Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland

14. Strength of a Nation

14 Strength of a Nation K ansas life was encompassing and my connection to India waned. I liked our food but I had no other calling card. I had aged out of that grace period of youth when all I had to do was eat a sweet and grin at my parents’ Indian friends. Relatives, especially, expected more of me now. I began to note that this thing called nation was pervasive: it made songs I knew nothing of, prized collective memories of past sagas, created scenes a whole community of people remembered. Those communal memories were fractured nightly in India with television pictures of temples bombed, mosques burned, and trains attacked by religious extremists. There was a high cost to losing these shared ties. When they were gone, citizen turned against citizen. It had been seven years since I had been in India. We were going again, and leading up to our 1977 journey, nearly one thousand political opponents of Indira Gandhi had been jailed, and a program of compulsory birth control had been introduced. Gandhi’s Congress Party lost and then won again in the general elections. Pakistan, on the northwest border, had declared martial law. Tensions were high and in late 1978, Gandhi herself was arrested and jailed for contempt of parliament. All these events set the stage for political splinter groups and continuing shows of might so that by 1984 even the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ most holy shrine, was stormed to flush out Sikh 106 Strength of a Nation militants pressing for self-rule. Then Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Bollywood movies, universally watched and commented upon in India, could tie the population to favorite songs and stories for intervals in darkened theaters, but the times called for more than cinema unity. In the late 1970s India meant different things to each neighbor in my grandparents’ town in Bihar. If the strength of a nation is simply the idea it evokes, I saw I wasn’t really part of India: just someone ringing the doorbell. My ideas of India were once removed, secondhand. I had no lifetime of ordinary daily experiences there. Deshies (Indians living abroad) were hard pressed to find a place in the subcontinent. I included India in my heart and mind but I found it did not include me. This was unbearably embarrassing, and so at sixteen, I did not want to return to India. Teenage instinct told me how out of place I would be. My pride in the idea of being Indian now failed me. I had seen this happening at the Indian events we attended in Kansas City. There were no other teens at the parties because the families had had their children later than my parents, the smaller children were occupied in their own ways, and I couldn’t quite hang out with the adults. I knew that in India my parents would take us visiting as usual, and rituals that used to work for me as a child there, primarily eating sandesh, somehow would not work now. At sixteen, I was neither child nor adult, and there was shaky protocol for all else. But I hid these fears and packed a suitcase for our family vacation. I knew I would hate the trip. The food at Didu’s house, however, was amazing. In fact, our first meal included delicate and flaky yogurt fish, doi maach, and the bitter gourd, korola, that I remembered calling blood purifier with my father with a giggle because it seemed to scour all other flavors from my mouth. Didu associated healthy properties with bitter korola gourd and it is, in fact, a Bengali favorite made with other vegetables in a dish called shukto. And though my youthful palate shuddered, Didu skillfully balanced the bitterness with the flavors of the other vegetables and mustard seeds. Still, I kept my eyes down when I took a tiny taste to give my tongue time to settle down. Somehow the rice, the other vegetables, or maybe just the situation of being at my didu’s table softened the bitter bite. After the shukto, the flavor of the flaky fish was outstanding, and perhaps the contrast was the point all along. It seemed all we did was eat. In the early evening, my grandparents would walk with us to visit a neighbor or two and we would be offered sweets and tea Strength...