The New and Sparing World

A New and Sparing World
No, I don't mean the mighty U S of A. Some of the people in the mighty USA are dedicated to consumerism in a way I cannot even fathom. Once upon a time I lived in a place where life was quite basic -- no supermarkets, frozen food or Doctor Pepper. I once asked one American friend what he missed most in that place. Disposable kitchen tissue, he said. In a country where women boiled strange vegetation for hours to make something that resembled mushy soap.
  With COVID terrorizing us, I have wondered, what price our extravagances? At the end of all this, are we willing to take a good, long look at our silly indulgences? Are we able to consider the harm we are doing to our world?
  I think: do we need to travel quite so much to quieten the sheer frenzy of our indulgent selves? Do families need more than one car in their front-gardens? And are all their trips in them necessary or useful?
  I start with my own household. The number of items of clothes we buy for our grandchild is sinful. And then we give away two or three bagfuls to charities twice a year. A few years ago, I remember I used to buy clothes a size too small for my biggish self. In the hope that I could slim down to them. Did I ever succeed in wearing them? The answer can be guessed.
I look in my condiments cupboard and there are several kinds of vinegar, Soy sauces and pickles.They fester there for years, and jars barely used get chucked out after a year, or two, or many. My linen cupboard is bursting with towels and duvet covers from all over the world; pillow cases that never see the light of day...  Recently I counted the saris I haven't worn since decades and there were sixty-four. I periodically look at them -- they are pretty to look at. But I don't wear them in England. Some are from the time of my youth, old and saturated with memories, but still, there is no excuse with such covetousness.
  After Covid, shall we see some sense in our lives? Less time rushing around wanting more and more, instead find more time to enjoy what is all around us. Just now, the butterflies, wasps and bees are back in force in my garden. The birds are reclaiming the trees, the grass, the bushes. I potter around in the wet mud, knowing I have to wash my hands so many times anyway.
  Next year, hopefully with death and damnation behind us, I shall make a list of how I shall trim down my life. Stay still. look. listen...  

Food in the Time of Covid

Today it looks as though our bread supply will run out.  In spite of my eating ends, crust and all, which I normally disdain to look at. We eat an unhealthy amount of soft white in our house; we have enough of that to carry us through to next week, but my daughter's seeded brown is over. So she's baking bread. I think the last time she did this was a decade ago. Meanwhile, having taken out the Kenwood and the balance, she made scones for me. She didn't approve of the fact that I insisted on ladling butter, jam, AND cream on to each half.
   There's been a revolution in our house about our concept of food. We don't waste a morsel of anything. Yesterday I tasted my courgette and spinach in yoghurt and quickly put it aside. Uneatable, I thought. My daughter added bits and pieces, pulverized it in the mixer and named it soup. My son and she ate it. I am reeling from surprise. My son does not often notice what we put in front of him, which, at the moment is a blessing.
   I am going back to Malayalee ways, cooking up Moong dhal, lentils and chick peas. We excavate things lurking deep inside the freezer, and eat it, sometimes not quite sure whether it is animal, mineral or vegetable. Whereas, in the past, I would flick such lurking unknowns into the bin, pleading unhealthy appearance, now I look closely, talk to it, and cook it.
   Yesterday I cooked an enormous cabbage-fry, normally something that hangs around in the 'frig accusingly for a whole week, but it has disappeared. I had to cook a whole cabbage because I couldn't countenance letting it get dry and mangy, (it looked a little yellow in parts) with the current paucity of veg. Fresh vegetables involve a trip to the supermarket, which we do not try very often. Yesterday, I also cooked a big pot of Lentils in coconut milk and that too, nearly disappeared. So, I think,what shall I create today? There is some flaked rice sitting in the larder for at least a year. I will make uppuma with it. Cook it with onions and green chilli after briefly frying it in a dry wok, and cooking it in a very little water. No coconut for garnish, but I shall do the Indian tempering with mustard seed and a dry chilli bean?
   Necessity, closely related all inventions. As they say!

For my UK friends, an easy, quick recipe:
Chick peas in yoghurt
Drain liquid from the can and empty one can of chick-peas into a pan. Add boiled water to cover, a quarter teaspoon of turmeric powder and simmer for 5 minutes. Add half an onion, chopped, a pinch of crushed pepper, one green chilli  chopped fine, and a teaspoonful of mashed ginger.  Add salt to taste. Add 8 ounces of coconut milk and a tablespoonful of chopped coriander leaves.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then add a cup of yoghurt. Stir gently. 
Goes with any kind of bread or rice.


 
   

Write or Eat Chocolate

Write or Eat Chocolate?
That's the choice today. I could read of course. Just downloaded one by Tayari Jones. What a writer!  Chocolate of course beckons for brunch as usual; I am tempted, because it does not involve any thinking. Dreadful business, thinking. And it threatens:

  Bubonic Plague across the road. When I got up in the morning, as a child of seven years, in 1942,  and looked out the window, there was always this huge more-or-less, but not-quite-finished house. The porch was big enough to park one of those long Chevrolets that rich Indians favoured in the forties. The red brick had not been plastered -- the owners had gone overseas just before the second world war started, and had been stranded in Penang, much like the families blocked from travelling now in the COVID 19 months. In those days Indians migrated to Ceylon, Malayasia, Burma, Singapore, even East Africa, not the UK or the USA. There was a big pond on one side of the house, in which, many years later, after the family returned, I learned to swim, using a float of old, dried coconuts tied round my waist.

  In the war years, though, a family of beggars squatted in that empty house, appearing out of nowhere. Two young men, two women, and several half- naked children. The women came to our well sometimes for drinking water; occasionally there would be a toddler tugging at her mundu. At that time, my father was in jail, having got on the wrong side of the British Raj because of his political activities and we children, Mani and I, could wander across and stare at the beggars.

  They cooked on a three-stone fire set up on the front veranda and slept on the end of it too. Nobody had electric lights then and kerosene was rationed. The beggars burned wicks in coconut shells briefly in the evenings, like fireflies flitting around.  One day, when Mani and I went to stare, the women chased us away. They didn't speak our language, but their distress was obvious.

  'They're sick,' our maid informed us next day. 'Bad sickness,'  We found out how bad when the family started dying one by one. Plague, my father's colleague, Nambiar, informed us. 'No one should go that side.' Achamma (father's mother) filled coconut shells with cow dung solutions and lined the walkway to the gate to ward off infections. It must have worked because we didn't get plague, though there was no dearth of huge bandicoot rats in the firewood.

  The family across died one by one, until there was just one woman and a child left. When the shit- cart came to take the last dead child away, Mani and I hid on the back-parapet of our house and cried. The unfinished house was empty again, soon after.

  Looking back, I am surprised at the number of deadly diseases we survived -- Smallpox, Typhoid, Measles, Whooping cough... My young mother, all of eighteen years old, had died five years back of Tuberculosis, and a young man from the house behind ours also died of Tuberculosis. In homes around us, people died, but we escaped. No doubt the cow dung worked. Inoculations against Cholera, and vaccinations against Small pox gradually became commonplace. I still have an imprint of that old vaccination on my upper arm; the weapon used was so enormous.

  Now I am wondering whether I should look for cow dung again.