The Flavour of a New Year

Also on OS.

This year, I am told, the Tamil New Year is on the 13th of April. On Sunday, for the first time in nearly a decade, I will be consulting my recipe book because I need to know how to make the New Year pachidi that I have never made before. My recipe book is no ordinary one; it is a Mahabharata diary. That is to say, every page of the 1991 diary has a small story at the bottom with a line drawing or two. My mother used this diary – a few pages of it – at a rather fraught time in her own life, but abandoned her entries some time in April – around New Year, in fact.

Ingredients: 1 raw mango, peeled.
1 cup jaggery
2 sprigs of neem flowers
Mustard seeds, red chilly, haldi and salt for seasoning.

When I got married, my mother, worried that I would never learn to cook South Indian food, wrote out some simple recipes for me, starting with a few different kinds of payasam, some everyday stuff and other more complex recipes that involved elaborate preparations. In the last year or so, she has started to write out recipes for special occasions – Pongal, Rama Navami, New Year, Janmashtami, Adi Padhinettu, Deepavali. When I was married, she tactfully refrained from asking me if I ever made any of the things in the book, but when I returned home a few years ago, she was somewhat reassured by my ability to at least make sambar and rasam.

Women of my mother’s generation never had recipes written down for them. They learned in the company of their mothers, assisting them, helping out with small tasks and eventually graduating to the big stuff. Cooking was always a communal activity – especially during festivals when, for days, the most elaborate meals were prepared.

But my mother moved away when she married. Even a move to a neighbouring state can be a kind of exile: a different language, different films, different ways of dressing, different customs. And most especially, different food. Things that were everyday items on the plate became exotic and rarely found: banana stem, certain kinds of greens, shallots, even white pumpkin, which, in this other place, people only used to ward off the evil eye.

Peel and cut the mango into thin slivers. Boil in a little water with salt and a pinch of manjapodi. After the mango is cooked, add powdered jaggery. Let it boil for five minutes. Add rice flour mixed in water to thicken.

In time, my mother’s connections to her homeland withered. She hadn’t seen a Tamil film in decades; she could barely understand the Tamil in the magazines – she, who had studied in a school where the medium of education was Tamil. She hardly ever watched the Tamil channels on television because everything was becoming more unfamiliar with each passing year. Our own language was restricted by the limited use we made of it in our day to day functioning. If there was a reason any more to describe ourselves in a way that would be familiar to others in another state that seemed immeasurably far away, it was because of our food, its seasonal variations and celebrations.

Season the pachidi with mustard seeds, one red chilly and fresh neem flowers. The pachidi denotes that life is a mixure of flavours, so use the ingredients carefully. (Sometimes it turns out downright bitter, but may yet be medicinal and therapeutic!)

But this is all I have known. My life has always been circumscribed by this limited vocabulary, these few words of Tamil that I can read in my recipe book, the Murugan calendar that one tears off one page at a time and which gives my parents all kinds of arcane information, these forms of ritual that have no greater significance for me. It has always been enough. I’ve never known anything else so I’ve never felt the deep sense of dislocation that my parents sometimes feel.

It used to be that when my mother wanted my help with some elaborate preparation, I used to have a regulation fight that was as formal in its structure as any festival. Now, I watch her as she takes out the Mahabharata book after every festival and writes out recipes. And I realise how important this is for her. This is her instinct for preservation, this need to record what has surely already passed in her own lifetime. It is only through the blueprint contained in this book that I can lay claim in a small way to the picnics she must have had on Surplus, along the Mettur Dam. It is through the code of the recipes that I can infer the stories that stand like shadows at the margins of the page.

The book already contains so many stories: my mother’s own account of events nearly fifteen years ago and the stories from the Mahabharata. The page which holds the recipe for the New Year pachidi tells a story of the Pandavas in their exile, when Bhima kills Hidimbo and marries his sister. It seems like a curiously apt story to accompany the recipe, indicating as it does endings and beginnings, and auspicious occasions in the midst of travails.

On Sunday, because my mother is away, I will make the pachidi and payasam though I will leave out the vadai as being outside the limits of the effort I am willing to make. As I am making all of it, I will spend a little time considering whether I take these rituals of food for granted and what, if anything, its loss will mean to me.

Taare Zameen Par for adults, and for children

Also on Open Space.

I watched Taare Zameen Par with my son in the first week of its release. Though I had read a little bit about the film, I deliberately stayed away from the reviews so that I could view the film with no preconceptions. Like every other adult I know, I enjoyed the first half more than the second for generally similar reasons: I liked the unhurried exposition, the ‘real’ situations and unprettified locations but most especially the child actor playing Ishan, Darsheel Safary.
My seven year old son, on the other hand, abandoning his popcorn and drink, spent the entire time until interval with his face half turned into my shoulder, sobbing and insisting that we should leave immediately because this was a terrible film. It appeared that other children in the theatre were similarly afflicted: I heard at least two other children in our row crying loudly from time to time. If the adults accompanying these children also felt teary, they were keeping a tight rein on their own emotions in order to comfort their children and not distress them further.
After the interval, though, everything changed. With the appearance of the art teacher Nikumbh, played by Aamir Khan, the turnaround from unbearable reality to easy denouement was rapid and clearly more palatable for my son. He laughed and clapped his hands and was aware – as he hadn’t been in the first half – that what tension there was, was temporary and that all would be well at the end.
Adults know this about representation: that what we see is at least once removed from reality; that though a film is set up to appear like the world as we know it, it is just a film; though when pressed we can rarely explain in greater detail what we mean by that statement. But this, in fact, is exactly what we offer our children as comfort: ‘It’s just a film. Please don’t cry - they’re just acting. It’s not real.’ And we say these things as a sort of short hand for what is, after all, a very complex mode of negotiating our ideas of reality and representation.
Classically, all dramatic art holds the suspension of disbelief in delicate balance with verisimilitude. Things should correspond with the world as we know it just enough so that we can accept other things we have never experienced for at least the duration of the act. The payoff is a graph of emotions along a path charted in advance by the director. At various points in our cultural histories one or the other of these two factors has been given greater valence.
But in the more fantastic films that are the staple for children of a certain age, disbelief is suspended with greater ease: talking animals and objects, the magical and the absurd are par for the course. They are asked not to recognise the duplication of the world in representations of it, but to see how the strange can be familiar. The bitterness of separation, rejection or loneliness is sweetened with the distance that fantasy offers in exchange for the time in which to process what is not pleasant. In the words of Mary Poppins, just a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.
Two things made Taare Zameen Par interesting to watch in the company of a child. One: though the film is about a child, it is not made – at least in the first half – for a child to view. The experiences that Ishan goes through frequently cut too close to the bone for a child watching the film. How is a child, who has been harried to complete her homework or taunted by classmates, to know that what Ishan is experiencing is ‘not real’? In the eyes of the child, there is no ‘problem’ that has a ‘solution’ in such a film; there is only a world as incomprehensible and unmanageable as their real one. To be told, then, that what appears to correspond so directly with their lived life is ‘not real’ is a patent absurdity - a contradiction so large it is not easily digested.
After the interval, when Nikumbh helps to identify Ishan as dyslexic, it seems like a cheat to an adult because it fails to answer the question of what one is to do with children who are not dyslexic but in every other way like Ishan has been portrayed. To a child watching the second half of the film, however, this is an unexpected reprieve. It arrives on their horizon as information usually does to the very young: as entirely new but easily accepted and accommodated in their constantly expanding world. Ishan’s dyslexia and the astonishing (to an adult) ignorance of the condition displayed by the teachers and parents explain much of what has happened in the first half. For the child viewer, the film ends satisfyingly, with adult repentance, due acknowledgement of Ishan’s talent and his right to take his place in a world that has a place for him.
In this sense, Taare Zameen Par is actually two films: the first one is heartbreakingly ‘real’ in that it pushes the limits of verisimilitude; the second one demands that we suspend our disbelief with equal elasticity. The transition is not easily made but it would be a mistake to dismiss the second half of the film as a cop-out for this reason. At the very least it raises some interesting questions about how children view films differently than adults and how narratives need to be designed when both adults and children are the intended audience.