born in a part of India where God had a riot with the colour green; everywhere you looked He had created hues of luscious greens and made the air so healthy and calm. There was, however, not one moment of peace that I can draw from those childhood years. My father was always trying to kill my mother or she was threatening to kill herself by jumping into one of the many wells. The sound of screaming voices invaded the first eight years of my life but the screaming stopped suddenly with the death of my baby brother. My father had already left the day before the baby was born: one day he was there and the next, he was gone. The shame of what she would tell the other villagers meant that we had to leave the village. We walked twenty-seven kilometres barefoot, carrying our scant possessions on our heads, and settled in the village of Collenauta on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
The only thing my mother could do exceptionally well was cook, so she offered her services to the patrons of the village who owned all the sugar cane plantations and who were immensely wealthy. The story I was asked to relay, whenever probed about my father, was that he had been killed whilst trying to save someone drowning. On hearing me say this with the intonation and facial movements that accompanied the phrase, the patrons, Thampurati and Mothalali, took pity on our plight and offered us a place to stay. That is how we came to be hired by the Kathi family, my mother as cook and I as her assistant, and we lived in the small quarters at the bottom of their land, surrounded by rich banana plantations, mango trees and paddy fields. It was a small room but beautifully decorated with simple woodcarvings and all the utensils we required to do our job along with a buffalo, which gave us fresh milk.
The art of putting together food is a magical thing and if it is done right it has the power to soften the most hardened heart. My mother always said that when you work with what you love, you work with magic. However, if the ingredients are incorrectly administered, or if you work with bad intention, it can also bring the most disastrous results. Subtly, we laboured, convinced that it was the love and gratitude we put into the preparation of the Kathi’s food that made them prosper. Just the right amount of cumin to stimulate appetite for life, a cinnamon quill to bring spice or action into stagnant phases of life, lemon juice to diffuse an argument, chilli to relieve pain and turmeric to heal the heart. Freshly picked coriander leaves tempered bad humour and gave a sense of clarity, fiery peppered rasam warmed the soul, and grated coconut added to many dishes soothed and comforted. Pounded lentils left to soak for days made the batter for soft pancakes filled with shallow fried masala potatoes for a sense of pride and stability. Golden beans added to vegetable thoran were for longevity and prosperity.
My mother would watch situations and then prescribe accordingly under the watchful eye of Annapurna, beautiful pale blue Goddess of food and abundance, lit by the fire and the passion of the sun and the moon. She was placed on a box in the kitchen area and was adorned every day with fresh flowers. We said a prayer to her when we woke up and just before we went to bed, thanking her and asking that she give us the courage to do our job. So I don’t know if we could really take the credit for delivering small doses of happiness wherever possible, but we believed it was Annapurna, and my mother said it really didn’t matter, for whatever you believed became true.
There was also a little bronze Annapurna, no bigger than my thumb which my mother kept in a makeshift pocket of her kasava mundu. She came everywhere with us and was placed in whichever kitchen we were cooking in and was always given the first offering of food. There were many kitchens the little Goddess visited as word spread rapidly through the village that we had the most amazing ability to cook. As we were hired out for village festivals, births and marriages, things in the village began to change: a new temple, renewed rainfall, and laughter. It was almost as if my mother turned the inability to mend her own life outwards and seeing the pleasure this produced fixed her in some way. She took pride in her work and it showed.
The astrologer first thought that these changes were negligible and had been induced by the new phase of the moon. When one of the village women, who had been trying for ten years to conceive, suddenly fell pregnant, he consulted his chart and once again found two new specks pointing in a northward direction. He paid us a visit.
My mother welcomed him in. He looked around at the walls that had been brightly painted and the kitchen area decorated with freshly cut flowers and then he saw the box with my mother’s Goddess covered with garlands and whatever pieces of jewellery she had. The room was infused with cooking smells and the fragrance of jasmine and incense and then he looked down at the floor which had been neatly swept. He felt a little reassured and he removed his chappels. My mother pulled out the best stool for him and he sat.
He was probably in his mid-thirties and had taken over from his father who had died suddenly. He found it difficult at first to speak and coughed everywhere, looking a little embarrassed, as he dabbed his cheeks with his loincloth. His bare chest had red saffron stains and a black piece of string hung diagonally along it. At the other end was a small bag where he kept a notebook, some seashells and a pendulum. My mother smiled at him and brought him some masala tea. He swiftly drank and coughed again. She pulled out some honey-coated jilebies and as she offered him one, his face softened. When that had disappeared, he took another and another, until his whole body surrendered and then he spoke.
‘Why did you come here?’ enquired the astrologer.
‘We were sent,’ my mother replied.
‘Dates of birth?’
She gave him the name of the rainy season and the time at which I was born and she said that he could plot my life for she knew for sure the path hers was going to take.
‘Just do Nali’s,’ she said.
He took out his notebook and began drawing and calculating. Smiling enthusiastically, he murmured the word ‘good’ half a dozen times and then he paused, long silent pauses where he shook his head, and then he began to discuss the plans that had been made for me.
‘Many men will come from afar to marry you and you will be a beautiful woman but you must not readily accept the first proposal and you must not marry in pursuit of love, for this, too, is an illusion, just a state of mind. You will be a very, very prosperous woman, unimaginably so, but never lose sight of your gift. If you do, you lose your centre and all else falls away. You are already very blessed, for many people must go in search of their gifts. Lifetimes are spent on this. You know where it resides, hold onto it.’ He looked up from what he was doing and asked, ‘Father dead?’
‘Yes, yes,’ interjected my mother hastily, ‘lost his life in a tragic accident.’
He was about to probe further when I looked at him sadly and said ‘drowning’ and then I asked him if I would be happy.
He responded by saying that happiness was a state of mind and nature dictates that states are forever changing. He opened his tin of moist sandalwood and placed two dots on our foreheads. Every Thursday after that he would pay a visit, have tea, share his counsel, bless us and leave.
I did go to school when I could but it wasn’t something that interested me. What I loved was the preparation of a wedding or a village festival; the anticipation, the chopping of food, the blending, the frying, the colours, the aromas, the tasting then adding, and then the final results offered alongside decorations. My mother understood this completely and the only stipulation she gave was that I learn to read and write.
We gained much respect for the work we produced in the village and although my mother had made enough money to buy her own plot of land, she decided not to, saving the money instead for my dowry. She hoped that the money would attract a good suitor for me.
When I was about sixteen, many young men and their families began to come and enquire if I was eligible for marriage. First, the tree climber and his family came. His job was to collect all the different fruit from the trees but my mother looked at the state of his feet and his fingernails and turned him away. Then the doctors’ family arrived, they weren’t doctors as such but were twins. In the village, twins were supposed to have curative powers and if someone had an ailment, one of the twins was brought in to touch the patient. If this failed, the other twin was brought in and the patient was supposedly healed. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, thinking that most complaints in the village were cured by her fiery pepper rasams.