Flavors of Being

As of last year, I’ve lived 80 percent of my life in the US, presumably making me predominantly American. An immigrant’s cultural identity and sense of self eventually blends into the broth of the prevailing social soup. One has to be open to new possibilities, beginnings, and transitions. One adapts and conforms to the local tenor, blends, and evolves. Time weakens the connections to one's origin, diluting its memory. 

Immigrating as a child and growing up without a cultural community, there remains bits of stories, fading vocabulary and language, few old photos, some fleeting shared experiences, and recollections of celebrations and festivities. Aspects one holds as fluid memories but without firm anchors to heritage. So many of the people in those memories are long passed into ancestorhood. So many of those places have long been paved over by modernity. Still, the consciousness in the 20 percent of myself commands outsized sway. How I sound there is an undercurrent of my whole self, the 20 percent that remains just under the rush of everyday being. 

Reflecting on the decades that streamed by in a once-foreign land, I am tugged by a longing for a connective medium that links heritage and identity to place and placeness, particularly in these divisive days. I am left wondering: What part of me is American and what part Gujarati? If the bulk of my lived experience is American, what’s happened to the rest? Is it lost? Irrelevant? Is it emergent and shaping my becoming? Strengthening my being? 

Placeness, the essence of all that transpires in one’s life, is complex and entangled, mingling and diverging, always changing. Life happens. Love happens. Death happens. Joy comes. Sorrow comes. And they disperse. People come and people go. If one is fortunate, one remains whole. 

One’s thinking language influences one’s lived realities too. The bulk of my experiences are among people who speak not a word of my native Gujarati. Their limited connection to the subcontinent might be through food that is principally of north Indian origin. Think “chicken tikka masala” or “vindaloo.” Or culturally disrespectful vernacular phrases, like “holy cow” and its derivative “holy shit.” English is the language of the running sewer of noise in my head. A vestige of coloniality and the mark of literate citizenship. (You, reader,  may have a similar inner dialogue that streams uncontrollably.) English, the once-foreign language, overwhelms my waking hours, in speech, news, media, work, signs, discussion, song, writing, reading, thinking. It is a gargantuan task to consciously block out a slice of solitude and think in my native voice. That place is filled with nostalgia: a simultaneous sense of loss and belonging; a combination of aloneness and respite. 

For the longest while I’ve struggled with these niggling thoughts. It’s easy to set them aside and let them be. Occasionally, I’d binge-read texts from my motherland. Listen to music. Translate, memorize, and recite poetry. But it all seemed contrived. Lost in translation, as it were. Sure, there were fleeting glimpses of some connective tissue reaching deep in the limbic memory, essences or sensations of places far away and long gone. Yet few things remain in those places of my youthful lived experience. Even my old childhood house will soon come down due to its timbers rotting, a direct result of recurring floods induced by climate change—something so many deny, sheltered in their privilege. Those images and memories of old seem faded now, looking like those tattered American flags struggling too long under hard and indifferent elements. Nothing stands still but in memory.

The more I dwelled with the idea of reconnecting to the past, to unearth the memory of beloved people and places, the sights and feelings, the colors and sounds of life—the more my childhood memory failed me. Twenty percent felt not enough. There is only so far one can go in the mind to recollect place and placeness, especially when the well is only a few years deep. (If we toss out the earliest childhood years, the pool shrinks.) And few people remain who can help conjure the past and set the story straight. Still, suppressing that part grates the rest of one’s being. An ongoing struggle for rootedness.  

Then one blue-sky afternoon, serendipity intervened. YouTube's artificial intelligence figured out my potential heritage and made a suggestion. It was a group of grinning young Gujarati men whose channel is called Village Rasoi (village cooking). In their joyful video, they harvested fresh vegetables and ingredients from a farm, piled it onto a platter, and playfully rinsed everything. They each carried large cooking implements, firewood, et cetera, and set up an impromptu outdoor kitchen right there in the field. They prepared a traditional Gujarati country dish, announcing each ingredient as it was being processed by hand, added, mixed, and blended. They spoke a country dialect. Their words were at once foreign and known. Their vocabulary was akin to the way my grandparents on my mother’s side spoke. A memory I had forgotten but that still pulses in my heart.

In that moment, the youths from Village Rasoi triggered a flood of emotions, joyful memories enlivened, of a mud house with bare adobe-plastered walls and an earthen floor. The image of a house tucked away in a crack of my memory, the home of my beloved Granny. Her open-air kitchen. The cool softness of that bare floor beneath my feet. I saw in my mind and heart an image of Granny sat upon the floor minding the small wood-fired stove. There in a flash was a spark, an eclectic current that zapped through the screen across two oceans and from the other side of the globe, a living time warp. The signal, having traveled to satellites in near space and back into our living room, brought to me a recessed past that I longed for unknowingly.

Rilke’s words rang clearly: “It will act as an anonymous influence, akin to how ancestral blood constantly moves and merges with your own and links with that of the individual, never to be unlinked." 

The simultaneity and the relationality between remote unknown individuals, with shared common threads, unknowingly created a conduit through which flew a current powerful enough to awaken a dozy part of myself with one dynamic jolt. I was hooked. Fascinated. I watched their posts obsessively, subscribed to their channel, even tried to emulate their recipes. And failed. 

Because they were cooking for over one hundred school children in their community, simply eyeballing the proportions didn’t work. So onto scanning for help from others. Before long, I settled on two different channels, each hosted in Gujarati. They explained the recipes, the proper ways to blend the dry spices, and what to avoid. It was a confidence boost. Channel one, Sheetal’s Kitchen, offers simpler and quicker versions. Channel two, Aru’s Kitchen, is hosted in Surat, a city close to my birthplace. She speaks the country dialect of my mother and grandmother. Her homey speech, traditional approach, and basic kitchen tools help me to remember the goings-on in my mother's open-air kitchen. And the flavors that were brewed there.

I’ve learned to appreciate both ladies for different reasons, and together their approaches have helped me to grow confident with working dry spices and mixtures, tempering and blending, and even improvising. Little by little, the pantry has grown, with regular preparations coming out of our kitchen. Some successes, some not-so-fine outcomes. Always a memory enlivened. The spoken words, too, burst into avalanches of nostalgia and sentiment.

It ain’t momma’s cooking, but it still takes one home! 

I longed to find the fluidity hidden in the liminal self, which in fact has an outsized influence on the totality of my being. That it came from an exploration of food, wherein the flavors of childhood were sheltered and hitched to so many memories, was no surprise upon retrospection. A joyful revelation, still. 

With each dish a flood of conjurings, evocations very much alive. With the help of remote “anonymous influence,” I now have a repertoire of appetizers, rice and dahls, seasonal anchor dishes, and a growing ensemble of teatime snacks. All vegetarian. Roti, the carrier bread of life in Gujarat, in western India, accompanies it all.

These distant cousins feel like a connecting bloodline, an ancestral lineage back to my place of origin. A place whose placeness, the essential soul and soil of heritage, flows unseen all the way down the waters of River Indus, to the cradle of Gujarati culture going back five thousand years to the Harappa. These are “links” with individuals in a moving flow, an active becoming, “never to be unlinked.” 

Food and flavors make a place, imbue it with the unique and elemental, essential tendencies that is placeness. The memory of which is a moving stream that may be temporarily trapped by debris, yet always seeking to flow freely. Memory is a living entity. It dwells in our deepest personal selves, its tides ebbing and commingling with the rituals of people and the nature of place. Reconnecting with the spices of my ancestors has opened another pathway to the wonder and joy of a life left behind. Still alive and blending into the becoming in the here and now. Tangibly real, still in every bite that slides down into the belly and nourishes the soul.

 

Gujarati Cauliflower, Potato, and Peas 
Recipe translated from Aru’s Kitchen

Ingredients 

• 1 cauliflower head 
• 4 small potatoes, boiled and diced into 1-inch chunks 
• 1/2 cup green peas 
• 1–2 small carrots dices to 1/2 in (optional)
• 1–2 green chilis (depending on heat preference) , coarsely chopped
• 1-inch chunk of ginger, minced 
• 10–12 garlic cloves, minced and mixed with salt to make a loose paste
• 2 tbsp chopped cilantro 
• salt 
• 1/4 tsp hing (asafoetida) [optional]
• 2 tsp Kashmiri chili powder (for color, can skip if not available)
• 1 tsp turmeric 
• 1/2 tsp cumin powder 
• 1/2 tsp coriander powder 

Cooking 

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan on medium heat. Add garlic/salt paste and hing, if using. Lower heat, and cook until lightly golden.
2. Add chilis and ginger, cooking for 1–2 minutes.
3. Add peas, carrots (optional), cauliflower, and turmeric. Stir and let cook for a few minutes, until carrots and peas are close to being cooked.
4. Add potatoes and salt to taste. Cook on medium, stirring gently. 
5. Add cumin, coriander, and Kashmiri chili powder. Lower heat and cover, cooking for a few additional minutes. Stir as needed to prevent sticking and burning. 
6. Garnish with chopped cilantro and serve with salad and warm flatbread or tortilla.

Tags

Culture, Food, Immigration, Place, Memory