Ginger and Ganesh. Nani Power
come to realize that everyone, naturally, had their own ways and methods, and that in navigating this journey I would find my own way. Which is a microcosm of life anyway.
MY FIRST HOUSE, a woman named Mishti. I am almost there . . .
I start to wonder, with a small nudging of pain: I’m looking for cooking lessons. Or am I? Am I looking for a mother? a friend? or an artificial lever into another’s culture? These thoughts pervade as I careen through the trimmed suburbs. I wish to learn but not intrude. I try and keep that in mind.
Meanwhile, I am lost in a maze of beige houses made of siding and fake rock. I turn around and start again. They all look the same.
I look at my address again. Yes, back the other way.
I turn around.
I have come to my first house, first cooking lesson and I am walking up to the door.
My first encounter—the sharp, bracing tang of ginger.
LIKE I SAID, here I am: in my forties, divorced, with two kids. I live in Virginia solely for the sake of my kids. My family is nearby and very present in our lives. It is exurbia, rural countryside of horse farms bleeding into the new sterile suburbs. There are certain reasons that I prefer this to a homey old cabin on a farm: upkeep. I can’t deal with furnaces and leaky windows, lawns to trim and hedges to clip. I come and go and write, and that is all I can do. I can also cook. But I fit in very few categories. I am not the barbecuing, SUV-driving suburban mom surrounding me. I am single, and therefore on some level cast out of this group. I don’t merge with the immigrant families, such as my Indian neighbors: they keep to themselves. Am I searching for a husband? No. I am happy to live my own life. Am I searching for love? Of course. But what am I not searching for? I am always essentially in the mode of searching. On any given day I could choose to eat from twenty-two different regional foods, from Vietnamese to Ethiopian. I can date men from the local country fields or go to Washington DC and dance with politicians, or meet an Egyptian waiter or a Russian mathematician. I can go online and meet Turkish men or African or Arab. I could go live in Nepal or move to New York City. I have too many choices. I am too free on some levels. So I come back to basics. Love. Friendship. Cooking.
This act of searching led me to Craigslist, to a community of ladies, of all ages, all classes, from various regions spanning the great continent of India all nestled in the suburbs, who were willing to teach me the vegetarian foods of their great country.
And then, via Craigslist, I also fell in love. Searching isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes you can find what you are searching for.
Krishna and Curry Leaves
Miracles abound
IT IS SUMMER of 2008. I am driving towards my first cooking class, a bag of vegetables beside me, as given to me on a list in the email.
I am tired. I just got back from vacation with my kids and my then-boyfriend. We had been together for two years and had become engaged. But the vacation seemed to break open the deep incongruities in our relationship, and the fissures widened. We fought and didn’t talk. We came back and it was all over.
On some level, I have to examine the fact that I felt I needed this relationship—that he had two boys like myself, and that I needed to remarry and have a stable home environment. But did I really love him, did he inspire me, was he someone I loved to talk to at the end of the day? Not really. We actually had nothing in common.
But then one starts to think: I have lived the family life with child rearing. What am I seeking exactly? I started to consider something more. I spent hours debating this with friends. It was an open dialogue, one that was not meant to be solved as much as discussed, endlessly. Soul mate vs. simple companion vs. friend with benefits vs. sugar daddy vs. best buddy—we jumped around with so many theories and ideas, if we were seeking the cure for cancer we probably already would have the Nobel in our hands. But of course, with all this talk, we had nothing and knew nothing. Just a liberal bunch of women dancing salsa or zydeco, going to farmers’ markets, attending yoga ashrams, drinking pinot grigio and trying out Buddhism. Dating here and there, with not much enthusiasm.
But I did know one thing. I wanted to learn Indian food. I didn’t think these two things, however, had much to do with each other. I was wrong.
MY FIRST TEACHER said she was from Gujarat, the most northwestern state in India. A quick bit of Googling and I discovered that the people are known for their sharp business sense. In fact, out of Forbes’s list of the ten richest men in India, four of them are Gujarati. Gandhi was also “guju,” as slang would put it. They also house the most vegetarians in all of India, and as every Indian will tell me in the days to come:
Now Gujarati, they know how to make veggy food.
I drive in this late summer day, to meet my first Indian cook, Mishti from Gujarat.
Mishti lives in one of those apartment complexes, newly built, near the area of Virginia known as Herndon. After meandering around the parking lots, which all feed into each other and make no logical sense, I finally find their ground floor garden apartment. I don’t know Mishti: I don’t know if she is old, young, how educated; at this point, I don’t even know where she is from—it is a blank slate.
So I find her door, another portal of mystery. A tiny dried wreath of flowers rests on its knocker.
And there she is, my newest guide to this soft world. Perhaps this is the bittersweet feeling a man feels when he pays for a prostitute, that this is something ideally you would have in your life naturally, and you are paying for such a private rite, and there is probably such a sense of vulnerability that you would need another human being, and yet a bit of pride that you did, after all, strike out and seek it.
And, yes, it is a need for a form of mothering.
My newly adopted mother, in this moment, is tiny and young, in her late twenties. Someone in the know told me Guju-babes are known for being sexy, that they tend to stay in shape. And such authority she possesses so young. She is elfin, gracious, and I leave my shoes by the door, which I always do in the Indian houses, and now I’ve come to think of it not just for cleanliness, but also as some meaningful ritual: as in, who you walk as in this world shall be left behind.
I have brought my son, not wanting to leave him at home. She gives him water and special sweets she brought from India, a golden hair-like candy that is delicate and saffrony, and crunchy hot biscuits. The apartment is simple, sparse, dotted with a few candles, and small icons of individuality, an altar to Ganesh in one corner, with a tiny brass frame of a family, blurry—I am unable to see more than the dim figures of a man, woman, a few kids of varying ages, amidst the dust of incense lying snaked on the table. The kitchen is merely a corner of the room, harshly lit by fluorescent. In the American need for convenience, have we achieved more time? No, not likely. Are we enjoying our meals? No, I don’t think so. We are stripping ourselves of a basic sensuality that our bodies crave, touching our food, loving it before we sacrifice it. And we are longing to change this: food is hot right now. Classes are filling up, the TV networks are packed with shows teaching us how to go back to the basics.
A brief aside about Ganesh: how I am growing to adore him. Something about the Indian deity touches me, and I collect his figurines in my house. I love the fables about this elephant-faced, potbellied God. Most Indian homes will have a small Ganesh sculpture somewhere. He is heavily revered. He is supposed to be the first deity one worships in Hindu ceremonies called pujas (offerings), especially at the beginning of any venture, especially any creative venture, so perhaps that is why I have a fondness for him. He is considered the problem solver, and I’ve heard you can offer him a cracked coconut in particularly trying times. But it is a certain joviality and warmth that he seems to exude that I really love.
I am here to learn the basics. We wash vegetables and she is shy, diligent in her kindness. And she tells me of her home. She adds twice the amount of sliced green chilies to every dish, and tops it all with a spoon of sugar, a Gujarati trademark, she says.
We