"Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is a gifted writer of great promise. I have a gut feeling we have a new star rising in Punjab's literary horizon. She has an excellent command of English and a sly sense of humour."
On the 39th death anniversary of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, am sharing an earlier post.
It was Amrita Pritam who coined that particular epithet for Shiv Kumar Batalvi. Birha is a Punjabi word that connotes the grief of separation from a beloved, and it was Baba Farid who declared birha a crowning emotion with his verse, birha, birha aakhiye, birha toon sultan.
Batalvi, widely regarded as a peerless modern Punjabi poet, trawled through the landscape of romance and its adscititious angst, his lyrical verse exploring unrequited love, premonitions of death, and the inviolable bond between an artist and his creativity. Such is his oeuvre that growing up in Punjab, it is common to confuse his verses with folk songs – such is their popularity with the masses. Thus along with lathe di chaadar, and jugni, and Heer, I heard maye ni maye and got introduced to Batalvi, subliminally, which is the gift of culture. It was only in my teens that I became aware that there were actual poets, with specific names and bios, behind the songs that I took for granted and hummed and heard being hummed around me all the time. The de rigueur rendition of Heer at weddings was copyright a certain Waris Shah, aka the Shakespeare of Punjabi! During my teenage years, confounded by hormones and the separatist movement of Khalistan, I debated with my extended family on questions of identity and often, the discussion was rounded off with a final quip ‘Bullah ki jaana main kaun’ This Bullah, I discovered, was Baba Bullah Shah, a revered 18th-century Sufi poet whose humanist verses are woven into the fabric of Punjabi. It was inevitable then that I would eventually discover Batalvi.
My mother, practical and no-nonsense at best of times, was dreamy-eyed when she first told me about the poet behind the familiar maye ni maye main ik shikra yaar banaya. He was the Byron of Punjab, she said, on what sounded suspiciously like a sigh, and I understood. Like a typical convent-school child I was familiar with the poetry and romance around George Gordon Lord Byron, the handsome poet with a limp and a penchant for romantic poetry, who allegedly left women swooning behind curtained windows when they glimpsed him walking down the street. Unh-hunh! a Punjabi Byron, I thought, what a poser. But I was young and had much to learn.
When I started exploring the ‘myth’ of this Punjabi Byron – for what else could it be, thought my cocky/read ignorant/ self – I came across comparisons with Keats as well. Shiv Kumar Batalvi was widely viewed through the prism of English romantic poets by people educated in English; for the semi-literate average Punjabi he was the empathetic poet who spoke to them directly with his down-to-earth metaphors, his soaring lyricism and his aching poignancy.
Batalvi was born in 1936 in West Punjab and his family moved to Indian Punjab after partition. That severing of the state into half was not the final tribulation for Punjab, which was to go through further subdivisions on the basis of language. In the fifties and sixties, the linguistic basis used for the division of India’s states was employed by the political parties in Punjab to further their respective agendas. In the ensuing imbroglio between the Akalis and Jan Sangh, Punjabi was hijacked as a language of the Sikhs, and consequently not of Punjabi Hindus who took to aligning with Hindi. In such an environment, Batalvi, a Punjabi Hindu, wrote poetry in his mother tongue Punjabi. Aided by his handsome looks, and his powerful voice, he recited his verses to packed audiences in Kavi Darbars across the states. He touched a chord with people and his popularity boomed. He gave the state back its language, free of the burden of caste or class. It was a parallel with his own life where he had been unable to marry the woman he loved because of caste and class differences. All that angst went into his poetry and no wonder the common Punjabi responded to it with a deep sense of empathy.
Batalvi himself was not very well-educated. He flitted across several educational institutions before settling down to work as a Patwari, a job that his frustrated father had arranged for him. The work of a land-record clerk had him visiting fields and farms. This kept him in close contact with the flora and fauna of Punjab and the illiterate peasantry of the countryside, and provided him with the visual imagery and earthy metaphors that propelled his haunting lyrics.
As I discovered, in the case of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, the myth was reality, phoenix-like. The man was seen as a modern-day Ranjha, the fabled lovelorn hero of Punjabi poetic legend, who sang his own compositions. He published his first collection of poetry at the age of 24, is the youngest writer to be feted with India’s highest literary award, the Sahitya Akademy, at the age of 28, became a legend in his lifetime, and was dead at the age of 35.
Personally, I re-discovered Batalvi in the mid-nineties when I was working in Mumbai. The physical distance from home, the palpable ache that came from not witnessing green fields, the bland spinach disguised as saag served in restaurants, made me yearn for home. It was then that I chanced upon Jagjit Singh’s rendition of ‘Birha the Sultan’. Hearing Batalvi transported me. I did not understand the lyrics completely but it was okay, I was in my comfort zone.
The remarkable thing about any great piece of art is that it reveals itself progressively. Which means that it is possible to discover new facets of the same composition/article/sculpture years onward. It happened with me when I started to write myself. I had never envisaged a writing career, and the thought that I would one day write a historical novel that would deal with the 20th century history of Punjab was a definite mirage. And yet, I did. I spent hours poring over history books and fiction and listening to interviews and talking to people who had been witness to that history to write my book. Writing found me, it led me to that particular project and I followed. And it was during that phase that I connected with Batalvi again.
In his poem, Eh mera geet kise na gaana, Batalvi talks about the bond between the artiste and his art, the gift and gift’s burden, one that is forged from beyond the time of birth. And consequently, the extent to which the link is permanent and inviolable. Witness:
Eh mera geet dharat ton maila
Sooraj jed puraana,
Kot janam ton piya asaahnu
Is da bol handaahna.
This song of mine is more soiled than the earth
older than the sun,
for several births I have had to live
with the weight of its words.
The psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, his path-breaking book that explores the nurture versus nature debate expounds that human beings are not born ‘clean’. Instead our genetic baggage is a large determinant of the lives we lead. It might be new to the world of science but intuitively ‘genetic baggage’ is something writers have tussled with as part of their trade. What a writer writes springs from who they inherently are. It’s as simple as that. Of course, how a writer then leverages that raw material is entirely determined by the individual, but the wellspring, the fountain is all within.
Over my decade-long writing career the veracity of that has come to me, often. When I completed the manuscript of my first novel (published second), The Long Walk Home, the writing of which took me seven years, the theme of the book finally became apparent to me. It is a historical novel that uses 20th-century Punjab to tell the story of the life of one man, a layering of the epic with the intimate. The book explores how a man’s life is inextricably linked with the coordinates of his birth: place, family, religion, caste. In the prologue to the novel, which details the protagonist Harbaksh Singh Bhalla, is a passage as follows:
He died in the same town he was born, just short of his seventy-first birthday.
One could say that Harbaksh Singh Bhalla had not travelled far in life, literally and figuratively. A lifetime in one place can imply many things: a lack of wanderlust, an inordinate attachment to one’s roots, risk-aversion. Or inferences more practical can be made: lack of opportunity, ancestral property, family matters. Then there exist tenuous notions like the air of a place and how the spirit resonates to it, the smell of the earth and its connection with something deep and primitive within us, the songs of home and their dance in our veins.
It could well be a concoction of all the above – a heady mix of conflicting elements that gives rise to an equation at once complex and elementary. But equations, however tortuous, can never sum up a person. The best way to know a man may still be the only way: to walk in his shoes and live his life.
Genetic baggage can, and does, trip the best-laid plans and the noblest intentions. Welcome, Mr. Pinker, to our world! And while you are at it, listen to Jagjit Singh’s soulful rendition of ‘Eh mera geet’ or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s haunting ‘Maye ni maye’. You might not understand the lyrics but the poetry will seep into you.
For those of you looking for a more contemporary rendition of Batalvi check ‘Ik kudi jeeda naam mohabbat’ from Rabbi or ‘Aj din chadya tere rang warga’ from the film Love Aaj Kal.
So folks, I was getting ready to hunker down at my desk for another day of writing when research took me to google the omniscient, and, voila!, I stumbled upon a coverage in The Hindu of my debut novel: Earning the Laundry Stripes.
Writers approach book reviews with trepidation, and rightfully so. As someone said, the decision to have a child is to forever let your heart walk outside your body ... Well, substitute 'child' for 'book' for what else is the process of writing but creation?! And books like children do acquire a life of their own.
So, as I was in the midst of this third book/creation of mine, I came across this delightful review and a warm feeling filled me up. A bit like your moppet returning from school with a report card, which, jeez - mercifully - says things are in order!
"At one level it is a racy narrative which can engage you through the journey of Noor across India's dusty and chaotic hinterland with their ... to a sensitive, searing account of the complex realities of an India divided along gender, communal, class and regional lines. "
It was published in November 2006 and some of you might have missed it. The book is still available in bookstores in India or you could order it online at Amazon, Flipkart, Friends of Books ...
The first woman Sales Manager in HLL, Noor Bhalla flounders initially, but soon learns that the best way to do her job is to use her inherent strengths as a woman.
Earning the Laundry StripesBy Manreet Sodhi Someshwar Publishers: Rupa & CoPrice: Rs 195
The five women in the Gujarati distributor's house spend most of their time in the kitchen, and are the first to rise and last to sleep. Says the grandmother with obvious pride: "Feeding a family of 15 is like feeding an army".
The most appealing aspect of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar's
Earning the Laundry Stripes
(published by Rupa & Co) is that it can hold a reader's interest at different levels. The author has transferred her real life experiences sometimes fulfilling but most often harrowing as the first woman ASM in sales at Hindustan Lever Ltd to the protagonist Noor Bhalla. An engineer-cum-MBA (IIM, Calcutta), Noor finds herself in a man's world of sales and is totally at odds with a milieu where her male colleagues watch porn films before presentations or attack liquor with gusto at office parties.
At one level it is a racy narrative which can engage you through the journey of Noor across India's dusty and chaotic hinterland with their
loos
(hot winds of Central India), distributors with their own set of idiosyncrasies who are totally taken aback at the prospect of having to deal with a woman in sales, and the `policeman' More, who blackmails her saying that the man she had thrashed with her handbag filled with a couple of kg of Rin bars, because he had molested her in a public transport bus, was in a coma and might kick the bucket any day.
Noor's journey is interspersed with sexual innuendos from her colleagues and distributors alike, beginning with an old man in Sales at Bombay HLL lecturing her on what misfits MBAs would be in rural sales, and how the "trade retail/wholesale is
manned
by men." As he holds forth on how sales is a "frontier province that requires lean and keen men", he suddenly stops to inquire about her name. `Noor' would make her a Muslim, but `Bhalla' was obviously Punjabi; this puzzles him.
Here is what Manreet's Noor wants to tell him, but of course doesn't: "I am a Punjabi Sardarni who chews screwballs and spits them out. For fun. But what if I were Muslim?
Hanh
?
Hanh
?"
Such passages display the female sales executive's chagrin at personal questions being thrown at her all the time and the communal divisions that rule people's heads and hearts.
The feminist angle
Along the way, as she takes on a myriad of HLL distributors in the hinterland, or accompanies a
from the day they are born all their fathers can do is to collect their dowry... Out of helplessness, some resort to
datura
(poisonous seeds to kill them)".
This is another level of the book, where Manreet the feminist comes through with a sharp focus. Take this passage when a senior colleague gives her another lecture on how incompatible it would be for a woman, "whose whole life" revolves around marriage and children, to be in sales, and advises her to opt for "market research" instead!
When he learns she has a South Indian boyfriend, he goes into a tizzy and says: "You have a penchant for problems", following it up with a
bhashan
on how men are different as boyfriends and husbands.
But as a woman sales executive Noor faces moments of triumph too. In the Gujarati distributor Govindbhai's house, after a meal when she resorts to her trump card of being able, as a woman, to go to the kitchen and talk to the women, she finds that there are five women between 17 and 70 there. They spend most of their time in the kitchen, and are the first to rise and last to sleep. The grandmother informs her with obvious pride that "feeding a family of 15 was like feeding an army", and how she is preparing her granddaughter studying in Class VIII for the task of taking over the kitchen in her husband's house some day!
But Noor is delighted when Govindbhai tells her the girl "is keen to meet a real lady manager as she has never seen one before. You see, she wants to be an engineer when she grows up." And Noor is reminded of the little girl in Etha, UP, "who at eight years, is a surrogate mother and housekeeper; a girl child who will neither get a chance to be a girl or a child".
Communal polarisation in India
Yet another layer of the book mirrors the author's distress at the increasing communal polarisation in India. At an HLL distributor's place in Bombayshe runs into Imran, the child who had watched his entire family being electrocuted to death in the Gujarat riots. The shock turns him into a mental retard. But imagine her horror when the distributor bitterly tells him that he had put his nephew away in a home because the terrorists wanted to use him as a suicide bomber. "The riots had already made the boy an idiot, they claimed. Why not put him to good use? Strap a belt of explosives around him, leave him in the middle of a crowded market and remote-detonate the bomb. Then watch the Hindus die."
Noor also has to contend with communalism at home; her mother is against her marrying the Hindu Siddharth, and says: "Marriage is different from friendship. After blood ties, the ties that count are those you make within your own community. Daily we are seeing riots in India: Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-Sikh, Hindu-Christian because the majority community wants to impose their faith on the minorities. Do not abandon your faith."
Her mother's desperate plea leaves her with many emotions, a prominent one being of the "little boy (Imran) who had screamed in my face and drilled a hole forever in my heart. A little boy who was graded `ammo' in yet another fight for faith."
These are the passages that elevate Manreet's novel from a mere narration of a woman sales manager's travails in a man's world, to a sensitive, searing account of the complex realities of an India divided along gender, communal, class and regional lines. Her ability to deftly mix sensitive and serious issues like gender and communalism with a lot of
masala
, such as finding herself staring into the eyes of a crocodile as she is stranded in a Sumo in flooded Baroda street, her encounters with the colourful More, tales of her batch-mate Kalpana's boyfriend pawing other women, etc, makes the book an absorbing read.
But the punch line is in her discovery that as a woman she can bring special insights into sales and had floundered because she had been looking at it all along from the male point of view. In her learning to "play off my inherent strengths a woman is just so much better than men at some things" lies her nirvana.
For me, the great pleasure of a well-thumbed, much-loved book is that when I am busted after a day of writing, or when I just want to read someone other than myself (the travails of a writerly life, eh!), I pick up one such friend.
Recently, I was browsing through The Hakawati, and was joyously rewarded for my effort. It is a lush luxuriant book, filled with nested narratives, and transports you to a new land - what more can you ask of any friend?
I reviewed it for the SCMP when it was launched, loved it and am sharing the review here. If you want to earmark a book for the long summer days, let it be this!
Beginning with the simple instruction – Listen – the novel opens with the story of an emir who has everything he desires except for a son. He consults his vizier and on his advice packs off his slave girl Fatima to Egypt to fetch the miracle cure. This saga intertwines with the story of Osama al-Kharrat who has returned from US to Beirut to his dying father’s hospital bedside. The war-ravaged city has changed beyond Osama’s recognition; childhood friends have grown up into selves as varied as militiaman, sycophant, femme fatale, businesswoman; and the large family has unravelled. But it is Eid-al-Adha, the traditional time for a family feast, and since the patriarch is bedridden an elaborate home-cooked meal is rolled into the hospital room on a gurney amidst gossip, laughter and stories.
As Osama’s feisty sister Lina, pregnant niece Salwa, best friend Fatima, obsequious cousin Hafez, and Aunt Samia hover about the hospital in concern, the narrative bubbles with their individual stories. Mingled with these are Osama’s reminisces of his grandfather Ismail – the original Hakawati of the story, his father Farid and his favourite uncle Jihad. And how, despite his father’s disapproval of the grandfather’s lowly storyteller’s profession – that had earned the family name al-Kharrat, fibster in Arabic – Osama was weaned on stories by the old man. Through the tangled skein of individual idiosyncracies, personal privations and lost loves emerges a microcosm of Lebanon during its independence, civil war and reconstruction.
The Hakawati is Alameddine’s Rushdiesque paean to the place of his birth. His invigorating tales of love, lust and longing juxtapose gentle pigeoneers with the adventurous Mamluk slave King Baybars, nosedive into the Biblical saga of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and take flight with the fabulist fantasies of demons, imps and magic carpets. “Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories," observes a character in the novel, and as the novel proceeds the reader begins to glean the leitmotif coursing through the web of stories. It becomes apparent that sometime in his growing-up years Osama had fallen out with his father Farid, the relationship thereon marked by a stony silence.
Now, as Osama keeps vigil over his prostrate father, the only way he knows to communicate with him is through stories. Like a contemporary Sheherazade, Osama attempts to stave off his father’s death through the narration of myriad tales. Thus the story loops back to the beginning, the first and last word being the same – Listen – and one realizes that all along the Hakawati was none other than Osama.
The book could have done with tighter editing, the buffet table sags under its sumptuousness. That quibble aside, reading The Hakawati is like embarking on a steam engine train to a wondrous terrain – surrender to its meanders, forget the destination, and you will discover, as a character quips, “A great story never ends where it is expected to”.
Mukhtar rose early, surprising her rooster as she slipped outdoors. The air, rested by a night’s sleep, was crisp and light. She paused for a moment to breathe it in, her thin shoulders squaring. Later, the fierce warrior of the Plains, the Sun, would toast it and send everybody scurrying – from Alexander’s mighty army hundreds of years back to the burly tribal bullies of today. Pre-dawn was precious time. Hunching forward, she picked her way through the unlit bramble.
The steel pipe rose from the shrubbery, an eerily glistening python aloft concrete stumps. She looked back and surveyed the brush in which stood her two-room abode – a juniper shrub caught her eye. The concrete stump directly in line with the shrub would do – depositing her hammer on it she pulled herself up. The cool steel made her shiver; its massive girth unsettled her. Momentarily. She steadied herself with the left hand, and with the right, started to chip at the solid steel. The tinny sound made a din in the quiet but Mukhtar knew the sound wouldn’t carry far enough. She worked slowly, each blow unflagging in its force. The claw hammer was not ideal for the job but there had been little time for preparation. The warning had come late. She continued to chisel until the dense steel dented. By the time the faint notes of Azan floated from the village, she had managed a thin rupture. Not a minute too soon. The first call for prayer from the muezzin would stir the entire village, including them.
Back in her room Mukhtar kept the light bulb switched off. Noiselessly, she slipped out of her salwaar-kameez, sat on a wooden slat and began her bathing ritual: little water, much scrubbing. In the arid Baloch region water was a luxury, yet she inflicted twice-daily baths on herself. Her skin, scrawny, callused in parts, did not whimper – Mukhtar had been moulting for five years. Today though, she scoured with extra fervour.
So once you are done reading the entire story, let me know what you think.
On 7 February a young girl in India had her nose, arm and ear chopped off. Her crime: resisting rape. Seventeen-year-old Sarika had gone out with her friend when three men pounced upon her. When she raised an alarm the men tied her up, mutilated her and left after threatening her not to inform anybody about the incident. The girl has since undergone several rounds of surgery to correct the effects of the brutal attack.
It happened in Fatehpur, located on the sacred Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. The fertile Gangetic plain is considered the cradle of Hinduism and Fatehpur itself finds mention in ancient Hindu texts called the Puranas. The juxtaposition of heinous violence with religious places is not unusual – precisely why this case is noteworthy for both its terrible brutality and its ubiquity.
India is a patriarchal society. The good Indian girl needs a man at each stage in her life – in the form of father, husband, and son. She does not question her father’s authority, participates in an arranged marriage, and when she reaches her in-law’s house with sufficient dowry to ensure that she is not burnt, proceeds to beget male progeny. In the event that she conceives a girl child, there is always recourse to female foeticide or infanticide. Which accounts for the skewed gender ratio in India: 933 girls:1000 boys according to the 2001 Census.
In the event that she is harassed the good Indian girl is taught to ignore, look the other way, do anything but avoid calling further attention to herself. The National Crimes Record Bureau (2007) shows that total crime against women has increased by 12.5%. Yet she is instructed to weigh the cost of a few gropes, molestation, rape versus the shame of a public case. Those who don’t listen deserve a lesson – as did Sarika. That she did not allow herself to be gangraped incensed the men enough to mutilate her.
Cutting off a woman’s nose is a common treatment meted out to difficult women. It has its roots in the Ramayana where Rama’s brother slashed the nose of a seductress. When I worked in Etah, another impoverished district of Uttar Pradesh, on a rural development project, one village woman who assisted us was perennially sheathed in a voluminous shawl that revealed only her eyes. It was only later that I learnt the reason why. Apparently, her irate in-laws had hacked off her nose since they suspected her of speaking to a strange man. Clearly, being a poor woman in rural India is hazardous.
Uttar Pradesh is India’s second-largest state economy. It has been growing at 6.29% since 2004, an economic feat that is credited to Mayawati, its Chief Minister. Mayawati, like Sarika, is a Dalit woman. However, that is where the similarities end. Dubbed the Dalit Queen, Mayawati belongs to that other subset of women in the subcontinent – dynastic successors, benefiting from either their fathers or mentors.
This provides a skewed picture of female leadership in the subcontinent – after all Benazir Bhutto was the first woman Prime Minister of an Islamic state, Indira Gandhi was the longest-serving Prime Minister of India, and Bangladesh has been ruled by two women, one the daughter of its founding father, the other the widow of an assassinated President. The truth is that their gender is incidental.
Mayawati, who has similarly profited as a political protege, has used public money on commissioning statues of herself, her mentor and elephants, her party symbol. She has done little to check the high crime rate in Uttar Pradesh which tops the list of lawless states in India.
Currently a Hindi film, No one Killed Jessica, is showing in India. It depicts the true story of a barmaid in Delhi who refused to serve a drink to a drunk bully. Slighted, he shot her dead. Despite the presence of multiple witnesses the accused were acquitted. Subsequently, the story was picked up by media and after intense pressure the case was reopened. Eventually, it took a public movement and seven years to get justice for one woman.
India ranks 114th out of 134 countries covered by the Global Gender Gap Index. It is last among the BRIC countries on the index, and second to last in South Asia, ahead only of Pakistan. The Indian economy has been growing at an average of 8% for several years, yet its rank has remained unchanged since 2006. In India’s much-touted growth story, its women are sadly missing.
Stringent deterrents and effectual legislation are needed to ensure that girls like Sarika get prompt justice. No nation can prosper if half its human capital, its women, are ignored, or worse, discriminated against.
Serendipity: A Life lesson (entirely unanticipated, in the mode of Serendip-Sri Lanka)
Summer time in Gujarat gives an altogether new meaning to heat. It was May; I had donned my usual protective gear: huge sunglasses and a cotton dupatta wrapped burqa-fashion. The car window was rolled down to allow for fresh air, that stung mercilessly.
We were driving from Baroda to Dohad, an arid dusty stretch. Do-had: 2-borders. A matter-of-fact name for a nondescript town bordered by the desert of Rajasthan, and the tribal region of Madhya Pradesh. What exactly was I doing, rattling down a searing tarred highway in a groaning Ambassador car with a 45°C sun burnishing bright over me? My company sold detergents for a handsome living – enabled by an antiquated rule of non-ac cars for Sales tours. This was likely driven by a Calvinesque belief in the power of suffering to build, simultaneously, character and sales.
I, engineer-IIM-grad, could have been working with a global bank, an a-c office with potted palms and polished floors. But no, I had wanted to learn ground realities about my consumer before I sat in the ivory tower of Brand Management. Therefore, at campus placement, I had accepted with alacrity the offer of Area Sales Manager. However, during those long journeys down Gujarat highways I often wondered when the real world would get too real for me.
After a four-hour journey we reached my Distributor's house, an old haveli whose rambling innards housed a joint family and a couple of godowns. Govindbhai, my Distributor, came from a family of grain merchants. Being a distributor was not as remunerative as the traditional family business but it did something for his status in town.
Perfunctorily I enquired about Sales – the reports were with me but an unexpected response was usually guaranteed!
"Surya Devta’s kindness, madam," he offered with a smile.
The reference to Sun God was Govindbhai's reverential take on my Company's, and therefore my, Summer Sales Spiel: more heat equals more sweat equals more dirt equals more washes equals more detergent equals more sales. Simplistic, but it worked, especially in rural India where, despite the heat and grime, people have a penchant for wearing white.
Of course, I had to be selective about the application of this logic as I had discovered during my first few months on the job. Declining sales in summer season were explained by an ingenuous twist to the equation: more heat equals water shortage equals less washing! Sales, as I had figured, is nothing to do with logic. It is about relationships: a fluid web of constantly changing dynamics, with the ASM, Distributors, Sales team, and Retailers as the nodal points.
We spent the next two hours reviewing Sales details over endless cups of tea. Then Govindbhai broached the topic of nashta.
After rounds of demurring from my side, and energetic protestations from him, I found myself seated at a ten-seater dining table on the first floor of the haveli. The spread on the table was mind-boggling: a cheerful smorgasbord of papad, dhokla, undhiyo, lentil, kadhi, three types of vegetables, lightly flavored basmati rice, hot-off-the-stove-rotis, yoghurt drink, and sliced mango. Truly, a feast for the Lady ASM from Bombay.
I still found it a little discomfiting. I say still because this happens every time that I make a visit. Sitting at the table with the men I worked or interacted with - the Sales Officer, the Distributor and his male relatives - while the women cooked and served from the kitchen. The women of the house would eat later, that was the custom - I would be politely informed when I suggested they join us. I had partaken many such meals but the disconcerting feeling never left me. Seated at that table I was on a level plane with the men: I was acknowledged as their equal. This recognition, however, distanced me from the women, and did not balance my equation with them.
After lunch I went to the kitchen to thank the women. It was big and airy. There were five women ranging from seventeen to seventy inside. They examined me with frank curiosity and proceeded to quiz me about my family, my home in Bombay, who managed it when I travelled, what about the cooking?
Meanwhile, I learnt that they spent most of their time in the kitchen. Feeding a family of fifteen was like feeding an army, the grandmother informed with pride. The agenda consisted of moving from one meal to the next: arms wrestling with atta dough, expertly sifting grain for possible pebbles, gently rolling out thin rotis, frying papad over just the right heat, chopping vegetables into florets or cubes, preparing the seasoning. The wealth of tradition was passed down from the matriarch to the bahus. The granddaughter of marriageable-age was apprenticed into learning.
'The women in the kitchen' – yeah, I boxed them – were so different from me, and yet alike. We managed our respective worlds with expertise and skill, but the worlds themselves were entirely different...
Something was bothering me and it was during the market visit, amidst detergent bars and sales chatter and more tea with retailers, that my mind supplied the answer. I had been fortunate to have the choice of which world to adopt, they had not. I felt a sense of empowerment because I had the ability to switch from one world (the-all-male-dining-table-world) to another (kitchen-cocoon-women-world) when I wanted. That was not something I could see either my male counterparts, or the women within the kitchen, doing.
After the visit, at four in the evening, the sun still bright, we were ready to start the return journey to Baroda. Govindbhai, however, seemed strangely hesitant to let us go.
"A small favour, if you would please, madam?" he said.
I nodded.
He looked at me nervously, shifting his gaze from me to the ground. "My daughter, who is in Class 8, is back from school She would like to meet you… You see, she wants to be an engineer when she grows up."
Back again at the dining table – this time though I was facing specific questions of a very determined and curious girl. She soaked up all the answers but it was I who got a life lesson: in a dusty little town, from inside a traditional haveli with its airy kitchen and no study, it is possible for a young woman to think different.
The sun was setting as we drove back from Dohad. The rays glinted off the Gulmohar flowers and seemed to cast a halo around the entire tree. Did I mention that I like this tree a lot? In the sweltering heat of the Indian summer it stands tall and green, bursting forth with fiery red flowers – a cheerful respite against a monotone background. I remember that journey because I noticed quite a few Gulmohar trees on the way back.
This article, a paean to the onion amidst the current onion crisis in India, featured as an oped in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune of 20 January 2011. I am reproducing it below as it appeared on the NYT website. Enjoy!
I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
My Empire for an Onion
By MANREET SODHI SOMESHWAR
Published: January 19, 2011
To govern a country, know your onions.
In 16th century India a cook in the kitchen of the Mughal emperor Akbar accidentally added two portions of onion to a dish which went on to become a great hit. Thus was born dopiaza, literally onion twice over, a dish cooked in onion sauce that remains immensely popular to this day and has been successfully transplanted to Britain as well.
Except, if you wanted to cook it in India today, you might once again wish to seek royal patronage (or settle for a recipe that required no onion). With the vegetable selling at 85 rupees (about $2) a kilo, up from 10 rupees six months back, the staple of the average Indian household has gone extortionate.
The onion is rather ubiquitous in Indian food. Roughly chopped, it is an essential accompaniment to the sparse meal of the poor, while its braised, pureed, sauteed and garnished avatars surface in the meals of all others. Muthi piaz — onion smashed with a fist — is de rigueur at roadside eateries throughout the country, and sirkawala piaz — onions in vinegar — are as essential to any table as salt and pepper.
So integral is the onion to the Indian way of life that it has its own mythology. Ayurveda, traditional medicine native to India, claims onion is diuretic, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and anti-pigmentationary. Highly regarded as an aphrodisiac in ancient India, it was banned to Hindu widows.
In the sizzling heat of the subcontinent, the onion is called upon for its cooling properties. This was brought to me forcefully when I began my sales training in the plains of Central India in summer when the average day temperature is 45 degree centigrade, fueled by a hot tropical wind called Loo. Since my work required me to visit 40 grocery stores in one day, I was advised to keep an onion with me, preferably on my person, or in my sales satchel.
By way of explanation, my supervisor showed me his bag, where an onion sat shriveling in one corner. He made his point further by requesting a laborer to allow me a peek at the folds of his turban — sure enough, tucked within was a red onion.
Legends have grown around the pungent bulb. Shivaji, the fearsome Maratha warrior who took on the might of the Mughals, was reputed to eat a lean diet of unleavened bread with raw onions, as opposed to the effete Mughals, who gorged on twice-cooked onion dishes.
To add to the woes of the Mughals, a holy man, Baba Buddha, when served a simple meal by the wife of a Sikh guru, smashed the onion and predicted that her son would one day similarly crush the tyranny of the empire. Obviously, the humble vegetable is an underdog’s ally.
For the runaway price of onions today, the government has blamed heavy unseasonal rains, but poor agricultural productivity, lack of adequate infrastructure for storage and transport, and deficient government investment are equally to blame.
So what is the average Indian to do? Use cabbage and radish as substitute. And protest. Effigies of the agriculture minister have been burnt. Opposition leaders adorned with onion garlands have held rallies.
A novel protest had Santa Claus handing out onions on Christmas eve. Meanwhile, enterprising businessmen are giving free onions with the purchase of televisions, cars, motorcycles and tires.
Rising onion prices have historically felled governments. In 1980, Indira Gandhi ousted the ruling government by appearing at election rallies with strings of onions. The message was clear: If you can’t manage the price of onions, how do you manage the country? A recent poll showed that the Congress Party would lose its parliamentary majority were an election to be held now.
The government is scrambling to bring the price of onions down. It has banned export of onions, turned to Pakistan for imports, and the prime minister has held cabinet meetings on the issue. Pakistan complied briefly before turning hostile, and now India is threatening in turn to halt cement exports.
It was always understood that you could knock next door for a bowl of sugar, some salt, an onion. With the current price of the vegetable, that would be akin to asking the neighbor for their family jewels. No wonder Pakistan is not responding.
We need to keep the peace in our neighborhoods. In the interest of social cohesiveness, and its own survival, the government needs to fix the onion price pronto.
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is a writer for the South China Morning Post and author of “The Long Walk Home.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 20, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, author of Earning the Laundry Stripes, The Long Walk Home, the bestselling The Taj Conspiracy, and the upcoming thriller The Hunt for Kohinoor
