Language Barrier

I couple who are friends of my parents are visiting their son and daughter-in-law in the US. The gentleman was kind enough to mail me a present for J that my parents had sent with him. One would imagine, it would be a fairly simple matter for me to call him and say thank you. I called the number from which he had called me when he first reached here and it was answered by a young woman with a distinct Bengali accent. Without further ado, I introduced myself in Bengali. Clearly, that was a very dumb move. The woman was grievously offended and asked "What did you say ?" in a decidedly rude tone of voice. I figured this was the daughter-in-law. Duly chastised, I reintroduced myself and in English this time and hoped for the best. At this point, the woman said "I don't know who you are" and hung up on me.

She had not allowed me the opportunity to say that I was looking to speak to her father-in-law Mr D. There is no other way I know to reach him now. He won't know that I had try to reach him.I tossed out the package in which J's gift was mailed so I don't have a postal address to mail him a thank you note. He does not have an email address. So here I am stuck with an unsaid thank you like a fish bone in my throat. It is hard to speculate what the relationship dynamics are between the woman and her in-laws but as an outsider I am stuck coming across as uncultured and ungrateful. I can't help thinking that I may have fared better if I had not launched into a conversation in Bengali - that may have been my undoing and it's too late to make amends.

Just Rice

Not to be unnecessarily difficult here, but reading this essay on rice by Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker do beg the questions why and when. First the why - why is this description of preparing pulao so terribly significant when it does not transcend the prosaic to become something larger than a grain (or bowl) of rice.

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield comes to mind as do some Odes to food by Pablo Neruda. Closer home (since Lahiri prefers to stick with all things Bengali), there is Sukanto Bhattacharya who wrote :"khudhar rajoye prithibi goddomoy, purnimar chand jeno jholshano ruti" translated very beautifully by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta as :

In the regime of hunger, the earth belongs to prose,
The full moon burns like a loaf of bread.

Now that is a way of looking at food a little differently. I recognize that Neruda, Hirshfield and Bhattacharya are poets and Lahiri is not but what a poet can do with verse, a competent writer should be able to do with prose. Basically what we have here is an intricate description of the process of preparing a desi rice dish by the author's father - which by the way is very similar to something Damayanti Basu Singh had written several years ago.

The essay by Buddhadev Basu which his daughter reproduces in translation is very much worth reading. Maybe that can serve as inspiration for Lahiri if she is absolutely determined to discuss the probasi banaglir handi-heshel ( non-resident Bengali's pots, pans and kitchen) in the most obsessive detail as has been her wont. There is a lot more work to be done to make such a piece of writing shine and become a thing of literary merit. Throwing a couple of Bengali words in for "texture" and "flavor" is not nearly enough.

Now for the when - when oh when is Lahiri going to say something that does not drip markeen probasi bangali (Bengali residing in America) like a over-soaked rosogolla. The drip is gooey, saccharine and yes very, very cringe worthy. Surely, she could employ her talents to turn out something more interesting than a really bland bowl of rice - and no, the raisins and almonds do not elevate it to anything more than that.

I asked my friend S who is a desi born and raised in NYC, what she thought made this kind of desi household minutiae unsupported by larger purpose so appealing. Her theory is that average American readers do not expect world class literature when they read the work of someone with an "ethnic sounding" name.  The best a desi could do is to satisfy their curioisty about what goes on inside a desi's home and mind. Lahiri and her ilk are enabling the vouyeristic in their western readers and it is the reason they are so marketable.

Mishti Doi

When my parents were visiting with us a few months ago, my mother told J a Bengali folk tale in which Mishti Doi plays a very critical role. Indeed, the protagonist finds this particular delicacy so irresistible that he forgets some important promises and thus the story.

Now, ever since J heard about the indescribable delights of Mishti Doi and it's ability to induce momentary lapse of reason, she has been clamoring to taste it. My mishti making skills are non-existent and in the backwaters where I live, there is no way I could buy her some from a desi (Bangladeshi more likely) store.

The craving for this unseen, untasted and yet supremely tempting treat has grown manifold since Grandma left and I am left with the daunting  task of producing it somehow. I figured it would not be too difficult to find a recipe and give it a shot - what's the worst someone (even if that person was me) could so with yogurt, sugar and cream anyway.

So I looked up some recipes and among the first things I saw was this dozen variations on the theme of Mishti Doi. Not exactly the simple two, three step solution I had in mind. When variation #1 (presumably the easiest) has instructions like "By trial and error you’ll find the correct temperature setting for your oven for the perfect Dahi ! If it's not setting up, increase the temperature a bit." I can already see my resolve to give this thing a shot dissipating rapidly. Cooking this thing needs one to be a clairvoyant almost !

Before giving up, I decided to look some more. Since I don't recall caramelized sugar being part of the Mishti Doi taste , I am a little suspicious of this "easy" recipe. One blogger's version looks quite promising  and the instructions are easy enough to follow - love the lack of ambiguity in particular. Not one to leave good enough alone and just cook the damn thing, I had to seek out a second opinion and there was no lack of them - there are 6920 entries per Google on the subject.

The one I checked out went into some technical detail that is bound to please the more sophisticated cooks but it's not something one such as myself should even bother with. If I know what's good for me and keep my limitations in mind, I would go with the three step formula and have J believe that it is Mishti Doi. But given the keen level of anticipation, I feel obliged to turn out something that is reasonably close to the real thing. My lack of competance at all things mishti (sweet) and the plethora of how-tos are not helping out.

Bengali Scrooge

I would be the Bengali Scrooge when it comes to enthusiasm over the festival de jour of our community - Durga Puja. I never got the point of pandal hopping and weeklong rabble rousing in the name of religion though as an extended carnival it is quite alright - specially if carnivals are your thing. It seemed to me that with each passing year, the religious and spiritual elements of Puja were harder and harder to discern in these over-crowded community events. My distaste for the festivities grew in proportion.

This year, thanks to an over enthusiastic acquaintance, J and I made a trip to a city some hours away from where I live to participate in the Durga Puja celebrations at the temple there. It involved us getting up at the crack of dawn, driving to their house, car-pooling to our destination with a few missed turns and wrong directions thrown in for good measure. Three hours later we arrived. The Puja started one hour later than schedule, J got extremely hungry and looked at me like I was punishing her. The crowds has swollen to the point where making an exit was difficult - besides I did not want to offend our host.

So we sat through the whole thing. The priest chanted mantras that sounded like a Bollywood-style bhajan. He kept repeating invocations to the whole pantheon of Hindu gods but the names of Durga remained conspicuously absent. Nothing else about the rituals looked familiar - he appeared to be improvising as he went supported by assistants that appeared just as clueless.

Then there were the conch-shell blowers, drummers and cymbal players. Between them, the decibel level in a closed auditorium was a force to be reckoned with. Around me the ladies gossiped about what was growing in whose backyard, whose in-laws had fallen ill, where they had bought the sari they were wearing and such.

When we finally got home at the end of what seemed like the longest day ever, J said to me "I can't believe you made me sit in that car for five hours just to listen to that racket". This was supposed to be her introduction to a slice of "bengali culture" that she has seen very little of. Clearly, that effort had not amounted to much or perhaps being Scrooge is in her DNA.