Curry. Naben Ruthnum
up in, or visited. They didn’t bother offering an answer to my questions, which were, more truthfully, attacks. The back-cover copy on these volumes was, if not identical, repetitive. Well into my teens, I’d always opt for Roth over Rushdie, Nabokov over Narayan.
Stories about reading are necessarily stories about prejudice: forming reading habits means cultivating strict prejudices and then carefully discarding them. As the posters in the kids’ section at the library inform us, reading can take you anywhere. But damned if you’re not going to decide exactly where and when you want to go. Much of the research for this book derived from books that had arrived in my hands over the years and articles that had flitted into my feed: reading outside the classroom is about controlling the accidental arrival of information, turning a chaotic flow of words and stories into an organized system of taste through rejection.
My family had a strict rule against reading at the table, the given logic being that it forced blood to your brain that should properly be in the gut, aiding digestion. My parents both being medical professionals (an ophthalmologist and a psych nurse), I didn’t challenge this logic.
We ate with the news on, and only rarely was the nightly meal not Mauritian food, which I’d describe to friends as Indian food as a shorthand to leave out the explanation of Mauritius being an island off the east coast of Africa, and later just describe, self-mockingly, as ‘Curry, what else would we eat?’ anticipating and cutting off jokes from the fairly unprogressive Western Canada youth of the 1990s. I loved the stuff, anyway. I accepted it and defended it as part of my cultural identity, an easily identifiable and likeable part of it, one in which I had built-in, extremely fake expertise. Any time a white friend reported his mom or dad making a curry with coconut milk or snap peas in it, I dismissed it as ‘the white man’s curry,’ and was at least correct in that neither ingredient was common in the Mauritian curries that were made in my house.
Curry was a territory I defended, an absolute truth based on the way it was made in my family’s kitchen, despite the delicious counterarguments we ate at restaurants in Vancouver (and eventually even in Kelowna, the expanding small city in British Columbia where I grew up). There was an acceptable authenticity in what we ate, one I felt ran counter to the books with various brown hands, red fabrics, clutched mangoes, and shielded faces that turned up on our shelves with such regularity that we may have been members of some Columbia House Diasporic Novel subscription package that none of us knew how to cancel. My family enjoyed the books, and continue to read some of them. In doing research for this volume, I had to expand beyond my usual method – picking up books that interest me and finding connected texts. I asked a close relative if she had any recommendations for – as I put it in the email – ‘super-typical “I miss the homeland” novels you’ve read by South Asian authors in the past few years.’ She replied, ‘Oh God, I avoid these like the plague. My white friends seem to enjoy them.’
They do indeed – so do some of my white friends, and their parents. But so do some of my brown friends, and their parents. I’ve read quite a few of these books by now, both by accident and on determined purpose for this book, as I’ve tried to hew out exactly what I’ve had in mind when my teenaged self defined these novels that I avoided as ‘currybooks’: it’s certainly not a description I’d apply to absolutely any book from the vast output of diasporic authors, or authors still based in India. Anita Desai’s work, Salman Rushdie’s, Hari Kunzru’s, Michael Ondaatje’s – it doesn’t linger in the nostalgic, authenticity-seeking reconciliation-of-present-with-past family narratives that are endemic to what I call currybooks. They don’t follow the genre rules, even if they nip in and borrow here and there. They exist as reflections of the author’s consciousness and culture, with culture processed through that consciousness. For example, Rushdie’s continual seeking of the truth outside of realism is exactly how he escapes tropes before they can solidify: his own recollection of India in Midnight’s Children had to acknowledge the existence of an India-of-the-mind, constructed from recall. And Anita Desai’s vision, in books such as In Custody, is as connected to the stylistic work of authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, with whom she presumably went through that whole anxiety-of-influence thing that writers do, as it is to the places where she grew up and the work of Indian authors such as R. K. Narayan.
Food and literature are the defining elements of the way I see myself in the Indian diaspora in the small world I’ve built around myself as a brown adult in the West: curry’s the vehicle I use to look at how we eat, read, and think of ourselves as a miniature mass-culture within the greater West. Curry’s just as fake and as real as a great novel, as a sense of identity.
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