring a glass and serve the water!"The man muttered something about why we should not have said so in the first place and went inside to do that.The minute he turned his back, I promptly burst out laughing thinking of what might have happened, had I not stopped the waiter. My husband also thought of the same thing and seeing me laughing joined us grinning.Lesson learnt: You should use your sarcasm only where it would pierce the brain and prick, not where it hardly makes a dent-for dumbness makes a mighty armour against sarcasm!

Humour at Home

My husband has a great sense of humour. In fact all his siblings share this trait. As a result all our family gatherings are a riot of jokes and funny anecdotes and every few minutes there would be a burst of laughter! I am very fortunate to be married into his family, considering how acutely we lack the art of repartee in my side of the family! My daughters have taken after him and the funny retorts continue to this day at home:-)
My father-in-law was the original quick repartee champion and all his children have taken after him. In this context, it is relevant to remember that my mother-in-law and myself are a bit slow to catch on to the sarcasm involved in these exchanges. In fact all the daughters in law sadly lack this trait and wake up to their sarcasm rather late! It makes it all the more easier for the 'Mandhis' -(monkeys)-(as my husband's family has been nicknamed, in revenge, by all the daughters -in law, after their family name of 'Mandhikanakkans' in the days of yore-which suits them very well when you consider their antics!) to tease us 'outsiders' non-stop in any family gatherings as we slowly fumble through their quick comments!
Ours was an arranged marriage like most of the marriages in our country. We had hardly looked at each other before the wedding day and any talking before the wedding day was unthinkable thirty years back! The very first time I started a conversation with my husband was the day of our marriage when we travelled by car (from my home town where our wedding had taken place in the early morning) to his place where a reception was being held.
On the way we stopped for some refreshments and we bought tender cucumbers to eat along with a drink of tender coconut water. The roadside stall had both and the man started cutting the top off the cocnut when my new husband noticed that I was still nibbling at the cucumbers. He asked me, "Oh you still haven't finished eating the cucumbers?"
I replied:
'My granny has told me that you would live to be a hundred years if you chew your food well"
For which my hasband replied:
"It is better to live a fifty years eating fast and enjoying the rest of the time instead of spending the additional fifty years in the act of eating!"
I burst into laughter. With this, the ice was broken and he started asking me whether I knew anything about his workplace in the north-which was the city of Pune. I was still in college then and remembered a geographical fact about the city.
"I know that it is in the rain-shadow region of Maharashtra and that it gets less rainfall than the city of Mumbai which is but a hundred kilometres from there". Then, to make conversation I asked, "Is it true you get less rain?"
My husband stared at me a moment and then exclaimed, "Of course, we don't get much rains there. In fact it is almost a desert and we have to ride camels to go anywhere in the city as otherwise commuting is very difficult. In fact I rode on a camel to reach the railway station....." when I realized slowly that he was pulling my leg!
And so I got initiated into his clan's brand of humour!

Which vegetable is this?

I was a newly married girl just settled in my marital home in Pune with my husband .(Actually still a teenager, as my parents arranged a marriage with a 'suitable boy' when I was still in college!) In fact I was still attending the final year of my college and my experience in cooking was still in the rudimentary stage. I could cook a South Indian meal, both veg and non-veg, though my cooking was confined to the most common vegetables available.

When my parents and relatives left us after a week of settling me down in my new home, I was inconsolable. As a distraction, my husband took me shopping for vegetables. He said he would like 'poosanikkai' (ashgourd) sambar and asked me to buy a piece of it. We were standing in front of a stall which had big ball-like vegetables stacked in the front. One was yellow in colour and the other was green. I knew one of them was 'posanikkai' but didn't know which one.

I could not ask the shopkeeper for 'poosanikkai' in Marathi or Hindi as I didn't know the equivalent name in those languages. Confusion! Gathering a bit of courage, I stammered out to my new husband whether he knew which was 'poosanikkai' and then I could point it out to the shopkeeper to cut a piece of it. He was flabbergasted to find out that his wife didn't even know enough about cooking to identify his favourite vegetables and his face was a study in shock! He must have thought that his future home meals would be complete disasters, going by this experience.

But I acquitted myself well enough in my very first dinner as my chicken preparation with all the masala from my mother's recipe outshone the one he and his friend had been preparing in his bachelor days in 'British style' (with only pepper and salt)! As it was a Sunday he had bought a whole dressed chicken for me to preapre. (In our family we always prepare non-veg meals on Sundays and the poosanikkai was stored in the fridge for the next day's cooking.) So he forgot the 'poosanikkai' episode soon enough. Of course I didn't tell him until after the dinner that it was the very first time I had touched a dressed chicken! (My mother never let me prepare chicken in our house as I might have spoiled Sunday's lunch by experimenting the main dish with my beginner's attempt.) And it was quite a fight to cut it into pieces-my husband also never knew till a few weeks later, from his friend who was also newly married but a few months before us, that the shopkeeper would cut the chicken into manageable pieces, if we so asked.

But after this now-funny incident was recounted by me to all my relatives amidst laughter, any girl who didn't show any interest in cooking was immediately supported by her doting parents, quoting this incident. If 'P'(me) who couldn't identify poosanikkai could cook for a dozen people within a few days of her marriage, anyone could learn cooking in days!