CHENNAI : If I’m going to give you a recipe that contains this much love, then I must also tell you the truth about why I learned it. On a rainy day in Colombo once, someone reached across a table and tore my heart up – with visible pleasure, and very little thought. Like a piece of tissue paper. I picked up the shreds and took them back home with me, or more accurately, to the flat in that city in which no one lives except a caretaker who is, in all senses but one, family. The caretaker, my RasiMaama, had already made lunch.
It waited, simmering within clay pots on a stove that’s too low for him, but perfect for me. It had been my grandmother’s kitchen, made to her height, which is exactly how small I stand. I sat down to eat, but became overwhelmed by sobs because of the bruising that morning had contained. I couldn’t tell any of them why I was so uncontrollably crying, and so I settled for a loving lie: that RasiMaama’s raalvullakari tasted exactly like Ammamma’s, and it had been so many years since I had eaten hers.
Say it with me, in my dialect: raal, not yeraal. Prawns. Vulla, not vela. White. Kari, you know. Prawns in a coconut milk curry, with eggplant cooked until softened to a tender green colour. There was nothing else to do that day, having wept and having eaten, than to learn how to cook it from him. My uncle-if-not-by-blood who had learned how to cook from my grandmother, beloved.Dice two eggplants, and soak the slices in water with rock salt.
Remember what is said about rock salt: that it contains the cure for everything from over-empathy to the evil eye. More importantly, in vegetables at least, it removes bitterness and germs. Rinse the slices and put them into the pot they will be cooked in. Clay pots make everything taste better, and remind you of the earth, of the grounding you need. Add to the pot: a sliced onion, four small green chillies, turmeric and salt. Keep the stove unlit.
Milk the flesh of one coconut. Keep the first, full milk aside (it will be added last), and milk it again once or twice. Add this milk to the pot. Clean and de-shell the prawns, and put them in too. Cover the pot. Let it cook now for twenty minutes. Check the texture of the eggplant. It will have softened, and turned green. The prawns will have shrunk to half their size. When the liquid in the pot has reduced, add the coconut’s first milk, set aside earlier. Bring this to a boil too. Switch off the stove.
Cover the pot, and then wait for someone to come home with whom you can share it. Make rice as you wait. If there is no one to wait for – but you find yourself always waiting, somehow, don’t you? – then wait until the tears stop. Never cry as you eat, for you will choke. (Yes, that’s in the recipe). I give it to you, this inheritance, this honest and heartfelt feast.