Our 78th Independence Day just went by. Each of us had our own thoughts about the state of India, what’s good and what needs fixing. I found myself thinking of the hidden drama in our lives and how I was given peace amid food wars that occasionally flare up.
As a Hindu today, I don’t care who eats what. My parents brought me up on the principle of ‘loko bhinna ruchi’, the Sanskrit equivalent of the Latin maxim ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’ (there is no disputing over taste). Whereas if we as children said ‘Chhee! Thoo!’ to any food, we heard a steady stream of mildly delivered but wearying reproofs on how disappointing it was to find such judgemental people in one’s own family at such a young age.
Of course, there was a denouement. One fateful summer day in the Bombay of our childhood, a bottle of sarsaparilla pickle from deepest South India made its way to the table. The moment it was opened, my father said, “Take it away! It smells like cockroaches!” My mother was not amused. Needless to say, we watched this development with great interest. A precedent had been set. Although we were foolish children in many ways, we could tell a ‘Thoo!’ and certainly a ‘Chhee!’ when we heard one.
This milestone event in our little lives altered family politics forever. We were now empowered by example, and although the powers that were tried to reassert authority by saying it was different for grown-ups and children had to eat everything on their plate, everyone knew the balance of power had shifted. But the message of the maahaali kizhangu, as sarsaparilla is called in Tamil, stayed. It was perfectly acceptable to not like certain foods. But it was unacceptable to make fun of others or think badly of them for liking them.
My mother, a committed vegetarian and devout Hindu, baked us cakes and pies, made egg sandwiches with mayonnaise and happily went out to Chinese and Mughlai restaurants with her non-veg colleagues from Calcutta, Shillong and Delhi. They valued their friendship more than food rules inherited by accident of birth. The meat-eaters never mocked my mother for being vegetarian while she had no opinion on their diet. It was all ‘live and let live’.
When our trusted family doctor said I was too frail and apologetically recommended meat broth, my practical mother did not think twice. With the advice of Mrs Khan, our neighbour in Bombay, the required kitchen equipment was set up in a corner of our long balcony and meat soup became my rasam. When I was officially declared fit, the equipment was simply given away and no more was said, although mutton-and-egg rolls from Akbarally’s famous shop would turn up now and then as my mother was not entirely sure about my health.
This very mother was devoted to Devi. She recited the ‘Mahishasura Mardini Stotram’ and ‘Mahalakshmi Ashtakam’ every day and observed the ‘Varalakshmi Nombu’ (vrat and puja) with sincerity during Shravan Shuklapaksh. So I too grew up being easygoing about food choices. You could be a devout person whatever your diet. And I would sooner eat sarsaparilla than imagine the Universal Mother spurned my mother for her priorities.
From food, it was a short mental step to water. It’s generally agreed in India that drinking water from an earthen pot rather than the fridge makes better wellness sense. Along with the chemical contribution of the baked earth to the quality of water and throat-friendly temperature of water from a traditional earthen pot, there is so much cultural romance attached to it. The simple, everyday act of drinking a glass of water (ideally, eight) thus gets invested with great charm.
All the East loves jasmine. Jasmine, that blooms so profusely in our land, value-adds to the pleasure of water from an earthen pot. My grandmother floated fresh jasmine flowers in the water every day when they were in bloom. That delicately perfumed water is a beautiful childhood memory.
Everyone says ‘jug’ today but I found north and south India had different words for the earthen pot. The north says surahi for a spouted water pot (‘su’ is Turkish for ‘water’) while the south says ‘kuja’ or ‘kuza’, Persian for water pot and used for jugs made of glass, plastic and stainless steel.
The word ‘kuja’ naturally leads us to Edward Fitzgerald’s 19th-century English translation of the 12th-century Persian quatrains called the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’. In Fitzgerald’s version are nine verses called ‘Kuza Nama’ (Book of Pots) describing Omar Khayyam’s visit to a potter’s shop and how some pots ‘spoke’ verses with philosophical content. Later generations have severely critiqued Fitzgerald’s translation. However, his verses were too ardent an element of our own teens to disown, especially poignant verses from the Kuza Nama like, “Then said another, ‘Surely not in vain, My Substance from the common Earth was ta’en, That He who subtly wrought me into Shape, Should stamp me back to common Earth again.’”
The image of ‘pot and potter’ as ‘man and Creator’ dramatised here is a universal idea. It found a powerful expression in India through our classical name for a potter, ‘Prajapati’ (‘All-Father’). So, when humans ‘made of clay’, consisting mostly of water, drink from a surahi or kuja to replenish themselves, the philosophy, poetry and ritual theatre has a perfection all its own. It could also be our personal gesture of gently rebuking our ‘Creator’ in Fitzgerald’s words: “Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And who with Eden didst devise the Snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give - and take!”
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)
Renuka Narayanan