Married to the Masala

Resurrection and relocation

2010-05-23T17:01:00.000-05:00

For various reasons, I'm consolidating this blog with my other blog and moving them both to another site. Please visit my new blog at marriedtothemasala.wordpress.com.

Thanks!

Thank you, and goodbye

2010-01-31T12:04:00.000-06:00

Friends, the time has come to say thank you, and goodbye.

For a while now, I've felt unenthused about this blog, like I've been phoning it in. When a good friend whose opinions I trust confirmed my suspicions that I've been letting myself slip toward mediocrity, I decided it was time to retire this blog and move on.

I've started a new blog, Messing with Recipes, which is just that: I love to mess with recipes, and one of the things I've learned by writing this blog is that I love to write about food. I hope you will all follow me there, and that if you enjoy it, you will tell your friends about it.

There is a slim possibility that I will post some kind of masala here from time to time (Mowgli is in favor of this, funnily enough). If I do that, I'll certainly let all of you on the e-mail list know.

For now, though, thank you for reading, commenting and making my first blog experience really lovely. I've appreciated all of it.

Indian Breath Mints

2010-01-27T05:56:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago a friend with extremely adventurous taste buds offered me an "Indian breath mint." I gamely put one in my mouth and immediately regretted it, but I stuck it out for a while to get the full spectrum of the experience.

It was more tart than 80 lemons, and then it was just plain awful, and the last taste was something like liime rind preserved in shoe polish.

So consider yourself warned if you find yourself presented with a jar of this or something similar, and don't be taken in by the happy-looking lady on the label.

Citizen Mowgli

2010-01-24T11:05:00.003-06:00

On Friday, January 22, at approximately 2:10 p.m., my husband became a U.S. citizen. It was the culmination of years of visa applications, fee-paying and test-taking, and it was, honestly, a relief – I felt my whole body relax when the letter with the oathtaking ceremony information arrived weeks after we’d thought it would. Immigration policies and procedures have changed at a rapid-fire pace since 9/11, and it didn’t seem all that far-fetched to think that I might wake up one morning to find my husband had turned into an illegal alien overnight.

The ceremony was meaningful but not overly long, and was held on the 28th floor of the Eagleton federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis. There was a short speech by a lady who works at the International Institute; she talked about New Year’s Day and a new start, Dr. Martin Luther King and civic responsibilities, and later stood for photos with several of the candidates. The judge (a bankruptcy judge, as it happens), also said a few words about the responsibilities of a citizen. Then came the motion to naturalize the applicants, during which each of them (there were 46) were asked to stand and state their name, country of birth and occupation, as well as say a few words if they liked.

And then, we endured possibly the worst rendition of the national anthem in the history of time. The woman’s wobbly voice made me feel for her, right up to the point where she forgot the words. Luckily, the judge was on the ball and prompted her with “bombs bursting in air” after which it was just a matter of restraining the urge to nudge my mom lest I dissolve into a fit of giggles.

The final step was for each person to approach the judge to receive their certificate of naturalization as their name was called. Everyone took a photo with the judge, some just the two of them, some surrounded by family members. Three of Mowgli's friends from work had come to the ceremony, so we got a group shot with them, my mom and me (and the judge, of course).

As we exited the courthouse, my work team (my office is literally across the street) greeted us with flags and cheers – something I’d known about and managed to keep from Mowgli despite his habit of looking at incoming text messages. Later, we celebrated with friends and family at a bar that was grievously underprepared to receive a party of just over 90. Someone told me they’d seen one of the two bartenders cowering in a corner, crying and saying, “I can’t do this.” To be fair, I had called to warn them that we could be that many, but the woman I spoke with had laughed down the phone and said it was fine.

Thinking back on the day, the most moving part (other than watching my husband accept his certificate) was a very short statement from an older Pakistani gentleman. After he said his name and that he was retired, he spoke about how much he loves this country and how wonderful the people are, and that he knew he had to stay here for the rest of his life. His words moved me to tears, and as much as I hate to admit it, reminded me that I am very lucky to have been born in this country.

Haiti, again

2010-01-20T06:47:00.003-06:00

The other night I told a friend that I'd expected making a dontation to support the relief effort in Haiti to make me feel better. When it didn't, I began to question my expectation, and was almost overwhelmed with guilt for being upset that taking action did nothing to help my mood. There were people deprived of water, food and medical care, and here I was, feeling bad about, well, feeling bad.

Is this the disease of the privileged? To feel bad while living a decent life and helping others when possible? To be unable to fully accept the good fortune of being born in a wealthy country to a loving family that made sure all needs, including education, were well covered?

This morning brought news of a new quake, 6.1 this time, that sent people screaming into the streets. I'm already considering a second donation, but I won't expect it to do anything for me this time.

Haiti

2010-01-17T12:22:00.004-06:00

All I can write about Haiti right now is this: The same sun shines on all of us, and reveals that we are more alike than different.

Please donate to the Haiti earthquake relief effort if you can.

Here's a link to a list of charities already on the ground there.

Here's a website that vets and rates charities so you know your money is not going to waste.

Thank you.

The Kinks have a surprise for you, maybe

2010-01-13T06:20:00.008-06:00

Hello kids, it's time for a little musical word association. I say "The Kinks." you probably think of "You Really Got Me" or perhaps the gender-bending "Lola." Or maybe you take the broad categorization approach and say "British Invasion."

Here's what you might want to answer in the future: We Are The Village Green Preservation Society. It's entirely possible you already know about and love it, seeing as how a friend said it's their favorite album in the universe when I mentioned it. But if not, do yourself a favor, go listen to a few tracks on YouTube or MySpace or whatever. Here's one, the title track, a bit slower than on the album, with a nice contrast between the prim, sentimental lyrics and the band's massive hairdos and late-'60s getups.

It's a concept album released in late 1968(early 1969 in the U.S.), the concept being to highlight endangered aspects of traditional English country and village life. Thus you have "The Last of The Steam Powered Trains" and "Animal Farm" and "Sitting by the Riverside." But you also have the philosophical "Big Sky" and the sweet, poppy "Picture Book." Through it all, you have straighforward (for the time) production peppered with folksy harmonica and accordion.

My only complaint is that the CD I picked up is so poorly mastered that it sounds like vocal mud pie, so I'm now on a low-level hunt for a vinyl copy (a friend has offered a turntable, headphones and the use of a listening space). I just have a hard time believing the Davies brothers wanted their affectionate gem to sound so smooshed together, and I want to hear what I've been missing.

It Depends, or, a Recipe for Hummus

2010-01-10T07:29:00.006-06:00

The other night I brought one of my fallback, signature dishes to a party, partly because I can make it in 90 seconds with my eyes closed, and partly because one of the night's honorees really loves hummus. Unbeknownst to me, one of the night's other honorees also brought hummus, and so, following a few minutes of good-natured smack talk, we had a blind side-by-side taste test.

Both test subjects, one of which was my husband, chose my hummus as their favorite. I was a bit sheepish about showing up the birthday girl, but she was a good sport about it, and during our post-battle chat I promised to pass the recipe along.

Later that evening, we were talking with someone else about food and cooking, and I was kvetching about Indian recipes. Real ones, meaning ones from cookbooks printed in India or written down by women who grew up making them, are nearly impossible to work with. The amounts are a small issue -- I can always find a conversion site to flip grams to ounces -- but the real problem is the instructions.

If you look at the photo of the recipe in this coconut chutney post, you'll see what I mean. "Heat little oil and fry all the ingredients," taken at face value, could have 20 different outcomes. How much oil is "little"? What level should the heat be at? How long do you fry these things? What should they look and smell and taste like when they're done?

As I was thinking about writing the hummus recipe below, it occurred to me that I could easily make it maddeningly brief and vague: Combine all ingredients and blend until smooth. I entertained myself, briefly, by imagining the questions and answers such a recipe would spark. How long do I blend it? It depends on how smooth you want it. How smooth is smooth? It depends -- how smooth do you like it? How much lime juice? It depends -- how juicy is the lime?

For the sanity of my readers and the honoree who requested this recipe, I have tried to be as specific as possible so that my experience travels with the recipe, even though taking this tack could cause complete strangers to think I suffer from OCD. Whether that's better or worse than people I know thinking I suffer from OCD, I don't know.

A few notes before you begin:

- I use a Cuisinart to make this; if you don't have one, you can use a blender -- but be prepared for a lot of pausing and scraping. If you don't have either, then I hope your arms are strong, because you're going to be mashing beans 'til the cows come home.

- Great Northerns are my bean of choice for several reasons: They are cheaper and easier to find, and I can never get chickpeas smooth enough no matter how long I blend them. So go ahead, try garbanzos if you like, see what you think, but I can't abide them, the gritty little bastards.

- Tahini (sesame seed butter) is avaliable at international groceries and some larger conventional groceries. It's always cheaper at the specialty stores, though. If you live in St. Louis, go to Jay International on South Grand.

- As with almost all recipes, this is better the second day, when the flavors have had a chance to chat, dance around with each other and get on a first-name basis.

Hummus of Champions

2 cans Great Northern or cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
3 to 4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped roughly
2 to 3 Tablespoons tahini
Juice of 1/2 to 1 lime
Pinch of cayenne, or more to taste, or 1/2 t. of a spicy spice mix such as Old Bay
Olive oil

1. Combine all ingredients except olive oil in processor bowl fitted with basic stumpy blade, using lower amounts for items that have a range.

2. Turn the machine on, leave the chute open and pour olive oil through it in a slow stream as you start to blend the ingredients. Everything will roll around and start to combine smoothly (and the texture will change) as you pour more oil in. You can stop as soon as everything's running around the bowl smoothly, but you can also keep going until you achieve the texture you like. I won't even try to describe the texture I like, because A) it's impossible and B) I don't want to make my readers ill in the process of trying.

3. Scrape the bowl once or twice to make sure everything's well blended and to taste and adjust the seasonings, most notably lime and cayenne. You want a detectable tang and bite, but they should be balanced against each other, i.e., not fighting.

A final note: I have made this with lemon juice and vinegar when I've lacked a lime. I've also left out the tahini. Nobody seemed to know the difference, since the beans, garlic and cayenne are the main players.

People Change Their Names

2010-01-06T06:28:00.007-06:00

If you know me and/or have spoken with me for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch, you probably know that I am fascinated with AMC's Mad Men. I love pretty much every aspect of it -- the production values, the art direction, the writing, the acting, the colors, the clothes, the shenanigans, the ad agency inside jokes, the historical references and sociological commentary.

Not long ago, as I worked my way through the first two seasons, the line, "People change their names" slid out of Don Draper's mouth, and my first reaction was, "they do?" Mere seconds later I realized how silly this was. Of course they do. I did.

When I was 18 and two years into a college career that would go on for three more years, I jettisoned my very Polish last name for the plain-vanilla one I have now. I picked the new one from a list I had systematically narrowed down over a period of weeks. I had spoken them out loud, written them, practiced potential new signatures, tried to imagine saying them to other people. Then, my seleciton finalized, I filed the paperwork with the court, placed the requisite ad in the local paper, and announced the change to my family on the back of that year's artfully photocopied Christmas card.

My father's reaction was much more low-key than I had anticipated. He wanted to know why I'd done it, and, as I'd rehearsed in my head, I told him the old one was a pain in the ass to spell for people (he agreed), and that it would be easier for my impending brilliant career in the music industry. He uttered a few understanding, innocuous words, and that was that.

I never told him the other reason: I'd wanted to separate myself from him, from our history as father and daughter, from his lackluster performance as provider and protector. I didn't see the point of prying open that can of worms; I'd tried to have the discussion with him, but it had gone nowhere. He simply wasn't capable, and eventually, I forgave him for that.

When I got married, among the myriad questions there was, of course, "Will you be keeping your name?" I decided to stick with what I'd chosen the last time I changed it.

Swedes in Nashville

2010-01-03T08:43:00.012-06:00

I have been lucky and pleased to work with talented and gracious musicians through my long association with Chris King. One of these, Lij Shaw, has a studio in Nashville called The Toy Box, where he engineers music ranging from illuminations of long poems to luminous Swedish pop.

It's the latter I bring to your attention in this space today. Anders Elfström's debut album, due to be released early this year, was recorded in Lij's studio. The process was documented in the 12-minute film below, shot and directed by Fabian Grapengiesser and edited by Edvard Heinmets.

Seeing an experience I've had through someone else's eyes was a curious experience. It made me nostalgic for the guitars and art and endless knobs and cords of the studio where I stood and sang last year. Emotionally, it made me both a little jealous (I forget, sometimes, that I have to share my favorite people) and thrilled that Lij's magic is being shown to the world.

My only criticism of the film is that it does not show enough of said magic, but I don't know that that's really possible. The visceral alchemy of working with a great recording engineer hinges on not only skill, talent and performance, but the ability to hear that last bit of something the music needs, and having the sense of how to get precisely that from the musicians. Lij is a past master of this, but again, I don't know how you'd capture that on film.

If you feel 12 minutes is too much time to invest, here's the video of one of the songs recorded at The Toy Box:

New Year's Eve

2009-12-31T08:00:00.005-06:00

It's New Year's Eve, and I realize an end-of-year wrap-up post would be apropos, but let's face it, it's been done, and done. On top of that, I have nothing to count down, and my "ten best" list would not be of interest to anyone outside my household.

So instead I'm going to tell you a little story that happened yesterday as we were out shopping for everything, by which I mean everything. Cereal, gum, oranges, bread, eggs, eggplant, chocolate, chips, cheese, milk, salad greens, both kinds of dog food. Everything.

We had fortified ourselves by going out to breakfast and were at the first of four stops, checking out and making small talk with the cashier. My husband Mowgli (not his real name) was putting things in bags; we bring our own and have learned that bagging our own tends to result in better use of space. Granted, this makes us sound like a couple of uptight turds, but seriously, it's just easier, especially if you have a spatial relations genius in the family.

But I digress. The cashier asked if Mowgli was from India, and he said yes. Then, instead of the usual "what part of India?" follow-up, she asked if Indian women wear dots on their foreheads because they're married. He was caught off-guard (fair enough -- who expects a cultural question in the middle of bagging their own purchases?) but said yes, it can mean that. Then I chimed in and said it could also mean that they'd been celebrating a religious occasion. She seemed satisfied with our answers, and we paid and headed for the parking lot.

Now that I've written this and thought about it, this little incident encapsulates our year pretty well. We've been handling the mundane tasks of life, and occasionally discussing bite-sized bits of Indian culture with total strangers.

Not a bad year at all.

Behold, the Power of Sausage

2009-12-23T07:22:00.004-06:00

I went to my mom's for Christmas, and because we are Polish, there is never a question that we will have kielbasa for dinner at some point during the stretch of luxuriant meals. We spend several weeks discussing what to eat when, what side dishes to make, where to pick up the best and freshest foodstuffs.

When it comes to kielbasa, there is only one place to go in Baltimore: Ostrowski's. And that is the first place we went after my mom picked me up from the airport. It's in a narrow-streeted section of the city called Fells Point, and when we pulled up, there were no parking spots to be found. My mom double-parked, and I sat in the car while she went in so I could move it if necessary.

At first, I was nervous. This was not my town; some of the people walking by and chatting on their stoops looked like stevedores who wouldn't think twice about roughing up outsiders. Then, one by one, other cars pulled up behind and in front of our car. Every driver did the same thing: double parked, put their flashers on and went into Ostrowski's. I relaxed and started rummaging for reading material and CDs.

Then my mom called from inside the shop to say it would be another 15 minutes or so because they were just loading up the sausage stuffing machine. Apparently the meat delivery had been late because of the storms, and the fresh kielbasa was going to be extra-fresh. By this time, the line of people was out the door and two houses long, and the line of double-parked cars covered most of the block.

My mom waited half an hour for the sausage we ate on Christmas Eve, and I'm here to tell you, it was worth every minute of that wait.

The Immigrant Experience, Baby Edition

2009-12-23T07:02:00.005-06:00

I have a friend who works with new moms and their babies in a hospital that serves a broad population including immigrants from a huge range of countries. She regularly handles discharges with the aid of a phone interpreter and is used to seeing all sorts of traditions, such as kohl eyebrows drawn on female Somalian babies by their fathers.

Recently, she cared for a Burundian mother who spoke not a word of English, and when she brought the baby to the mother for the first feeding, she gestured in a way that said "will you be breastfeeding"? The mother gestured in a way that indicated she would not, and my friend was puzzled, but she respected the mother's wishes and brought a bottle.

Later, a minister from the woman's church came to visit her. She spoke English fluently, so my friend asked her whether women in Burundi typically breastfeed. The minister, also a woman, said of course, that's how we feed our babies. My friend then related the ealier conversation with the new mom and asked the minister to help her talk to the mom aobut it.

During the short conversation, the woman said she hadn't wanted to breastfeed because she was worried about offending my friend. Alone in a hospital, thousands of miles from anything familiar and unable to communicate, she was not feeding her baby in the way she wanted to because she thought it would be rude.

My friend quickly explained that it was not necessary to be polite about this, and the woman promptly lifted the baby to her breast and began to feed her.

Arranged Marriage, Part Three

2009-12-20T07:55:00.007-06:00

If you're just joining us, this is the third installment of a four- or five-part series on arranged marriage that is the result of an e-mail correspondence with a reader, Barani. Here is part one and part two.

Today, we'll learn about caste, diet and religion. Again, the text in italics has only been edited for clarity.

Next we move onto the caste taboos:
There are thousands of castes, and the upper castes tend to be vegetarian.
Virtually no caste that is vegetarian is lower caste.
In my caste, they will accept love marriages with any vegetarian caste (which is also forward caste).
One of my cousins married a Gujurati Patel (vegetarian) as love marriage with family support.

Familial opposition will be severe if the other party is non-vegetarian (can be assuaged if the other party agrees to become vegetarian).

So the first fault line is diet.
The second fault line is religion.
The line is between Indian origin religion and foreign origin religion (can be assuaged if the other party agrees to become an Indian religionist).

Diet actually goes like this:
Vegetarian = 95% probability of being upper caste
Non-Vegetarian = 75% probability of being lower caste
The other 25% Non-vegetarian upper castes are soldier castes who have to be used to bloodshed and the soldier castes also do animal (goat) sacrifices to get used to blood.
Often people to find out if a person is low caste, ask whether he is vegetarian.
Crudely - Vegetarian = Upper caste
Goat, Chicken, fish eater = low caste
Beef and Pork eater = Dalit (untouchable)

So there is a 3-way segmentation based on diet.

RELIGION
Marriages are fairly common between Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Jains and Hindus and Buddhists.
Often within the same family you may have 2-3 Indian religions.

In the birds and bees conversation in India, every teenager learns - you will be dead meat if you bring home a non-vegetarian or a non-Indian religionist.
In Punjab, 10% of all murders are done if a hindu or sikh (Indian religion) marries a muslim or a xtian* (foreign religion).

*Editor’s note: “xtian” denotes Christian.

Naturalization Test

2009-12-16T06:26:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow my husband Mowgli (not his real name) will take a written and oral test of English and a 10-question U.S. civics exam as part of his naturalization process. Herewith I present to you a sample test, culled from the 100 questions contained in the study booklet he was given. A passing grade is six correct answers, and for fun, I've posted the answers to the questions below the photo.

Let's begin, shall we?

1. What is the supreme law of the land?

2. What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence?

3. In what month do we vote for President?

4. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?

5. Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s.

6. Who was the first President?

7. Why does the flag have 50 stars?

8. What did Susan B. Anthony do?

9. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

10. How many amendments does the Constitution have?

1. The Constitution; 2. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; 3. November; 4.The Atlantic ; 5. War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War; 6. George Washington; 7. each star represents a state; 8. fought for women's and civil rights; 9. Thomas Jefferson; 10. 27.

Arranged Marriage, Part Two

2009-12-13T06:26:00.010-06:00

Last Sunday, I wrote a post about arranged marriage, which you can view here. Today I'm posting part two, covering virginity, the traditional Indian view of marriage as being between two families (not two individuals), and the generalities of how a match is made.

All text in italics was written by a reader, Barani, who is kindly sharing his first-hand knowledge of this topic. All I've added is punctuation.

In Indian society, it is compulsory that the bride is a virgin.
The only exception is if the groom has a blemish, such as old, bald, poor, handicapped etc.

So very few Indian boys will knowingly marry a non-virgin.
In some cases, non-virginity is hushed up, sort of don't-ask, don't-tell.
If the woman already has a child, then it is impossible to use this fig leaf.
In Indian divorce law, if the bride is a non-virgin, then it is a legitimate grounds for divorce.

So no parent will allow his or her daughter to date.
If a man asks a girl for a date, her brother or father will come after you with a gun or a sword.

More than 75% of Indian women are virgins and 0% are unwed mothers (will lead to shot-gun forced marriage or honor killings).

Next, in the Indian context, marriage is between 2 families because after the marriage, you owe your in-laws as much responsibility as your own family.

Next, until recently and even now to some extent, poverty is widespread in India and the girl's parents want a good earner, not a hunk. Only well employed men need apply, no students.

Now that we have understood that Indian marriages are a merger deal between 2 families, then it means that both of the families must be of comparable socio-economic status and speak a common language.
India has 25 major languages with 20 different alphabets.

So you need to specify, Gujurati, Punjabi etc. to indicate Language.

People like to marry within their own religion, even in the west.
So classified Ads in the west will say Jewish, Catholic, Born-Again etc.
Same way in Indian Ads you have to specify religion.

There are traditional matchmakers in rural areas who do this for a living.
In north-India, the bride has to be same caste, and not closer than 5th cousin.
In South-India, the preference order is sisters daughter, Fathers sisters daughter, Mothers brothers daughter.
If these are not suitable then they search among second cousins and neighbors daughters of the same caste.

McDonald's in French is "McDo"

2009-12-09T05:39:00.012-06:00

This morning a news item about the recession hitting McDonald's caught my eye. I'm sure the piece is meant for those who indulge in the daily ritual of sniffing after signs of economic recovery and/or further deterioration, but I am not one of those. My only thought on skimming the article was "Right about now, someone at Mickey D's HQ is saying, 'Thank God for the French.' "

After successfully battling beaucoup de resistance from labor interests, aesthetes and farmers, McDonald's ("McDo" en Francais) has 1,000 locations in France. If memory serves, France is roughly the size of Texas -- which, it seems, had 1,041 restaurants back in 2004. But those numbers only tell part of the story -- according to this article, the Louvre location is the most profitable in the world. Also, the French spend more per visit than Americans and linger over their meals, just as they would in a bistro.

But how did this seemingly incongruous thing come to pass? The short answer appears to be marketing. Le Big Mac knew that in order to win the hearts and minds of the French, they would have to placate the country's protest-loving farmers, lest they use mountains of potatoes to block the entrances of touts les McDo's. This article details the story of McDonald's in France nicely, and the most telling details, I think, are that 1) the man largely responsible for the success of McDo in France is in fact French, and 2) since 2001, McDonald's has had a large display at the weeklong Salon d'Agriculture, an event meant to showcase the people and products of French farms. McDonald's mission there was not to pass out samples of frites, but to tell people that 75% of the produce used in French McDonald's restaurants comes from France.

Marketing-wise, this was brilliant not only because of its visceral appeal to the pride of the general populace, but because it was a pointed message to French farmers, who at the time rabidly, publicly supported a protester who'd vandalized a McDo in 1999. They'd been enjoying the economic benefits of selling their crops to McDo's while criticizing them. And now everyone who happened by the McDo booth at the Salon d'Agriculture would know the farmers been biting the hand that bought their food.

Zut alors! Or as we say here in the U.S., D'oh!

Arranged Marriage, Part One

2009-12-06T07:35:00.007-06:00

About a month ago, I received a comment to my "Classified Ads" post from an Indian who said that martimonial ads have improved the matchmaking system; he then offered to tell me about arranged marriages from his perspective. I set up a "contact me" button, and shortly thereafter, Barani (his chosen pseudonym) began to send me long, detailed e-mails full of well-organized, concise, honest statements about all aspects of arranged marriage.

It's fascinating to suddenly be given a different lens to view a thing that I've been trying, and failing, to understand. I'm grateful that he's taken the time and energy to write to me, and that he's trusted me use his words as I see fit. Some of what he says is not news to me; for example, what he says about the reasoning behind the system:

In the west, you date for 3 years to find compatibility
In India, if you marry within similar castes, the culture is identical, and you don't need the 3 years of getting to know
Both sides know exactly what is expected and there are no surprises

But some of it is revelatory, such as what he says about going through the winnowing process via matrimonial ads:

It stung, even though it was long distance rejection
I could never handle direct rejection as in the western system

He draws parallels between matrimonial ads and western personals -- though I would take it a bit further and argue that eHarmony and its ilk are watered-down, western cousins of the arranged marriage system.

These matrimonial ads are no different than what western people do in their personal ads

Of course all women claim to be beautiful and all men handsome
In reality less than 10% will be beautiful or handsome

And he lays out the details of the process (note: my understanding of biodata is age, occupation, education, religion and caste):

So first there will be matrimonial ad
Next step is photo exchange
and both sides can reject based on photo or biodata

After mutual photo approval there is interview of 1 hour
Next if both sides agree, then marriage takes place

The vast majority of my non-Indian readers will probably have a strong reaction to that last line. I used to, but now that I understand the reasoning behind it, it just seems like a different way to approach marriage. Not one I would be comfortable with for myself, but one that's worked for millions of people for many hundreds of years. Granted, there are arranged marriages that don't work well, but obviously, the same can be said of love marriages.

Photopost: Useful Souvenirs

2009-12-02T06:12:00.003-06:00

I went to Poland with my mom back in 2000, and we were both overwhelmed by the wide array of crystal items in Krakow's Cloth Hall. These little cordial/shot glass thingies are among my favorite souvenirs, maybe because I actually use them.

The Philosophical Side of The Sopranos

2009-11-29T07:53:00.008-06:00

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) and I have been on vacation since last Friday, and I had grand ambitions for this time, detailed in a long list that I plan to keep as a reminder of my folly. To be fair, I did roast a chicken and make a veggie pot pie, and we did visit Lincoln's home in Springfield. But -- citizenship quiz studying? Not once. Attempt dosas with new recipe from kind cyberfriend? Didn't happen.

And writing? Wasn't even on the list. I didn't think it needed to be. I thought I'd spring out of bed and start pecking away until Mowgli snatched the laptop from my flying fingers. I did my usual blog posts, but that's all I did -- the minimum. Unless you count the plethora of Facebook updates on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, which, to make myself feel better, I do.

What I've been doing instead of writing is so weird, it makes me squirm to admit it publicly. I've been watching season 5 of the Sopranos. I haven't loved it as much as I've heard some do -- the violence prevents that -- but I've liked it enough to look forward to watching one or two episodes before the day gets rolling. In fact, I watched one this morning, and it spawned today's topic. Lucky thing, too, 'cause honestly, I had nary a post idea when I got up this morning.

It was Episode 58, "Sentimental Education," and about 10 minutes in Tony B., who's been trying to go straight after 18 years in prison, compares being an immigrant to being in prison. The rest of the episode underscores this theme, with pointed remarks about Koreans and dogs, and Carmella's affair failing because of her lover's prejudice against women like her, i.e., mobsters' wives. Toward the end of the hour, Tony B. beats up his Korean business partner, destroying his best chance at achieving his goal of going straight. Tony Soprano responds to this news by saying, "It's tough to do business with outsiders."

Granted, this is a show that delights in making cartoons of ethnic stereotypes, but it did make me think about the three-way battle between heritage and fate and free will. To what extent are we all bound by our heritage, the shapes of our noses and cheekbones, our last names?

What do you think, readers? How have you experienced these strictures? Are they good, bad, or somewhere in between?

Last Year's Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T08:09:00.009-06:00

This year, our Thanksgiving will be low-key and at home, and I will be thinking, on and off, of the Mumbai terrorist attacks that happened a year ago this weekend.

During "11/26," as it is known in India, hundreds of people were killed, wounded and terrorized at multiple sites across the vast and tangled metropolis of Mumbai. The attacks went on for days. A landmark hotel was occupied and burned. The head of the police force's terrorism unit was killed. Suspicions that the perpetrators were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives were bandied about (and later confirmed).

The siege began at 9:15 p.m. local time Wednesday, November 26 -- Wednesday morning, for us -- and so my husband and I were glued to CNN for long stretches of the four-day holiday weekend. I'm pretty sure I detached myself first when I realized I had all the information I needed and wanted. In that respect, it resembled my reaction to 9/11 -- it is a horrifying event, but watching the same thing over and over serves no purpose.

We called my husband's parents, who live in far-south Tamil Nadu, because it seemed possible that the whole country was under threat. The only aberration they reported was heightened security measures. I e-mailed my cousin, who was staying at a school outside Bangalore with her family at the time. She said that they hadn't been aware of the attacks until someone from the outside world (her mother, I think) notified them.

HBO has come out with a documentary about the attacks that uses cell phone audio and suveillance footage to reconstruct the sequence of events. According to this review, "we're not left in awe of the precision and strategic cunning of the terrorists' plan as we were in the wake of 9/11. Instead, ... what's stunning is that such a haphazard attack could've resulted in such a staggering loss of human life."

Ugh. Despite my curiosity, I'm now struggling with the "to watch or not to watch" question for the same reason I quit watching the live coverage last year. Concentrating on making good food may be the better choice.

The Bethesda Prayer Center

2009-11-22T07:44:00.010-06:00

Following our failed attempt to visit the waterfall outside Coimbatore, Mowgli and I stopped at a Christian prayer center we'd passed on the way out.

The Bethesda Prayer Center is part of the legacy of Dr. D.G.S. Dhinakaran, who had a conversion experience in 1955. He was on his way to the railroad tracks, intending to kill hemself by jumping in front of a train, but was stopped by his uncle, who introduced him to Jesus. According to his bio, the doctor "experienced a sudden wave of divine peace and hope, flood his heart. His mind was transformed and he returned home enlightened."

Following his conversion, he built schools, held massive prayer meetings focused on healing the sick, started a magazine called "Jesus Calls," and served as a conduit for the word of the Lord. One of the messages he received was to open a prayer center:

"On August 12, 1983, the Holy Spirit guided Dr. D.G.S.Dhinakaran to do something for those who are in need for prayer at any time of the day. Therefore Dr. D.G.S. Dhinakaran erected a 24 Hour Prayer Tower. Today the Prayer Tower is a full-fledged Prayer Centre equipped with modern facilities. Specially chosen and trained Prayer Warriors endowed with the compassion of Christ, attend to such calls round-the-clock."

When I tell people about visiting this place, I am invariably met with astonishment; Christianity in India strikes most people as an impossibility. And yet, it is widely believed that the Apostle Thomas traveled to and died in India; today, India has upwards of 20 million practicing Christians.

I admit, though, that the experience of finding a fervently faithful group of Christians in the middle of an Indian agricultural area was jarring, not least because when I said I was from the U.S., I was greeted with an enthusiastic, "praise the Lord, sister, praise the Lord." Never in a million years did I think I'd be in Tamil Nadu the first time someone said that to me.

Of Dogs and Donations

2009-11-18T06:19:00.006-06:00

There's a photo from our trip to India a few years ago that's not spectacular, and yet, I can't bring myself to delete it because of the story and the memory behind it. Here it is:

That's our vehicle the dog is next to. We'd just driven out of the city for the first time since we'd arrived because we wanted to visit a waterfall in the jungle. The jungle entrance had closed early due to issues with elephants (some habitat encroachments are more equal than others) and so we were standing around, talking about what to do next. Being inclined to take photos at all times, I started snapping away and shot the one above.

And then my husband Mowgli (not his real name) became mildly agitated and told me to back away from the dog. I recall being unimpressed by it -- as you can see, it's pretty small and a bit on the thin side. Also, we have two dogs that, combined, outweigh me, and since I've fed, bathed and walked them for 10 years, I'm pretty comfortable around canines.

But I took my husband's word for it and backed up instead of trying for a shot of the dog's face, which was reasonably cute. As I moved away, I recalled him telling me more than once that dogs in India are not to be touched or even looked at because most of them are street dogs and therefore dangerously aggressive. It's not just his opinion -- the Mumbai high court ruled 2-1 earlier this year that "nuisance" dogs can be killed. Which might sound less awful once you know that 25,000 Mumbai residents a year are bitten by one of the 70,000 feral dogs who also live there.

By contrast to the photo above, here is one of my dogs, Georgie, recovering from knee surgery:

Even as I think "aw, the poor thing," I think, "she has it better than the vast majority of dogs, and maybe people, in the developing world." And that's when the guilt kicks in and I start to think about donating to an organization that helps the poor. I think I'll use Gori Girl's excellent "how to help the poor" guide to figure out which one to give to.

Connections

2009-11-15T06:40:00.007-06:00

A few weeks ago, interesting blog-related things started to happen. Seeds I had planted, sometimes unknowingly, began to sprout. Like any farmer in springtime, I was thrilled to see fresh green shoots of possibility poking up through the ground.

First, an intercultural relationship blogger, Gori Girl, found my blog and left a comment on one of my posts. Once I started digging into her blog, I was even happier she'd found me, because she handles complex topics like giving to beggars with thoughtfulness, clarity and heft. Her dedication to her main topic is evident in pieces like the two-part interview with her in-laws wherein she delves into their thoughts on her relationship with their son.

Next, Maami, a blogger based in Madras, contacted me to talk about a project involving intercultural relationship blogs, and I happily directed her to GoriGirl.com and GoriWife.com. Earlier this year, I'd found her blog by clicking on an "arrived from" link in my stat counter report, and liked it so much I left a comment and bookmarked it.

Right around the same time, someone left a comment on my "Classified Ads" post offering to give me the inside scoop on arranged marriage from an Indian perspective, so I set up a "contact me" button. It's not clear what the final outcome of this exchange will be, but at the very least, I'm gaining a firsthand, horse's-mouth understanding of a complex topic.

Finally, my apprent doppelganger (Midwestern girl married to a South Indian) left a comment on my "Two Lists" post, saying she'd stumbled on my blog by clicking "next blog." Now we're Facebook friends.

I didn't have a huge stack of expectations for this blog when I started: My main goals were writing practice, learning something new, and fun. I probably should have expected to learn a lot about my husband, his culture and myself. But thanks to the curious alchemy of the Internet, I've been given what feels like a bonus: connections that are full of untold possibilities. Imagining what might happen next is starting to occupy large, happy chunks of my imagination, and for that, I am grateful.

Gene the Pumpkin Man!

2009-11-11T06:10:00.008-06:00

Gene the Pumpkin Man is an institution unto himself up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He's been in the pumpkin growing and selling business for 52 years, and his family's been farming since the late 1880s. I've made many trips to Kalamazoo to see family, and whenever I passed the bright orange signs of Gene's, I'd think, wow, I really need to check that out. Finally, this year, the stars aligned and I made the pilgrimage with one of my girl-cousins.

Gene is a man who is fully dedicated to his chosen path in life. My aunt once saw him and his wife out at breakfast in the off-season; he was dressed in orange. His Christmas lights? Orange. His car? I don't want to ruin it, so just scroll down now if you can't wait.

And now, I will tell you a little secret: I am jealous of Gene the Pumpkin Man. He does what he loves, and clearly, he can live on what he makes. I'm starting to strive for that kind of life, and I'll tell you, as I do it, this orange-clad man is one of my sources of inspiration.

By now, you're probably wondering how any of this is at all related to other cultures, so here you go, straight from the informational booklet given to me by the Pumpkin Man himself: "The pumpkin is fruit of the gourd family and is native to Central America. It was grown by the Indians in North America when the first colonists landed."

Enjoy the photos, dear readers. (By the way, they were all taken with my iPhone.)

Pumpkins as far as the eye can see.

Big ones, little ones, different varieties.

Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins.

There are more pumpkins in that barn, I promise you.

Doubtless by now, word-of-mouth is the only advertising this man needs, if in fact he needs any. But I loved this bit of merchandising: behold the Gene the Pumpkin Man pumpkin carving knife.

This sign is visible from Route 43, which passes in front of the farm.

He also raises a variety of wacky squashes.

Some of them look like they have tumors.

Others reminded me of sea creatures.

Gene the Pumpkin Man is happy to pose for photos. On nice days like this, a line full of kids and adults forms.

Naturally, he drives an orange Cadillac.

With personalized plates.

A Special Kind of Selfishness

2009-11-08T06:22:00.007-06:00

Last week's horrific attack at Fort Hood left me very sad, baffled, and concerned on several levels. After the initial shock of "what?" and taking in the "who, what, why, how" bit by bit, I started to worry about my husband.

It's a special kind of selfishness, this concern for a man who has nothing to do with the tragedy that's stirring up strong emotions across the country, and yet I can't help myself. In the back of my mind, I'm always concerned for his safety, and it's not because he drives a bit fast (he is, overall, a very good and safe driver).

There is a look he gets, not every day but some days, an accusing look that has nothing to do with anything but his skin color and what people think it means. He is good-natured about these glances, and it's hard to imagine that there would ever be any physical contact associated with them, but still, I worry. My concern is that the mentality behind statements like, "Maybe Muslims shouldn't serve in the U.S. military" will someday create a dangerous situation for people who are perceived to be Middle Eastern.

I know, it's fantastical thinking, and the likelihood of something like that happening in our city seems slim. Yet last week, the thought of soldiers being killed by a soldier on the largest U.S. military base in the world was unthinkable, and this week, we're still trying to understand why and how that happened. And after a while, all I can think is, "Well, crap. Clearly, the world's gone mad. Anything can happen now."

The other thing I think at times like this, and that makes me utterly crazy, is that I should be careful about what I say and write. Such is the polarized nature of our country right now: There are people who think that there is only one correct response, and that any other response indicates anti-Americanism. There is no room for nuance, no space for debate.

So let me be very clear: I have no sympathy for that man. He is very sick, and what he did was horrendous. My fervent hope is that by studying how this happened, the authorities can make sure that nothing like this will ever happen again, that no mother will ever have to be told that her child was killed by someone who was trained to heal people.

Okonomiyaki!

2009-11-04T05:42:00.007-06:00

Last night I was watching the Osaka episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a show that makes me pea-green with envy because really, all this guy does is wander the world, eating, drinking and getting paid for it. Oh, and smoking, which he was thrilled to be able to do in restaurants all over Osaka.

He does, however, delve into the history of the places he visits, and in this case it was fascinating. Osaka is known for its food, and in particular the practice of eating great quantities of it. This tradition was a side effect of a piece of 16th-century legislation that forbade the rising merchant class from building showy houses or wearing fancy clothes. So they started going out and eating (and drinking) themselves silly, and along the way, invented a spectacular array of food that goes very well with beer.

Mowgli joined me partway into the program, and I can't quite recall, but I think he wasn't actually on the couch with me when the segment on okonomiyaki started. Good thing, too, because first I blurted out "okonomiyaki!" and then, well, I kind of spazzed out because the memories of eating this awesome food in Japan came flooding back.

Mr. Bourdain didn' touch on the roots of the dish, but my understanding is that it was born of necessity just before or after World War II, when there was a lot of flour and cabbage about, but not much wheat. The following description (from this site) backs me up:

"The roots of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki lie in something called "Issen youshoku" (one-penny Western food) that spread across western Japan like cheap candy before the war. Wheat flour was mixed with water and spread in a circle on a griddle. Chopped green onions and such were sprinkled on top, then the concoction was folded in half and served. This proved to be an extremely popular dish. As the name implied, you could buy it for one "sen" (1/100 of a yen), which at the time could purchase two large lollipops."

But that's Hiroshima-style: layered ingredients. In Osaka, everything is mixed together before being plopped on the grill -- in front of you, if you're at one of the countless okonomiyaki restaurants in Japan. You can cook them yourself, but the staff are experts. Here's a video of how that works, complete with helpful subtitles to let you know what's going on, and a bed of peppy Japanese pop:

So you might be wondering: What does that crazy word mean? Okonomi means "what you like" and yaki means "grilled." And now I have a major craving for what I like, grilled.

A Very Happy Halloween

2009-11-01T07:23:00.008-06:00

Seven years ago today, I was driving to work, thinking about the awesome party I’d been to the night before. This is what I looked like:

I know, it’s hard to tell from that photo, so I’ll lay it all out for you: I was a battered Statue of Liberty. On my back was a sign that said, “Kick me, I’m Ashcroft’s bitch.” I must have been feeling particularly passive-aggressive activisty that day. Later I found out that the hostess had worked for Ashcroft, but she never brought that up as I paraded around her house, insulting her former boss. Her mama raised her better than that.

But I digress.

The costume was a last-minute thing, pulled together in the space of a few hours when I committed to the idea of looking silly and socializing with other silly-looking people. It wasn’t complicated, but I was proud of my bent cardboard crown, my thrift-store-sheet toga that I’d stomped on in the backyard, the black eye a makeup artist friend had given me.

So there I was, smeared in mud and fake blood (I think I burnt parts of the crown, too), my makeup intentionally smeared and runny, and in walks the dreamiest-looking guy I’d ever seen in person. Yes, it’s dramatic, but it’s true: I saw him from across the room, and I just kind of went “ooh” inside. After a while, he came up to me and we chatted about his grad school days at the university half my family had attended, movies old and new, and astrology (he guessed my sign correctly).

The next day at work, a longtime friend of the hostess laughed when I said I wondered when my new boyfriend was going to call.

Two hours later, she got an e-mail from the hostess asking if I would mind passing my phone number along so she could give it to the man I’d talked to all night. He wanted to ask me out, but wanted to be sure I was interested.

We talked later that day, and the conversation was a bit over-long for work. I didn’t care.

Two weeks later, we had our first date.

Four years and 11 months after we first met, we were married. The Halloween party hostess lit the candles for us.

And when I saw my almost-husband on that day, I went "ooh" inside.

Apples, almonds and philosophy

2009-10-28T06:03:00.009-05:00

It has been raining here, on and off, mostly a slow, soaking rain that makes most people crabby, and makes me think of Michigan, where I was born and where I went to college.

On Monday, claustrophobic from the rain and antsy from a grinding morning at my desk, I decided to run errands at lunch, rain be damned. My lunch that day was a salad -- delicious, but not road-friendly -- so I grabbed my coat, keys and an apple, and headed out.

In the car, the apple proved delicious, but not enough to keep my stomach happy, so I rummaged in the door pocket, where I found a baggie of almonds and raisins. As I started in on these, it occured to me that this was exactly the kind of lunch Henryk Skolimowski would have served me.

Henryk was the paramour of my work-study job boss, Joan, a kind, funny, soulful woman who paid me the maximum allowed by the university for my clerical position. Her professor beau could not type all that well, and she told me that if I wanted to, I could work for him on the weekends, essentially taking dictation into a computer. She also mentioned that he would feed me, and this being college, that appealed to me immensely.

On my first day, once we had worked for a few hours, me typing furiously and occasionally supplying the right word for something, Henryk announced that we would stop for some food and tea. We trundled downstairs and he brought out apples, cheese, bread, nuts and dried fruit.

I'd look forward to this kind of simple meal for as along as I worked for him, but it wasn't just the food I liked. We'd sit at a small table near a window in the snug kitchen, munching and sipping and talking, sometimes about his wartime childhood in Warwaw, sometimes about current events, sometimes about not much at all.

Looking back, and looking at the man's Wikipedia entry, I'm surprised that I wasn't intimidated by this man's intellect; he was a profssor of philosophy, in his late 50s and writing about really weighty stuff involving UNESCO. As far as I can figure out, I felt comfortable with him because he was Polish, as I am, and even though I had never been to Poland at that point, we had enough common cultural ground that he seemed more like an uncle than an employer.

The last I knew, Henryk and Joan were married and splitting their time between Poland and the U.S. I hope to see them again someday, and in the meantime, I'll think of them whenever I have a simple lunch on a rainy day.

Two Lists

2009-10-25T07:55:00.004-05:00

Ways in Which We Are Just Like You

1. I am the one who smells food to determine whether it’s gone bad.
2. We talk about the thermostat. A lot.
3. I am the keeper of the social calendar.
4. He is the computer wrangler, faucet installer, and lifter of heavy things.
5. I am the buyer of greeting cards and sender of packages.
6. He does not cook.
7. I do not organize the garage.
8. After a bad day, nothing helps more than a hug from him.
9. We take classes together to keep things interesting.

Ways in Which We Are Different From You

1. Our budget includes trips to India.
2. Some of our misunderstandings revolve around language.
3. We own a rice cooker.
4. The time difference between us and his parents is 10.5 hours.
5. There are saris and churidars in my closet.
6. Some of our religious celebrations involve incense and fruit.

A Stunning Moment of Monumental Stupidity

2009-10-21T06:01:00.003-05:00

Yesterday at work, I received one of those rare e-mails that make you squeal: You have a package at the front desk. I didn’t even have to unwrap it to find out what it was; the heavy-duty shrink-wrap showed me it was the rice cooker we’d ordered last week.

If you’ve ever cooked rice on top of the stove, you know that while it is not rocket science, it can be tricky and tends to take a long time. With a rice cooker, the process is fast and the rice is perfect every time. The newer ones come with steaming baskets so you can do veggies or chicken or fish at the same time, and the bowls are nonstick. For households with South Asian residents, they’re an essential piece of equipment.

Our old one had an aluminum bowl that had to be soaked and scrubbed after every use. I was convinced we were eating Alzheimer’s-inducing particles along with our rice and dal. It did work perfectly though, right up until I killed it.

It was a Sunday, I think, and I was making lava cakes, which require a lot of butter. I had used all the refrigerated butter for the cakes themselves and needed one more hunk to grease the ramekins. I was also steaming broccoli in the microwave and assembling a salad for the next day’s lunch, so I was going at full speed, confident in my ability to monitor, stir and chop.

I grabbed a stick of butter from the freezer and picked up a knife. I put the butter on the counter, ran the knife under hot water, and cut through the butter, leaning forward to put more weight on the knife. Then there was a loud pop and a gasp from the living room.

“Did you just cut through the rice cooker cord?”

“Um…”

I wasn’t sure. I had been in such a hurry, I had to look. On the counter, a few inches from the stick of butter, I saw the two neatly severed ends of the cord. I held the knife up to get a better look at the blade. Here’s what I saw:

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I just did.”

My husband had been lying on the couch, watching TV, and had had to sit up and turn 180 degrees to see what I was doing. He had seen me going to cut the butter, had seen the flash. He still doesn’t know why he turned around at that precise moment.

For whatever reason, I was not even mildly shocked by the incident – not physically, anyway. And even though I had cut the cord before the end of the cycle, the rice was as perfect as ever. I'm still using the knife -- it's a good one, and it's a good reminder.

Diwali

2009-10-18T09:12:00.002-05:00

Last night at dinner, I was able to explain Diwali (pronounced “Divali,” and meaning “row of lamps”) to a tableful of people while my husband Mowgli (not his real name) was in another room. When he returned, he commented that I’m starting to know more about Hinduism than he does.

It’s not that I have the fervor of a convert; I don’t practice Hinduism, or any other religion, on a daily basis. But when he doesn’t know the answers to my questions, he’ll take down a book from a shelf, or go online, and then my love of research takes over.

So, though there’s a lot more to the holiday than this, here’s what I’ve learned about Diwali:

- The central theme is good triumphing over evil, and hence light over darkness. This springs from the festival being the anniversary of the death of a demon (see below) as well as a harvest festival.

- In Southern India, Diwali is celebrated as the death anniversary of the demon Narakasura, who had been terrorizing the earth and imprisoning women. There are two versions of how the demon was killed; one is that Krishna beheaded him with his discus, and the other is that his wife, Satyabhama, killed him when he knocked Krishna out. She was able to do this because the demon had received a boon from Brahma that he could only be killed by his mother – and Krishna’s wife happened to be a reincarnation of the demon’s mother.

- In Northern India, Diwali is celebrated as the homecoming of the god Rama following a 14-year exile and the defeat of the nasty king Ravana, who had kidnapped Rama’s wife, Sita. Clay lamps filled with oil are lit to welcome him.

- Lakshmi (goddess of wealth, light, prosperity, fertility and wisdom) is a central figure during Diwali; this has to do with the harvest aspect of the festival. To do a proper Diwali, you should clean your house thoroughly so that when Lakshmi visits, she will be pleased.

- Diwali is a time when you forgive transgressions and accept forgiveness. Accounts are settled, new accounts are opened, and people visit with each other and exchange sweets.

- Celebrations go on for days in India and vary according to religion (Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists also celebrate Diwali), and vary according to the region and individual traditions.

In our house, we poured water on the front walk and steps and lit sparklers, dabbed our heads with oil (probably related to Krishna taking an oil bath to cleanse himself of the demon’s blood), showered, put on new clothes, prayed in front of our house shrine, and then had some rock candy.

Mowgli might be right about my growing Hinduism knowledge in certain cases, but if there’s a pop quiz on gods and goddesses, he’ll beat me every time. And without his mother, we’d both be lost; Mowgli prepared the shrine and directed the ritual according to her directions.

Classified Ads

2009-10-14T05:58:00.005-05:00

Not long ago, I picked up a copy of an Indian-American newspaper after dinner at one of our standby Indian restaurants (House of India). Back at home, I skimmed the articles about Indian diplomats visiting New York, read one about a 13-year-old environmental activist addressing the UN, and rolled my eyes at the Bollywood gossip column. All pretty standard stuff for a New York-based publication aimed at this audience.

And then I came to the classifieds. These are not about selling cars and looking for apartments; these are personal ads, desi-style. Here's a typical sample:

There was a section for males, too; I found the one at the top of this photo particularly interesting because of the age of the advertsier and the outright mention of divorce:

The one in the middle of this photo might be my favorite, because it makes me imagine the writing process. Were the parents huddled over a kitchen table, debating the veracity of their claim of "outstanding personality"? Was the guy there, insisting that he be referred to as "extremely handsome"?

The ads made me think of my brief, entertaining, unsuccessful foray into picking dates from ads. I tried to picture myself meeting those guys (who, by the way, did not comply with truth in advertising standards) for the sole purpose of seeing if I might want to marry them. I couldn't; it's too much of a leap for me, even though I understand and respect the traditions of arranged marriage and matrimony by classified ad.

Photopost: Soft Drink with Bonus Haiku

2009-10-08T05:58:00.003-05:00

Japanese soda
So fizzy and so tasty
But what is that taste?

Photopost: Temple Rededication

2009-10-07T05:33:00.008-05:00

On Sunday I wrote about the local Hindu temple's kumbhabhishekam, or rededication; later that morning we attended the conclusion of the four-day ceremony. I took loads of photos, and I have to tell you, I wasn't the only one, although most people were snapping away on cell phones.

The entrance to the temple grounds, coming from the parking lot next door. The grey object in the center is the head of Ganesh; he is the remover of obstacles and the lord of beginnings.

The entrance to the tent outside the temple, where there were pujas to purify and revivify the temple and its contents going on for days. Up until a certain point, the temple was completely closed.

This was a holy occasion, and thus, a shoeless affair.

I don't know what this pole's purpose is, but it's new. At the end of the ceremony, a priest came out and put things on its base, but by the time I got up to it, all I saw was a small bowl with a bit of water. People were dipping their fingers in it and dabbing their foreheads and throats.

There are seven of these golden spikes; they're new, too, and according to a priest we flagged down, they draw divine energy into the temple.

This lady is holding a kumbha (vessel), that's wrapped with thread. A group of people (who I believe paid for the privilege) were allowed to take the vessels, which were partially filled with holy water, and pour their contents on the main altar. This is known as abhishekam, or sprinkling, and it can also be done with milk, ghee, oil or milk curds. The garlands on the door behind her are made of fresh flowers.

The only place in St. Louis I've ever been able to lose my husband in a crowd.

And then the helicopter appeared, carrying one of the temple's priests. He was flown around the various parts of the temple so he could sprinkle holy water and rice on the building. Ordinarily, this is achieved with ladders and internal staircases, but the fire codes prevent this.

Then he did the same to the crowd in front of the temple; it was windy and gritty and joyous.

Dwadasha Kumbhabhishekam

2009-10-04T06:39:00.005-05:00

I know, it's a mouthful. Here's what it means: 12th anniversary celebrations at the Hindu Temple of St. Louis. It's both a rededication and a refreshing of sorts, involving water, fire, purification of the carvings of gods, chanting, and offerings. We were there yesterday, dropping off a 50-pound bag of rice to be used as prasadam (offering of food to the gods which is then distributed to the people), and we picked up an elaborate program that explains what's going on and why.

The temple has numerous vigrahas, or stone carvings of Hindu gods and goddesses. When they were installed 12 years ago they were purified, chanted over and generally prepared to serve as channels of the divine, and they're worshipped on a daily basis by resident priests as well as devotees. The ongoing worship is partially meant to keep the channel of divine love open, but that does not guarantee the proper level of spiritual maintenance. Here's an excerpt from the aforementioned program on this topic:

"The day-to-day rituals of temple worship act as a guide to keep the wayward mind focused. Nevertheless, the many errors of omission and commission in the daily conduct of the devotees and the comings and going of many who do not share the ethos of temple worship do diminish the spiritual intensity of the initial consecration over time."

The four days of rituals will also involve a purification of the building itself; I'm hoping we will see that later today. If we do, I'll write about it here. If we don't, I'll write about whatever we do see and experience here. As you can see from the schedule below, there's a lot going on today.

Fall Celebrations

2009-09-30T05:52:00.009-05:00

Last weekend, I went to Nashville with an old music-making friend to contribute vocal tracks to the latest in a series of projects called poetry scores – long poems set to music as one scores a film. Click here to read a post about that trip, and listen to MP3s of the songs with me on them.

Mowgli did not go with me – the reality of owning two large dogs makes it difficult for us to take weekend trips together. When friends asked what he’d be doing, I said my best guess was that he’d be watching football and cleaning the house. I was right on both counts.

The reasons for the football are self-evident – men like sports, ugh-ugh. The cleaning is less obvious unless you’re privy to the Hindu calendar and realized that Saraswati Puja, a major Hindu observation, fell on Sunday.

Saraswati is the goddess of the arts, learning and knowledge, and she also governs language and tools. Her connection to tools mystified me until Mowgli explained that because you need knowledge to use tools, and she rules knowledge, she therefore rules tools.

We’re not just talking about hammers and screwdrivers here; the Hindu concept of tools encompasses everything that helps you do anything, and thus includes appliances, books, flashlights, computers, phones, watches, doorways, lightswitches, pens, keys, and vehicles. All of these things get daubed with both kumkum (which I think of as blessing powder) and sandalwood paste, but cars get a special treatment that’s meant to cast out the evil eye.

The passivity of being a passenger on a five-hour trip allowed me to think about the puja, and get bummed out by the prospect of missing it. Participating in Hindu rituals with my husband lets me crawl into his cultural skin a bit, and it’s plain fun to see him prepare for them rituals with joy and excitement. When I got home, I was happy to find that though Mowgli had daubed everything with the sharply sweet sandalwood and kumkum, he had waited for me to start the ceremony.

I puttered, unpacked and settled in, then showered before we lit an oil lamp, incense and camphor, and prayed over an assortment of fruit, hot milk with sugar and cardamom, and a few books, watches, keys and musical instruments. (This part of the ceremony is the same as for Ugadi, which I wrote about earlier this year.)

The serious, reflective part over with, we proceeded with the fun part. We moved the cars, one at a time, to the front of the house. Mowgli had cleaned them inside and out, and anointed the hoods and trunks with the aforementioned powders. He had also prepared the lemons by washing them, daubing them with kumkum, and scoring them widthwise before we prayed over them with the rest of the fruit.

I took four lemons and wedged one against the front of each of my car’s tires; then I drove forward slowly, squashing them, and drove around the little park in our neighborhood. As I pulled into the driveway, I could see Mowgli smiling and waving from our front porch. I smiled and waved back. I picked up the lemons I’d squashed, and watched Mowgli repeat the process with his car. As I stood on the porch waiting to see him come back from his short drive, it felt a bit like Christmas morning, with our simple actions and the smells of incense, sandalwood, lemons and cardamom standing in for the smell of a pine tree and opening presents.

Seven years ago when I first met my husband, I could not have imagined this ritual, much less that I would ever take part in it. Two years ago, as we started our married life, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I would look forward to it. Realizing that I cherish it makes a pretty good anniversary gift. Thanks, honey.

Ramadan in Holland

2009-09-27T06:33:00.002-05:00

A week ago, a friend who lives in Amsterdam sent an e-mail about participating in Ramadan fasting in order to better understand both the tradition and a German friend of Turkish descent. I found it pretty interesting, and thought the rest of you might, too.

Yesterday was Suikerfeest for those of Islamic tradition here in Holland. "Suikerfeest" roughly translates to "sugar party," and lots more of the candies called "Turkish delight" fill the stores. It's an obvious marker for the rest of us that Ramadan has come to a close.

I, too, just finished the fast of Ramadan, and what really caused me to write this was something a very good friend of mine mentioned. In particular, instead of always seeing religions focus on denial, he expressed that he would like to see a focus on indulging the pleasures and joys of this life. Those thoughts eventually crystallized into something I thought would be worth passing along.

I only did the fasting part – I did not do the mediation/prayer several times a day. Still, going with no water and no food from before twilight starts in the morning until after twilight ends in the evening for a month was pretty intense. At 52 degrees latitude, dusk sometimes didn't end until 9 p.m. Also, I should note that on four separate days I broke my fast a bit early when I was with non-fasting friends so as not to force everyone's evening plans around my own constraints. Additionally, while in Sarajevo, hotel breakfasts started at 6 a.m., which was bit after the call to prayer, which we could hear from a nearby mosque.

Back to the joy vs. denial debate, at first I was thinking – wait, joy is how we should be arranging our whole lives. You know, perhaps, rather than 30 days of joy and pleasure, the goal should be to have as close to 365 days of indulgence as possible. With the perspective that my life is a life of indulgence, does the idea of taking a month out to step back and experience my body differently take a different perspective? Does that make the denial seem better? To me? Not really.
So then I started thinking about the fasting I just completed. It didn't connect to the conversation about denial at all. I pondered that for a while.

Slowly it came to me that maybe it was because denial wasn't a main factor for me. I don't think denial is a main factor for those that follow the fast every year either. Yes, there was some denial going on, but the denial seemed almost incidental. Perhaps a means, not an end?

But again, talking about all that seems very intellectual and abstract. So while connecting to another person and another tradition was certainly a big factor, it is not really down to earth in a day-to-day way, and doesn't really illuminate the denial angle one way or another.

The fast created a very physical experience of learning that even with thirst gnawing at me, I can fill my worldly obligations. Without exactly intending to, I demonstrated to myself that, with focus, I can be rational and level-headed and civil and tend to all of my work-a-day duties even with low blood sugar. But even that was a secondary thing, I think.

After some time, I came to the idea that framing the fast of Ramadan as denial would be a mistake, but an easy one given the seemingly endless focus on guilt and punishment in our historically Christian-dominated culture. By comparison, I don't think we see the fasting portion of the indigenous American "vision quests" as being about the denial aspect; I don't think it makes sense to view the Ramadan fast as denial either.

I think it's our cultural perspective that sometimes makes the tradition seem like some weird abstract analog of a sado-masochism club. As if it were a tradition of getting tied to a big cross, seeing all sorts of beautiful people walking by being intentionally tempting, and only getting untied at dark. Now that I've done it, I see it's not like that at all. (Although of course, there were a few days where that seemed to be almost the case. But not most.)

Now I see it really isn't about denial at all. And certainly it isn't any sort of self-punishment. Rather, in its own little way, it almost is a focus on pleasure. Most days were about indulgence, although admittedly quaint or at least simple ones. The evening tastes were magnified. The first glass of water every night was really an amazing thing all by itself. My wife had great fun taking bigger risks in the kitchen because she knew that I would be the most forgiving audience ever. And every dinner was "King's Cabbage," which was really neat.

The fasting of Ramadan isn't for everyone, but it's a surprisingly interesting tradition. I'd encourage giving it a try for a week or so to get a taste of it. For me, anyway, it was fun.

Sumo Revisited

2009-09-23T06:23:00.003-05:00

Sunday’s post on sumo has me thinking about bodies, size, and the twin obsessions with thinness and excess weight we have in the United States. The emcee managed to avoid using the word fat, and I stood there thinking she was smart to craft her patter for neophytes.

As I listened to her, my love of sumo made me think that surely at least a few people were there to learn about an ancient culture’s time-honored athletic contest. That conversation would go like this:

Bob: “Hey, sumo, I wonder what that’s like?”

Mary: “Yeah, I mean wow, what is the history is behind that?”

Bob: “Hm. That might be interesting.”

Mary: “Okay, let’s go check it out. And then we can head over to the ikebana hall.”

But I knew that the majority of the audience must have been there for the shock value, gross-out factor, what-have-you, of seeing fat guys wrestle. And that conversation would go like this:

Bob: “Oh wow, sumo! Fat guys wrestling!”

Mary: “Yeah, in diapers! Let’s go see that.”

I will admit that the biggest guy there (I think the emcee said he was 300-ish pounds) was not necessarily pleasant to look at. His legs reminded me of a baby’s, with the excess flesh drooping down and rubbing against itself. The emcee stressed several times that these guys have regular checkups, and tend to be in better shape than you would think.

Beyond the visual impact, there’s the stubbornly solid smack of massive bodies making contact at high speed. It’s a bit like the sound of a belly flop, but more substantive, with a wider range; it was also loud enough to shock me, and I was at least 30 yards away from the stage.

I wish I’d talked with a few audience members to find out why they were there, and whether their perceptions of sumo changed after learning about it and watching it. The conditions for that kind of change were good. The emcee stressed the cultural significance of the sport, the high place of honor reserved for champions, and the gorgeous women they subsequently date and marry. The rikishi were gracious with the kids they brought onstage, and gracefully powerful in their bouts. The bouts were interesting, with a variety of moves, holds and unexpected outcomes.

So if you were there, tell me: What did you think?

Japanese Festival: Sumo Edition

2009-09-20T06:54:00.015-05:00

One of the things I most wanted to see at the Japanese festival was the sumo. A while back I blogged about the basics of sumo and why it's so awesome, so I won't repeat myself here. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who wanted to see big men wrestling -- the place was packed.

The three rikishi (wrestlers) that were there had wrestled professionally in Japan but were from Hawaii, and they were introduced by a woman who wrote a book about sumo. I don't recall her name, but I do recall the crowd getting visibly and audibly impatient as she sucked up valuable wrestling time with fun facts about sumo, like, sumo wrestlers are big because they eat a lot! Really? We had no idea.

Okay, done being snide now. She did say some interesting things, and I realize she was gearing her talk to people who have no exposure to sumo, but in all honesty, she needs an editor. (Interestingly, though, she never once used the word "fat.")

Eventually she introduced the rikishi, ending with the biggest one, who elicited gasps and comments from several people around me. They went through their stretching exercises as the woman continued talking about how much weight they'd lost and what there did no (one of them is a surfing instructor). Then, finally, hallelujah, the two smaller ones settled in for a bout:

They brought a bunch of kids up to go through the stretching and strengthening exercises:

They asked for a kid volunteer to wrestle with one guy:

Then came an older kid, whom they put in a mawashi, which was funny both because they had to spin him around three or four times, and because I knew everyone there was thinking, "Hey, look at the kid in the diaper."

He got the initial squat just right.

He was very serious about the bout.

But he did not win.

Watching all of this only strengthened my jones to attend a real sumo basho (tournament). And while there are annual "sumo opens" in California (this year's happens to be next Saturday), I have a feeling that wouldn't quite do it, either. Because with sumo, as with ice cream, NASCAR and high-end hair products, there just ain't nothing like the real thing.

Lolita: More than a Fictional Character

2009-09-16T05:43:00.009-05:00

A week and a half ago, we went to the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and I've been writing about it ever since. I lived in Japan for nearly three years, right after college, and I experience enough nostalgia for it that getting a big cultural fix was soothing.

One of the things I really wanted to see was Taiko drumming -- big drums, lots of them, and impressively coordinated people wailing away at them. The event was packed, and we picked our way along the back of the crowd until we found a spot against the fence with a decent view.

A little while later, two frill-bedecked young women walked by, and I immediately knew what their deal was, though I couldn't recall the name for it. Here they are, from afar:

After a while, I realized I was excited to see two intrepid Midwesterners taking fashion chances at an event that's not necessarily crammed with open-minded people. Recalling an early photography teacher's advice that it's always better to get your subject involved in a shot by (gasp!) talking to them, I worked up a bit of courage. I said I liked their outfits and asked them what they were called. Lolita, they said, and they seemed both excited and envious when I mentioned I'd lived in Tokyo and seen the groups of people that hang out in Harajuku park in their Loli outfits.

Despite the name, most Lolita practitioners will tell you that dressing this way has nothing to do with Nabokov's book or anything sexual. It's a way to escape, indulge a love of fashion, and express themselves. There are clothing lines dedicated to this mode of dress, and there are sub-modes: Gothic, Black, Elegant, and so on. Outside of Japan, followers often make their own outfits because ordering these items online is time-consuming, expensive and fraught with size-translation peril. I wish I'd asked these ladies about that, because I'm betting that made at least some of what they were wearing, and they'd have been really happy to talk about it.

Well, the one on the left, anyway. The parasol gal was less enthused, though she was pleased about looking tall in the photo.

Other posts in this series:

People-Watching
Bonsai, Ikebana and Fish Banners

People-Watching at the Japanese Festival

2009-09-13T06:28:00.008-05:00

The people-watching at the Japanese festival was unexpectedly rewarding. The place was just crammed with people of all description, most of them wearing traditional Midwestern summer garb, but some splashing out a bit with Japan-flavored outfits or items. The best outfits deserve a post of their own, though, so come back on Wedesday to check that out.

Umbrellas were quite popular.

So were fans.

These pointy hats were everywhere. I think of them as Chinese coolie hats -- what manual laborers wear to keep the sun off. So it was funny to see them on so many well-fed Midwestern kids.

It was also possible to spot the occasional actual Japanese person wearing traditional Japanese garb.

It's a little hard to see, but this lady is wearing geta -- wooden flip-flops that have you up on two vertical chunks of wood per foot. That means she's almost certainly wearing tabi, the heavy socks with a split that puts the big toe off on its own. It was about 85 degrees and humid that day, too, so between the footwear, kimono and obi, I'm sure she was really toasty.

Bonsai, Ikebana and Fish Banners

2009-09-09T06:05:00.022-05:00

On Monday, we went to the Japanese Festival for the first time in years. I was a picture-taking demon the whole time, so you, my friends, are in for at least a solid week of posts about the festival, Japan, the people at the festival, the food at the festival, you get the idea.

Today's installment has to do with the natural world, and how it's traditionally manipulated within ancient art forms of ikebana and bonsai. And fish banners. Must not forget about the fish banners, about which I posted on my other blog.

While we were walking around the bonsai display, we speculated on the origins of the tradition and guessed that it had something to do with a lack of space. We were wrong. According to this site, it's a horticultural tradition of creating an aesthetic masterpiece out of a tree. It originated in China and was adopted by Japanese Buddhist monks, and from there, it spread to the elite. Here's an informative quote, also from that site:

"In an ancient Japanese scroll written in Japan around the Kamakura period, it is translated to say: 'To appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity.' "

Ikebana, on the other hand, is both the art of arranging flowers and other plants, as well as the coming together of nature and humanity. Similarly to bonsai, arrangements are displayed as works of art, it has a spiritual aspect to it, and it's done by both men and women.

As I mentioned on Buildings and Skies the other day, the fish banners (koinobori) are carp, which swim upstream and therefore represent strength and perseverance. They are hung during festivals, but also on Children's Day, which was called Boy's Day until 1948, when the government declared that girls should also take part in expressing gratitude toward their mothers. My recollection is that girls are given sets of dolls representing the emperor's family, and one carp for the mother, father, and each boy in the family is flown outside the home.

The Phone That Changed my Life

2009-09-06T06:47:00.005-05:00

On Thursday night I made a ridiculous purchase for an item I did not need, but wanted: a phone that is not so much a phone as a very pretty and enjoyable toy that provides seemingly endless hours of entertainment. With it, I can: check e-mail; noodle around on Facebook; store, purchase and listen to music; take, store and share and edit photos and video; find the nearest open gas station; and so many other things that attempting to list them here would be a lengthy, if interesting, exercise in futility.

This purchase, as much as I resisted it, has changed my life in the space of the last two days. I know that’s dramatic, but it’s true.

One of the ways it’s been transformative is by demonstrating in a concrete way that it is good for me to occasionally buy myself the best of the best, my heart’s desire, something nice. I give my husband Mowgli (not his real name) majority credit for this; he is, as I like to say, a fancy lad, and tenaciously persuasive about many things.

With this particular item, he’s been working on me for a year. Get it. We can afford it. Get it. You’ll enjoy it. Get the biggest one.

And so, after gradually realizing that he was right and I did actually want the thing pretty badly, and having verified both online and via a surprisingly decent customer service line that I was eligible for an early upgrade, I called a store near us and guilted them into reserving one for me. Then I called my husband to giddily give him the good news and outline my plan for the two of us to spend a romantic evening at the phone store.

The guy who greeted us there frowned a bit when I said I’d reserved one earlier that day, but came back from a locked room with “the last one.” We were there for an hour, I think, making changes to my service, talking about the warranty, picking a shell for the device (purple and pink, much to Mowgli’s chagrin), and getting a tutorial on the basics of the phone’s features.

During the 15-foot walk to the car, I got a little dizzy from walking with my eyes glued to thescreen. I sat in the driver’s seat, setting up the voicemail and trying out voice dialing. I’m pretty sure I had started drooling when I heard a question from somewhere off to my right: “Do you want me to drive?”

I said no, and about 15 seconds later, unable to tear my attention away from the thing, I said yes. Mowgli drove us the 150 yards to the next store, I put the phone in my bag with great tenderness and delicacy, and we shopped. When we got out of the store, I took a few photos, and spent the entire drive home trying to figure out how to post them to Facebook.

At home, Mowgli put the groceries away (usually a tag-team effort) and I went out on the deck with the phone and the dogs, downloading apps, playing with said apps, and generally trying to run the thing out of juice as instructed by the phone store guy. Eventually I moved inside and sat on the couch, fiddling with it as Mowgli watched TV. Occasionally he’d ask me something, and I’d answer on a 30-second delay, without looking up.

Then I heard laughter from my left. “What?” “It’s like when you tell me you want me to pay attention when you talk to me and I’m watching TV. Only I’m trying to get your attention and you’re staring at the phone.”

Ladies and gentlemen, my iPhone changed my life – by turning me into a man.

One Hundred

2009-09-01T06:05:00.006-05:00

Well blog friends, it's a big day, in several ways.

This is post number one hundred. It's hard to believe that I've sat down at this kitchen counter, usually early in the morning like this, that many times. That was part of the point, to sit down to write on a regular basis. But I didn't think about how it would feel to hit this number and look back. It feels pretty great.

I also didn't think about how it would feel to watch my visit stats climb and have feedback from readers. That feels pretty great too, so thank you, readers, for reading and commenting.

But as they say on TV, that's not all! An essay I wrote specifically for Sauce Magazine appears in their September edition. It's about food, naturally, but it's also about an unhappy event, and a kind of masala I've toyed with writing about here: Native American culture.

And finally, partly to mark the occasion, I'm taking this blog's schedule down to two days a week: Tuesdays and Sundays. That way, I'll have more time to work on the book. Yep, a book. About my personal masala, in novel form. It's already been a revelatory process, and I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into it.

I suspect I may share parts of it here, sometime during the next one hundred posts.

Mowgli Prepares to Take the Plunge

2009-08-30T13:20:00.021-05:00

Now and then during our engagement, people would ask me if my Indian-born fiance was a citizen, which I took as a polite way of asking if I was marrying him so he could remain in the U.S. I would reply that he wasn't, but that he had his green card. For those who didn't know me well and/or seemed unaware of the implications of that, I'd add that he didn't need to marry me to stay in the country.

In a nutshell, once you have taken the necessary steps to get a green card, you may come and go as you like, and live legally in the U.S. for the next 10 years. After that, if you haven't already become a citizen, you have three choices: renew it, return to your home country, or apply for citizenship.

My darling husband Mowgli (not his real name) is taking the third option, so yesterday, we went to a camera shop to get passport-style photos of him to send with his application. He took great care with his grooming, ironed his crisp white shirt for approximately one hour, and worried about his handsomeness level -- all business as usual for him.

Once the application is filed, he'll be notified about when to show up for the naturalization test, which consists of a reading and writing test of English, and a verbal civics test. Once upon a time, it consisted of a list of 20 questions, but now there are 100, all about the branches, history and mechanics of our government. Ten of those 100 are asked during the interview, and you have to get at least six right to pass.

Since Mowgli is known in certain circles as an American History trivia team ringer, I don't think he'll have any trouble with that. But I'm not sure I could pass that test if I had to take it today.

I know that the President vetoes bills and that FDR was President during World War II, but if they asked me when the Constitution was written, I'd be all like, um, after 1776? And while I was happy to see questions about Native Americans and Susan B. Anthony in there, I think the one about the Pledge of Allegiance is a mite tricky.

The INS provides a free booklet of the 100 questions and their answers, and you can go online to get free flashcards. But if you take a look at the photo of my old copy of "Our American Government" below, you'll see how seriously I took civics class.

Photopost: Back to School, in India

2009-08-27T05:43:00.002-05:00

I snapped this shot of schoolgirls outside Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in March 2008.

Mowgli and the Chore Chart

2009-08-25T06:08:00.009-05:00

The other day I wrote about the bread baking event at the family reunion. Today I'm writing about something less exotic: the chore chart at the family reunion, pictured above.

If you count up those names, you'll get 47 (this is what happens when two people have eleven children, who then each have between one and three children apiece and get together 30 years later). So the chart is a necessary part of gathering for a weekend -- but it's also fun.

It is work, sure, but preparing food with someone is one of the best ways to get a feel for them; chopping vegetables, frying bacon and scrubbing pots have a way of exposing the ins and outs of a personality. I saw humor, management techniques, frustration and cubic tons of love in that big, bright room. If it had been possible, space-wise, I am dead sure that everyone would have been in there for the entire three days. As it was, we settled for scooting past each other to get at blueberry buckle, ice cream, soda and yes, children, alcohol.

Back to the chart, though. Everyone above the age of 14 or so was assigned to a team, and each team was assigned one meal and one cleanup. My husband Mowgli (not his real name) was on a team that drew breakfast duty on Sunday. I had my doubts (he is NOT a morning person), but he made me immeasurably proud when he told me, as I stumbled into the kitchen around 8:30, that he was the first one there.

The word on the street is that he made a whole mess of French toast -- my mother, who was on the same team with him, even claims to have photographic evidence.

Big loaves of thanks to the family

2009-08-23T19:40:00.005-05:00

My husband and I just returned from a family reunion on my dad's side that was lovely in many ways and about which I will write in greater detail later. For now, I feel compelled to tell you about one particular incident.

There is a bakery in the family, and thus several bakers were on hand. These are people who make bread for fun, and tend to pass along the baker's art at family reunions. The bread we learned to make is legendary in this clan: Dilly Cheese -- it's exactly what it sounds like, and mere mention of it sent a roomful of folks into raptures.

I took approximately 8 million photographs of the bread-making process, but one of my favorites is of my husband's hands in dough. This was an unexpected development and hopefully the start of a bread-making trend at Masala House.

Below is my other favorite photo: cousin Matt, showing us how it's done. Deep thanks to him and the rest of the clan for welcoming us with open arms, and teaching us how to make something that nourishes body and soul.

In Ghana, a Funeral is Called a Homegoing

2009-08-20T07:46:00.005-05:00

I really didn't intend for this week's theme to become death, but it snuck up on me. Death will do that.

Yesterday, I posted a photo I took two decades ago in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetary. It is a peaceful, pretty place of cobblestone lanes and trees and amazing monuments, where Jim Morrison and all sorts of famous folks are buried. It felt like a random, if semi-logical, event: need to post, need a photo, ah here, I like this one, click, click, done and off to work.

But today I realized that I have had death on the brain ever since a friend started a series of posts about his father-in-law's funeral, which took place in Ghana recently. His writing and photos have made me feel like both a participant and a voyeur, and I urge you, dear readers, to go take a look.

Here is the first post, and here is the second, and the third.

Photopost: Pere Lachaise, summer 1990

2009-08-19T06:21:00.002-05:00

Fresh out of college, practically no money, wandering around a beautiful cemetary in an amazing city with an older brother.

I can't recommend it enough.

Common Language

2009-08-18T06:00:00.003-05:00

When I was in my early 20s, I dated a Liverpudlian. We argued playfully about the usual British vs. American English words: lift vs. elevator, car park vs. parking lot, sidewalk vs. pavement.

Now I'm married to a South Indian. We don't argue about Indian vs. American English so much as translate them in our heads. Sometimes he says fingers when he means toes, and he knows that when I say stroller, I mean perambulator.

Last weekend, we were dividing up the cleaning, and I said I'd vacuumed the basement, the stairs, the hall and the kitchen. Hours later he was puzzled about why there was dog hair on the dining room floor if I'd already cleaned it. I said I hadn't. He looked confused and said yes, you said you vacuumed the living and dining rooms, the basement and the stairs.

Enh?

And this is how I learned that for my husband, "hall" means living room and dining room.

Yes, We're Together

2009-08-16T06:49:00.004-05:00

My husband and I don't often go shopping together, for various reasons. But when we do, about half the time, a checkout person will not realize we're together. "Oh, I didn't realize you were together," they'll say as I scoot my toothpaste up the conveyor belt with his razors. This, despite the fact that we've been talking about personal things and standing roughly half an inch away from each other. And probably holding hands or something smooshy like that.

I generally put it down to the level of distraction in the store. A checker must have a million things to keep straight, those registers are full of tricks, and sometimes the poor thing is wearing an earpiece blaring God knows what sales messages into their brain. Still, it's bothersome.

It's not even the blatant racism of it that bugs me the most. It's the negation of us as a couple, a reminder that here in the Midwestern U.S., the marital combination of our skin tones will always be seen as an anomaly. Not that a handful of people being blind to our coupledom matters that much in our day-to-day lives. But it still shocks me a little bit every time, and the really sad part is it shocks me a bit less each time.

Photopost: Hare Krishna Lunch

2009-08-13T06:18:00.004-05:00

A while back I wrote about the mysterious van that shows up during lunchtime, always at a particular spot outside a certain office building downtown. It's from Govinda's, a vegetarian Indian buffet place run by the Hare Krishnas, and while I find the atmosphere at the restaurant a little culty, I do occasionally order a delicious, filling lunch from the van (via e-mail, of course).

So below we have the full lunch, which is $8 (it's $6 without the yogurt and dessert). Clockwise from the bottom: rice with an icky pickle on it, two curries, a flatbread (kulcha, I think), dal, halava for dessert, and yogurt.

Japanese Leftovers

2009-08-11T05:46:00.008-05:00

At lunch with a friend last week, I reached for a discarded straw cover without thinking about it. Within a few minutes I had turned it into the little object above. Then I went to work on the blue napkin wrapper, which was trickier because one end of it was coated with an adhesive on the order of an industrial-strength Post-It® note.

I picked up this habit when I lived in Japan, and I moved back roughly 15 years ago, so I've been folding bits of paper into knots for something like 20 years. I can't recall where or when I started, or who taught it to me. If I'm in an Asian restaurant, I'll make a chopstick rest out of the paper sleeve they come in, but I'll also make these if there are more scraps of paper on the table.

Why do I turn strips of paper into tidy little knots? It's not as if I'm a nervous person and need something to occupy my hands. I never take them with me, so as soon as I make them they become useless bits of stuff, destined for enormous restaurant trash cans.

It's a Japanese leftover, an amusement, and a mystery.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2009-08-08T08:19:00.013-05:00

Tokyo, circa 1991.

On Thursday morning, when I was about two minutes from work, I heard the announcement that shocks me every year: On this day in 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Really, they should say, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, instantly obliterating tens of thousands of people and condemning tens of thousands more to death. But that wouldn’t be polite, would it? And obviously, we all know who dropped the bomb, but it’s the passivity of the language that bothers me.

That night, I watched a documentary about the bombings, White Light/Black Rain, which was released in 2007 and includes interviews with the surviving crew members of the Enola Gay. One of them used the same passive construction: The bomb was released, or the bomb left the plane, something like that. None of the airmen expressed regret about their role; they talked about performing their duty to their country, and calmly described the missions in clinical terms. One of them did, however, deride people who are quick to say, "nuke 'em." I think he may have used the word "idiot."

There were also interviews with 10 or 12 survivors, who went through the details of where they were and what they were doing when the bomb hit, as well as what it was like to survive. I learned quite a few things from these people: The hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) are still discriminated against, and were initially ignored by their own government. The patients in the hospital that was set up to treat and study hibakusha would beg passing nurses to kill them rather than endure another bandage change. The Japanese word invented to describe the atomic explosions is "pikadon," a combination of two onomatopoeic words: pika for "flash" and don for "boom."

But by far the oddest thing I learned had to do with the Hiroshima Maidens, a group of 25 severely disfigured young women who were brought to New York for recontructive and plastic surgery. During their stay, two of the maidens and the group's chaperone met Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, on the TV show “This is Your Life,” an encounter this New York Times article rightly describes as “monumentally awkward.” It is the original reality TV; all parties are extraordinarily uncomfortable yet remain glued in place, performing the roles they've agreed to. Lewis looks particularly squirmy, I'm sure in part because he didn't know he'd be meeting survivors until he showed up at the studio.

If you’ve read this blog for a while or know me well, you know that I spent a few years living in Japan, specifically in Tokyo and on Hokkaido. There were definitely times when I felt awkward about being an American in Japan, especially around older people who had undoubtedly lived through the war, and quite possibly survived the burning of Tokyo five months prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The photo above is of a man that my older brother and I encountered while ordering hamburgers late one night at a fast-food joint. I’m sure we’d had a few beers, but I was clear-headed enough to feel negativity coming from him, and to make an educated guess about why. Of course, it could just have been that he was annoyed by our loudness and foreignness; it’s impossible to know for sure, and asking wasn’t really an option from either an etiquette or language standpoint.

When I was watching the documentary the other night, my husband asked if I’d visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I was ashamed to say I hadn’t. I was even more ashamed to admit I didn’t know why. I recall thinking about it, but can't conjure up the reason I decided against it.

Not making that trip is one of my few regrets; it’s the passivity of the decision that bothers me.

Even Dogs Play Favorites

2009-08-06T06:02:00.009-05:00

We have two dogs, both mutts, both delightful in their own ways. Georgie is a Rottweiler mix, aloof and protective, and so densely built that strangers assume she's a male. She once barked at clothes that were hanging on the back of a door; I suppose they looked ominous to her, and to be fair, they had appeared without warning. When I walk her alone at night and Mowgli calls out, "be safe," I giggle.

And then we have Jim, the pretty sweetie-pie of the house whose most dangerous feature is the stench of his breath. He loves human contact so much that he will let you rock him back and forth when he is standing. I once compared him, fairly, to Inspector Clouseau.

Jim is Mowgli's favorite dog. He has proclaimed this loudly, in front of both dogs, on numerous occasions, so at this point, every creature in the house is aware of his canine preferences.

My morning routine is to feed and walk the dogs, and then work on writing projects, with the dogs cruising by for pats and scratches. Sometimes I ask their opinion of this or that sentence, but they're generally reluctant to comment beyond a yawn. This goes on for an hour or so, and then I go upstairs to get ready for work. When I come down, Jim is inevitably waiting as you see him above, tucked into that corner between a speaker and an overstuffed chair.

This is his view:

He doesn't budge when I come down to gather my things. Why would he? He's waiting for his favorite human.

Photopost: South City Grocery Store

2009-08-04T06:39:00.002-05:00

I used to live in the area of South St. Louis commonly known as "Little Bosnia," in a house that was built in the early '20s. When I moved in, in 1999, the neighborhood was a mix of families that had been there forever, entry-level homeowners like me, and lots and lots of Bosnian, African and South American immigrants.

One of the wonderful consequences of that population mix was a plethora of international food items in the most affordable grocery store. It started out as a single shelf of unroasted coffee and tea cakes, way back in the dairy section. Soon there was a stand of freshly baked Bosnian bread nearby. These days, it's a huge section of its own, with juices, preserved vegetables, dessert mixes and prayer candles.

I was there the other day, doing research for a blog post for work, and couldn't resist the opportunity to take photos of all that awesome stuff. I'm pretty sure several old ladies thought I was nuts, which made me laugh, and I'm sure my giggling cemented their impression of my mental imbalance.

Enjoy.

Polish Pride: Mustard Edition

2009-08-02T06:30:00.014-05:00

Yesterday, having done battle at Soulard Farmers Market, I stopped by a grocery store because I had forgotten to buy apples, and I was not up for a second round of battle with that unending knot of slow-moving people. There were also a few items I needed that cannot be found at the farmer's market: dryer sheets, Nutella, and mustard.

At the store, I was pleasantly surprised to spot a mustard with a Polish name on it: Kosciusko. I had no idea who this guy was, but I recognized the name as Polish, and that was good enough for me. My train of thought ran this way: "Wow, mustard made by a Polish guy. I'm Polish, and I like Polish things. I bet this Polish mustard is fabulously delicious."

This morning, when I turned the little plastic barrel around, expecting to find that it had been made in Detroit's Polishtown (Hamtramck) or perhaps imported directly from Poland, I learned that it had been made by Plochman's, a company founded by a German emigre and originally based in Chicago. As best I can figure out from their website, they started making it in the mid-1990s.

So now I'm questioning my purchase logic. Was it really Polish pride that made me buy that mustard? The lure of the familiar? The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it becomes: I am not a fresh-from-Poland emigre desperate for the flavors of home. I am the great-granddaughter of an immigrant who has been to Poland exactly once -- and spoke the language so badly that I ordered, with great confidence, a mountain of pierogi.

That Kosciusko guy, by the way? Not a mustard-maker, not involved in any sort of food-related industry. He was an 18th-century military commander in his native Poland and the fledgling United States. Fortified Philadelphia in 1776, built a bunch of forts along the Canadian border, went home to defend Poland from the Russians in 1789. Didn't know a damn thing about mustard.

Those Germans, though, they know from mustard. I bet this German mustard is going to be fabulously delicious on my turkey sandwich.

Mowgli-Approved Dal Recipe

2009-07-30T06:01:00.007-05:00

Toor dal, a/k/a pigeon peas, are our bean of choice for dal-making.

My husband Mowgli (not his real name, I mean come on, that would just be silly) is an infamously picky eater. In fact, he's so picky that I sometimes consider changing his blog name to "The Man Who Will Only Eat Five Things," but that's just a mite cumbersome. True, but cumbersome.

This July, the usual hot-washcloth-in-the-face effect has been blissfully absent, and yes I know I just jinxed it, sorry about that. But it's been close enough to soup-eating weather that yesterday morning, my thoughts turned to dal.

As I work full-time, and dal takes a couple of hours to make the way we like it, crock-pot dal seemed the way to go. I'd never tried it, but if you've read about my massive dosa failure, you know I don't shy from a kitchen challenge. Also, beans are cheap.

So without any futher ado, I present to you this blog's first practical offering: a Mowgli-approved dal recipe.

Get your crock-pot out; if you don't have one, get ye to a Target and shell out 18 clams like I did.

Put 4-6 cups of water in the crock (4 makes a thick dal, more makes it thinner). Wash 1.5 cups of beans (lentils, toor dal, moong dal, yellow split peas, whatever, doesn't really matter) and add them to the water.

Add the following spices:

1/2 t. turmeric
1 t. ground cumin
1/8 t. cayenne (or a couple of dried red chiles if you have them)
2-3 curry leaves -- totally optional, you won't miss them if you don't know what they taste like, and they're only available at Indian or international groceries.

Turn the crock on low and go to work, or sleep, or whatever. Mine went for 9.5 hours and was just fine.

When you get home, or wake up, turn the crock off and add about a teaspoon of salt. Remove the chiles and curry leaves if you added them earlier. If you're feeling fancy, add 1 teaspoon of garam masala and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. For the record, I did neither last night, though I had both on hand, and it was still delicious.

Start your rice, and get out a small frying pan, some cumin seeds, ghee (butter or oil will work, too) and an onion. Dice the onion and saute it over medium heat with a teaspoon of cumin seeds in 2 tablespoons of whatever oil you choose. You want the onions to turn out soft, but not brown, so count on at least ten minutes of cooking time. Add the onion mixture to the soup, stir it in, add more salt if you like, and enjoy over rice.

The onions should be just a bit more done than this.

Travelogue: The Czech Republic

2009-07-28T06:05:00.013-05:00

Kutna Hora, more commonly known as "the bone church."

One of my oldest St. Louis friends is married to a guy who has a Ph.D in folklore, has written an award-winning play, and has spent a lot of time in the Czech Republic over the past 17 years. Naturally, he also has a blog about art and theatre and culture, which you should go visit. He’s also a founding member of Bad Soviet Habits, an arts collective that “seeks to reach new audiences by finding and promoting new work, new artists, and unconventional spaces and projects.”

He is an interesting, funny and gracious dude, and kindly answered my questions about his experiences in the Czech Republic while he was in the middle of an 8,000-hour work week.

When did you first go to the Czech Republic and why?

I flew in in January ’92, just after I graduated from college mid-year. Not the best time, either weather-wise or color-wise, to first arrive there. Gray gray gray, Although my friend Richard treated me to a crêpe (palacinka) on the street that was amazing. They're hard to find now.

I’d studied in Spain my sophomore year of college, and when I graduated I knew I wanted to travel again, learn another language (one different from the Romance family), to live outside of the U.S. I’d been very lonely in Spain, where I’d known no one to begin with, and in this case I knew at least one person. So it was very arbitrary in terms of destination, but it happened to fit many of my criteria. I think I was the only American in ’92, and probably one of the few English speakers who had difficulty landing a job teaching English.

How many times have you been back? Is it different every time you go? If so, how?

I lived there for 18 months the first time, traveled back twice to visit friends in the late ’90s, then started studying Czech formally at Charles University in Prague in advance of applying for grants. I lived there again while doing dissertation research in 2001, and have been back 2-3 times since then, most recently to perform in the Prague Fringe Festival this past May.

Czechs used to say that it would take one year out of communism for every year under communism for them to become a “normal” nation (their word) again. The country is changing quite slowly, but the city of Prague is very different. It has become a European capital – in the same way that New York City couldn’t be anywhere but in the U.S. but is hardly representative of the U.S., or Paris is completely French but not representative of French life.

Prague is European with a strong Czech accent. The clothing is much more European – it’s harder to tell what someone’s nationality is based on their dress. That’s a recent phenomenon, the turnover’s just been in the past two years, an ex-pat friend tells me.

Meanwhile Brno, the capital of Moravia (the second “state” that is the CR) is [undergoing] a much slower change. More Czech (or Moravian) with a hint of Italian investments. If you go to the little towns, things don’t look different at all. I expect the residents find it changed, but as a visitor, it doesn’t seem like much has happened.

From a trip with the in-laws last year, in a pub in the Prague neighborhood of Vinohrady near the Flora metro station. "Tasty."

Leftovers From Life in Japan

2009-07-26T07:39:00.014-05:00

In the kitchen of Yoshida House, circa 1990. This clown still owes Sam and me money.

Yesterday was full of errands that derailed my usual sensible eating schedule, and my lunch was late, substantial, and topped off with an ice cream sandwich (I'm a little addicted to those at the moment). So around nine last night, I found myself in need of a snack that would be substantial enough to serve as dinner without being heavy or unhealthy. In a scene straight from my teenage years, I opened the fridge, stood there with one hand on the door handle and the other on my hip, and gazed at the shelves, waiting for a sign.

It didn't take long for it to dawn on me that we have both yogurt and bread, and I happily grabbed them and found a suitable bowl. As I tore the bread up into lima-bean-sized bits and glopped yogurt on top, my mind drifted back to where I learned this combination: Tokyo. In a gaijin house in a suburb called Oizumi Gakuen, to be precise.

My gaijin house closet. That's a tiny fridge at the bottom left -- an important accessory if you want to count on finding your food where you left it.

"Gaijin" means "foreigner"; a gaijin house is a rooming house for non-Japanese, a place where nobody looks askance at tall, loud, rude people, beacuse everyone is tall, loud and rude, and taking delight in educating each other about the ins and outs of surviving in a foreign land. Ours had perhaps six 8' x 10' rooms per floor, each with a sink, and one toilet per floor. The telephone, shower and kitchen were communal. It was not glamorous, but it was fun, friendly, and most importantly, cheap. When my brother and I first arrived, there was only one room available, so we shared for a while. He still complains about the noise I made when I flossed my teeth.

Sam (not his real name) and I found that room thanks to a connection we'd made during a flight from Ulan Bator to Beijing. Our black market Trans-Siberian ticket had ended up stranding us in the capital of Mongolia, and we consequently found ourselves on the weekly flight to Beijing. It was an open seating situation, and the man next to us, who had just been filming highland games in the countryside, happened to have lived at Yoshida House, or knew the manager, I forget which. When he heard we were going to Tokyo, he scrawled a name and phone number on a scrap of paper.

So back to the yogurt and bread. I learned this combination from an Israeli man a few years older than me, fresh out of military service and engaged in the time-honored tradition of selling junky Thai trinkets on the street. I don't know if the dish is typically Israeli, or just something this one guy did, but I saw him eating it all the time in the communal kitchen, tried it myself once, and liked it enough that I still eat it.

Spot the dog in the garden at Yoshida House, circa 1990.

Just now, on a whim, I searched for Yoshida House. Not only is it still up and running, but it has a lovely website. It looks a lot cleaner than I remember it, and the people look classier, too. I'm glad it's still there; maybe I'll go back for a visit someday.

Photopost: Trans-Siberian Express

2009-07-23T06:17:00.006-05:00

Roughly 20 years ago, my older brother Sam (not his real name) convinced me that going walkabout in Europe and Asia right after graduation would be just the thing to do. As usual, he was right.

These photos were taken by him during his journey west on the Trans-Siberian Express to meet me in Germany (he had just spent a year studying in Nanjing). I myself took that same train back east with him a few weeks later, and took these photos of his photos this morning.

Enjoy.

International Cocktail Hour

2009-07-21T06:00:00.005-05:00

Last week I was grocery shopping with my husband Mowgli (not his real name) when he started prowling the liquor aisle. I knew what he was looking for: Hpnotiq. And no, that's not a string of typos, that's how some brand guru decided to spell it -- you can check out the bottle below for confirmation.

Now, if you've met Mowgli, you may know that his favored hard liquor is Wild Turkey. Being a man who's confident in his choices, he does not care one fig that others find his love of both Wild Turkey and Hpnotiq incongruous.

Despite the fact that it is bright blue and can accurately be described as tasting like a SweetTart, "Product of France" proudly adorns this blend of vodka, cognac and "exotic fruit juices." The stuff is so beloved by the patrons of our local grocery store that it was behind the service counter, from whence it is difficult to steal.

Back at home, we delivered it to the fridge. I cozied up to my Sunday night show with a small amount of the stuff, but was not enjoying it as much as I might due to the tart end of the SweetTart factor. Later, I perused the fridge for a mixer, and my gaze fell on the bottle of super-sugary Indian mango juice we had also picked up.

And thus the green concoction on the left was born. I like to think of it as the Shazam because that was the thought in my head when I realized how well the two liquids would go together, but I'm taking suggestions for names.

Japanese Prints in a loo in The Lou

2009-07-18T19:27:00.010-05:00

It’s not every day that art makes me gasp, and before the 4th of July, it had never happened to me at a party – and certainly not in a bathroom.

A friend’s boyfriend, an artist himself, has two Toshi Yoshida prints hanging opposite his toilet. One is of a wisteria vine, and the other is a pink Mount Fuji. I was shocked not only by the unlikely placement, but by the sheer beauty of the colors, lines and composition. Unable to believe what I was seeing, I examined them for a good five minutes, oblivious to everything else.
Back in the kitchen, as I was helping myself to more chips and dips, I made a bad joke about how awful they were and suggested he give them to me. He declined my offer. The following week, still intrigued by them, I asked him a few questions about their history and what they mean to him – and why they’re in the bathroom.

The location has to do with his desire to keep them together as well as practicality – he has a lot of artwork, and they struck him as perfect for the bathroom. They came from an estate sale in upstate New York, where his family vacationed every summer. His father owned an antique shop in Daytona Beach, Florida, and would drive up with the family, but drive back in a U-Haul filled with that year’s plunder.

When his father passed away, he didn’t want much from the shop, but since he had always been attracted to those prints, he asked for and got them. Part of what he liked was their quietness, their amazing simplicity of color and design, the understated mastery that had so impressed Monet and his contemporaries. But he had also liked the way they transported him emotionally, allowing him to travel while standing still. He’s a traveling kind of guy, always up for new people and new experiences, and always enjoying coming home to everything in its right place.

He mentioned that to his dad, they were just merchandise, and that the shop was never terribly successful – people don’t go to Daytona Beach to buy antiques. Given a different location, the prints might have sold, and he wouldn’t have inherited them. And I wouldn’t have had that astonishing moment in a bathroom on the 4th of July.

Photopost: Parisian Chocolate Wrapper

2009-07-16T05:56:00.011-05:00

In May, a friend went to Paris and kindly brought me back two kinds of chocolate. The dark niblets went straight into my snack drawer and were gone within the space of a week. The milk medallion with the Eiffel Tower on one side and the Arc de Triomphe on the other went into the enormous bag I carry back and forth to work and was promptly forgotten until Bastille Day rolled around this week.

Good thing, too, because had I eaten it right away, I might have been so eager to get at the chocolate that I wouldn't have noticed how amazing the foil packaging is. Enjoy, mes amis!

Mystery Shelf

2009-07-14T06:18:00.008-05:00

One would think, with all the foreign-born ball players in my town this week, I'd be itching to write about how the Dominicans dominate pitching Zen or some such thing. But as I know next to nothing about baseball, and am feeling too lazy to commit to an hour of research, I'm going to, how do you say, bunt?

The photo above depicts what I like to call the Mystery Shelf. I know what many of these items are. For example, in the front row, from left to right we have a jar of mustard seeds, a tub of jaggery balls (unrefined, molassesy sugar in a sticky, hard lump), a lifetime supply of bay leaves, a vat of turmeric, and a tub of toor dal (split yellow lentils, for dal). Reclining across the turmeric and toor dal is a packet of urid dal (a very small dried bean) I bought a few weeks ago so I can take another stab at making dosa and (maybe) idli.

But that teeny-tiny sunshiny tub on top of the Nescafe tin? No clue. And those jars you can see the yellow tops of in the far right-hand corner? Um, yeah. That's why they're back there. I've taken the Magical Mystery Shelf Tour several times, opening and sniffing every single tub, jar and tin; if I don't know what something is, I put it in the back.

Now, I can hear the questions forming. "Why keep stuff if you don't know what it is?" "Is this the laziest woman alive?" But here's what you need to know: This shelf may be in my house, but it is not my shelf. It's my mother-in-law's. I've suggested, ever so gently once or twice, okay maybe four times, that we stow these things elsewhere until she returns to visit (read: returns to cook all day, every day, needing every item on the Mystery Shelf, and more). These gentle suggestions have been rejected and I have gracefully abandoned my campaign for more pantry space.

So I take occasional tours through the Mystery Shelf, and sometimes hold items up to the webcam during a video call for ID purposes, and look forward to the day when my Amma is here to show me what everything is for.

Fun Facts about Gordon Ramsay

2009-07-12T08:21:00.008-05:00

Manhattan Kitchen, March 2009

One of my favorite post-work decompression methods is to watch "Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" on BBC America. For the unfamiliar: It's a reality show wherein the world-famous chef, restauranteur and swearing machine troubleshoots a floundering restauarant, fixing it within a week and usually making people cry and/or swear right back at him in the process.

After watching it for a few months, I realized why I like the show so much: The man actually cares about these places. He wants to see them succeed, he knows how to fix them and he's willing to be hated in the process. He's also similar to Cesar Millan in his tough-love approach, but that's probably a separate post.

This morning, I went poking around to see what I could find out about Mr. Ramsay, and so, for your entertainment, I present to you my favorite fun facts about him.

1. He wanted to play football (soccer, to Americans) on a professional level, but injured himself badly enough that he had to switch careers.

2. He professes to hate the French even though he is Scottish (I'm assuming here that French-bashing is an English sport).

3. He once threw a food critic and said critic's dining companion out of one of his restaurants for insulting him (note: him, not his food). The dining companion happened to be Joan Collins.

4. The animals he raises for food purposes are named after other celebrities -- mostly chefs, but also Trinny and Susannah of "What Not to Wear," who were said to be amused at having pigs named after them.

5. He nearly died when he fell off a cliff into icy water in Iceland while filming a segment about puffin hunting. I like to think a puffin pushed him.

6. He was unseated from his number-one position on the Top Gear leader board by Simon Cowell. (Background: Top Gear is a British car show, one of the featured segments of which is interviewing a celebrity and then putting them in a "reasonably priced car" and sending them around a track to see how fast they can go. The results are recorded on a leader board, and a good part of the fun is seeing who's faster than whom.)

Photopost: Indian Watermelons

2009-07-09T06:20:00.004-05:00

When we were in India last year, I was cameraless and borrowed my father-in-law's (Naina's) digital jobbie, both because I am a lifelong photo-snapper, and I like to play tourist. Whenever we returned to the house, Naina would take the memory stick and run it down to the corner photo shop to have my shots printed. The first time this happened, I was really confused about his hurried departure, then delighted when he turned up a short time later, paper bag of prints proudly in hand.

A few days into this routine, it came to light that he and the photo shop guy had been discarding some of my street shots, thinking they must surely be mistakes since they were so mundane. I explained that I wanted to be able to show my friends and family all aspects of Indian life, and that street life holds all kinds of clues to a culture.

And that's part of the story of the photo above. The other part is that I was walking with my husband Mowgli (not his real name) near the stadium when we came across this stack of watermelons and baskets. I recall being in a hurry, hungry to see as much as possible that day -- it was one of our last chunks of free time. I still regret not going inside that shop to take shots of tropical fruit stacked into pyramids, and I still remember being impressed by the neatness, volume and variety I could see from the street.

I'm still hungry to see more of India, and next time around, I'll take my own camera, and take more time.

Homosexuality Legalized in India

2009-07-07T06:46:00.004-05:00

Late last week, after 149 years of living in fear of legal prosecution thanks to a colonial-era law, Indian homosexuals scored a huge victory: India decriminalized homosexuality.

Here's a short list of things I'm looking forward to following this development:

- Reading about couples who can relax a bit after years or decades of being forced to keep their relationships under wraps

- The legalization of gay marriage in India (I can dream, can't I?)

- Serious Bollywood plotlines about gay couples (there was a farcical one last year)

- The extinction of stories like this

- Being able to use a more suitable photo for a post on this topic instead of the one I scrounged up from last year's trip

A Love Story, Starring Goat Cheese

2009-07-05T09:53:00.014-05:00

"If you'd feel comfortable, you could just send us a check."

That might be all that's needed to convey the adoration I feel for the extraordinarily nice lady who sold me the one of the best chunks of cheese I've had in the U.S. But there is a bit more to the story.

Friday was a day off for me, thanks to the 4th of July holiday weekend, and I took the opportunity to reestablish the farmers market habit I'd let slide yet again. The parking gods bestowed a meter-free spot upon me, and I made my way to the stalls, armed with a 20 dollar bill.

Taters, maters, cukes and zukes, check. Peaches look nice, great, I'll take two. Sure, may as well pick up a pint of blueberries for a buck. Might as well wander the other leg, see what's going on there, see how many people I can spot drinking beer at 10 in the morning (three, maybe four).

Halfway down the northeast leg of the "H" that forms the market, there stood a lady dressed in a long-sleeved, flower print dress and apron, a bit of black lace covering her bun. But it was the incongruity of the latex foodservice gloves that stopped me in my tracks.

She smiled brightly and said, "Would you care for a sample?"

I set down my bags. "Yes, absolutely."

She took me through the options, and I decided on the Fleur de la Vallee (literally, "flower of the valley," a hard aged cheese). It was magnificent. Nutty, salty, amazing texture, and I immediately knew I had to have some to take home. When I reached for my cash, though, I realized I didn't have enough left; this is not cheap supermarket-brand cheese.

"We take credit cards and checks, too."

"Ah great, here's a card."

That's when she discovered the wireless card machine wasn't working. It just kept saying it was dialing. She went out from under the iron awning, saying it sometimes interfered with the transmission.

She kept trying, apologizing intermittently as she excused herself to offer samples and answer questions. I was perfectly happy to watch the river of passersby as I waited -- it's half the reason I go to that particular market. We chatted a bit about the cheese, and I realized as I was standing there that this was the Amish goat cheese I'd read about recently and had been wanting to try.

Finally, she fixed her kind eyes on mine, uttered the words at the beginning of this post, gave me a business card, and sent me on my way. I thanked her for trusting me as I put the hunk of cheese in my bag.

And now I feel compelled to urge you, dear readers: If you live in the St. Louis area, do yourself a favor and seek out Baetje Farms goat cheese. They're at Soulard Farmers Market every weekend, as well as other markets, wineries and at least one restaurant. Their motto is "Committed to quality from start to finish," and if you consider customer care as said finish, I can tell you that they are deeply true to their motto.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a check and a thank-you card to write.

Citygarden Opening Day

2009-07-02T06:06:00.009-05:00

Yesterday was the first day that our brand-spankin'-new, $30 million sculpture park and garden was open to the public. It is lovely, and it was a joy to stroll around it, even though I could not stop myself from wondering how many schools could be repaired with that money. I don't mean that as political commentary -- I'm no good at that -- it's just an illustration of a guilt complex in overdrive.

Over half of the 23 pieces are by artists born outside the U.S., and all but two of those are from Europe, with France being the dominant country of origin. I was hoping for some African or Indian or Malay pieces, but it seems Japan and Taiwan will have to do. In case you're interested, I'll identify the pieces by American artists at the very bottom of this post, in tiny letters, just for fun.

I like the tranquility of this piece, and I wonder why the man felt the need to take the cat along. Did he intentionally create a captive audience, or did the cat get in the boat voluntarily because it loves the man?

The cat's face, which struck me as creepy in its humanness.

I have no idea why I like this piece so much, but hey, that's the magic of art. It's the only one I read an explanation of, so I can tell you that the part at the top is meant to be an opening seed or "a mouth that opens to the sky, like a baby's first cry."

Pinnochio welcomes you to the All-Star game!

My very favorite piece; again, no idea why, but as it turns out, the artist is one of my people: a polack.

Confronted with a gorgeous new sculpture park, a local naturally takes the opportunity to have her dog piss on it.

The obligatory damsel in distress; while I'd rather see a naked woman in a position of strength, I am happy to see that she's been eating well.

Two bunnies avert their eyes from a derelict van -- and, as it happens, the much-reviled Richard Serra piece that you can't quite see in the next block up. As I was walking around the bunnies, a passerby refused to respond to my cheerful "good morning." He must be a truly woeful person to be able to maintain a scowl in the presence of giant white bunnies. Poor guy. Maybe the bunnies will work their magic on him if he keeps taking that route to work.

Pinnochio is the only American piece depicted. I didn't plan it that way, I swear!

Two-Word Tamil Lesson

2009-06-30T06:04:00.007-05:00

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) speaks three languages. English is his first (in case you're curious -- he gets a lot of questions about that), and at home, his parents speak a mix of Tamil and Telugu in addition to English. So if I want to understand and converse the way they do, I'll need to learn two languages as well as the particular mixology at work in my in-laws' home.

For now, I've decided that learning Tamil, slowly and randomly, is the way to go, since they live in Tamil Nadu and I should therefore be able to use it both in the house and in public the next time I visit.

One word I've learned, from doing yardwork with Mowgli, is the word for "snake," because we have garter snakes and he is not fond of snakes in any form. When he sees one, he will point and use the Tamil word for snake.

Not long ago, when a nature show ad came on, and there was a gorgeous close-up of a tongue-flicking snake in the ad, I proudly trotted out one of my five Tamil words. "Ooh, honey, look at that big bad tombu!"

That's when the laughing started. Tombu means "thumb." Pombu is "snake."

And now I know two Tamil words really, really well.

India Diary, Part Two

2009-06-28T06:52:00.012-05:00

If you're just joining us, today's post is a continuation of Thursday's post, which consisted of excerpts from the diary I kept when I went to India last year for a reception thrown for us by my in-laws. Again, this is verbatim except where noted by brackets.

On the endlessly fascinating street life:
"We saw a bunch of bullock water carts -- tanks of water on wheels being hauled by bullocks with brightly painted horns, some with decorative horn-covers:"

By the way, it turns out these water carts are supplemental -- the city provides water on specific days at specific times, and it's up to you to fill your tanks with as much as you need. If you can't get enough, or need more, you contact a supplemental water company, which then dispatches a bull-drawn tank.

On our one trip outside of the city:
"Went off to the waterfall -- about 40 KM away, north of the city. Passed farms w/grapes, bananas, sugar cane & rice paddies, in between villages with stall-stores at the edge of the road, schools, coconut vendors, groups of women, men & schoolkids. Lots of goats, stray dogs, cows (some on leads), and donkeys. Saw a donkey fight in the middle of the road -- awesomely funny."

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) told me later that donkeys eat newspaper, and something in the ink makes them crazy. I still wish I'd been quick enough with the camera to get a shot of the donkey fight. Most of the animals we saw, including horses, were wandering down the street. Cows tend to be tied up because they're very valuable; goats are allowed to wander because they'll eat as they go and it's cheaper to keep them that way; and the dogs are just semi-feral and everywhere, and not to be messed with.

On wandering around town and visiting a grocery store (at my request):
"Had a Coke at Domino's after taking pix of the delivery motorbikes outside and attracting the attention of the owner, who was amused by my tourist ways, but v. nice. [Mowgli] had suggested a juice bar, but I couldn't decide to save my life (Chickoo?!) and was nervous since mom's incident. And something familiar just sounded good.
Went to a grocery store -- Nilgiri's -- to check it out -- narrow aisles, and lots of choices just like in the U.S. Sort of like a Target in that they had housewares, dog stuff, toiletries, etc. [Mowgli] said later that produce was next door."

I'll leave you with sketches of some of the gifts we received at the reception. The Shiva was too heavy to bring back, but the Ganesh came with us and now resides in our living room.

India Diary, Part One

2009-06-25T05:46:00.011-05:00

I blame the jetlag for my fascination with the lightswitches.

I recently rediscovered the diary I kept during our trip to India last year for a reception that my husband's parents threw to celebrate our marriage. My mother and older brother went with us, and we traveled together from Newark to Brussels to Chennai (Madras) to Coimbatore. On the longest leg of the flight (9 1/2 hours) we all slept, though I noted that when I woke up I was so groggy that my husband was worried (we had only been married for six months).

Here are a few excerpts, verbatim except where noted with brackets.

First impressions of Madras:

"On the way to the hotel I was in back, trying to see as much as possible. Lots of dust, roadside shops/bars serving taxi drivers. I noticed that if I breathed with my mouth open, I could feel a fine coating of silky grit. Lots of honking. People driving fast, auto-rickshaws, scooters, trucks. We passed a modern gas station, just like ours -- big, well-lit, neon, lots of pumps."

The entry/new bride welcoming proceedings at my in-law's house in Coimbatore, which were attended by several aunts and uncles. Just before this, we'd done the entry ceremony, wherein I'd had to be the first to enter the family courtyard and house, stepping with my right foot first. Mowgli was scolded for trying to enter before me, but to be fair, we'd just traveled for over 30 hours.

" ...I lit the lamp in the family shrine. I had to strike the match with my right hand -- kind of tricky for a southpaw. All of this took maybe five minutes, then we ate, served by the ladies. I held a silver tray with dishes of kumkum and turmeric. [Amma (mother in-law)] put the gift on it, they daubed themsleves and me, then I offered the gift and they took it."

On my mom crossing the street:

"Mom's freaked out about crossing the street. There are no crosswalks and nobody stops, but nobody gets hit either. Everyone also honks. Mom stops when she should keep going."

On beggars:

"Saw a few beggars -- little kids, and an old dwarf man. [Mowgli] gave the man some money but shooed the kids away. I have to ask him why he gave to one and not the other." Note: He told me later the kids are working for a boss, so he didn't give because the money wouldn't help them.

On waiting for our driver* to pick my mom and me up at a hotel:

"Saw a few Westerners, but mostly Indians lounging, standing in groups, going here or there. Had a false alarm thinking Babu [his real name] had come -- the doorman laughed at us when we shrugged at our own eagerness. He had a great moustache:"

*My in-laws hired a driver to take us wherever we wanted, pretty much whenever we wanted, for the duration of our stay. At first it felt uncomfortably luxurious, but after about five minutes of being driven calmly through the maelstrom that is Indian traffic, it seemed more like a necessity. He also kept an eye out for unsavory types and answered all of my silly, curious traveler questions with grace.

Last Night at the Hindu Temple

2009-06-23T05:39:00.007-05:00

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about my dad, thanks in part to the ubiquitous Father's day ads, but mostly because yesterday was both his birthday and the second anniversary of his funeral. We ended up at the Hindu temple last night, which worked out well in terms of marking the occasion; I'd wanted to do something, but wasn't sure what. Ordinarily, we go to the temple on weekends (partly for the food) but we had houseguests, and once they departed, lassitude slunk in and I was loath to change out of my lounging outfit.

The crushing heat of the last few days has been a visceral reminder of his stroke, long decline and funeral, all of which took place in Arizona. High temperatures make me wilt, and I already felt wilted on the inside. I was hoping the sweet peacefulness of the temple would perk me up, or soothe me, or otherwise make me feel better.

Not long ago, I told a friend that it doesn't seem to matter what state of mind I'm in when I enter the temple -- by the time I finish going around to all the altars and sit down to contemplate the main one, I feel deeply well. I think it has something to do with paying attention to things outside my daily grind, paying attention to my spirit life, and maybe just plain old paying attention. I don't feel the need to understand it completely, though. I'm just grateful that it works even when I'm in as sorry a state as I've been lately.

Last night we arrived to find the main tower swathed in scaffolding; Mowgli says they're cleaning it for an upcoming major festival and that they do this every so often. At first I was disappointed because I had already envisioned a stunning image of the ornate, gleaming, otherworldly structure at the top of this post. Then I realized it's an apt metaphor for how I've been feeling: in need of maintenance.

Iran Election Protests

2009-06-20T09:55:00.025-05:00

I've been entranced by the goings-on in Iran for the past week, unable to stop seeking updates, and hoping for a peaceful, positive outcome for the brave souls who are willing to die for change. But I also know that the Supreme Leader is not likely to relinquish his grip gracefully.

The latest update from the BBC's website reports 10 additional deaths, the arrest of one opposition leader's family, and the use of tear gas and water cannon to prevent protesters from gathering. But their coverage, like everyone else's, is riddled with words that reflect the restrictions placed on them by the Iranian government. It's difficult, if not impossible, to verify what's happening, when the next protest will be, how many are dead. Even the eyewitness accounts can't do that -- as valuable and visceral as they are, they're too fragmented.

And that's been the most enthralling thing to me about this struggle: the unprecendented access to the voices of the people fighting this battle, from this amazing collection of young voices on the BBC's site to the Guardian's excellent aggregation of traditional media, social media, and items being e-mailed to them from inside Iran. Much is being made of the inadequacy of the traditional news media coverage of this story, but to me, it's fitting that it should be the people who figure out a way to get the story out by any technological means necessary.

One of those means has its origins in China: it's a piece of software designed by exiled members of Falun Gong to get around Chinese censorship. It "takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site." Thus the blockade of sites such as Twitter and YouTube is circumvented, and the world receives stunning images of people, struggle, hope and violence.

It is fascinating to me that the country that brought us Tiananmen also spawned a piece of technology that's illuminating a situation that has the potential to become another Tiananmen. Mowgli and I were discussing that scary potential last week, and when I said that I hoped it didn't go that way, he said he didn't think it would. With all my heart, I hope he's right.

Sumo!

2009-06-18T06:08:00.017-05:00

In Tuesday's post I talked about my sumo alarm clock and promised to talk about sumo today, so here we go.

When I lived in Tokyo with my older brother, he got into sumo, and then I did, too, once I got over the big-men-in-diapers ick factor (it helped to learn the proper name for the diaper: mawashi). We'd watch "Sumo Digest" whenever there was a basho (tournament) going on (they go for 14 days, six times a year). We took turns waiting in line for days to get tickets to one day of the basho advertised in the poster above. There were a lot of minor yakuza waiting with us, and we learned from our linemates and students that many corporations snap up blocks of the best tickets.

Sumo is an ancient sport that's connected to the Shinto religion as well as Japanese military and imperial history, and it's a test of strength and skill as well as a ritual and an exercise in psyching out your opponent. Check out these guys, preparing to fight:

There's a good five minutes of ritualized stomping and salt-throwing, and rikshi (wrestlers) crouch down at the face-off point many times before they actually go at it. They both have to have their knuckles on the ground before the match can begin, so crouching but keeping your hands off the ground is one way to stall the beginning of a match.

Things are pretty tense by the time a match begins, and it can go very fast from there, because the rules are very simple: Force your opponent outside the ring, or make him touch the ground with more than the bottoms of his feet, and you win. Approved fighting techniques include grabbing the other guy's mawashi and using it for leverage, shoving, slapping, hooking the other guy's leg with your leg, and so on.

This clip is an excellent example of a classic bout:

These nobori outside the kokugikan (tournament hall) announce the honbasho (Grand Sumo Tournament):

Finally, it's definitely a family affair; this is one of many kids we saw the day we went:

Sumo Alarm Clock

2009-06-15T21:38:00.015-05:00

During my final year of college, my older brother and I hatched a plan to teach English in Japan. It was all the rage in those days, and so we ran off, abeit circuitously, to Tokyo. (More about the circuitous part in a later post.)

After a year and a half in Tokyo, I really needed to get away from all the crowds but wanted to stay in Japan, and so I found a job teaching English at a very small school in Kushiro, on the northern island of Hokkaido. And that's where the sumo alarm clock comes into play: he was a departing gift from a student of that small school.

He is modeled on a real sumo rikshi (RICK-shee), Wakanohana, who along with his brother Takanohana, was very popular at the time. He has woken me every morning for more than 10 years, and last night when I dropped him on his topknot, I knew it wasn't good for him. The topknot isn't just cute, it's the activation device for the alarm, and it was stuck in the "off" (down) position. I wiggled it, pushed down gently on it, and then on a whim and starting to panic, I gave it a sharp whack.

Imagine my relief when it popped up into the "on" position and the alarm statred to sound, healthy and strong as ever.

About the sound of the alarm. It's in the pattern and rhythm of the play-by-play chant of the referee during a wrestling bout, but instead of saying whatever they say for that, it says, roughly, this:

Here's the charge, wake up, wake up-wake up, wake up, wake up-wake up, looks like it's over, it's over.

Naturally, it says all of this in Japanese. Here's a video of a bunch of bouts where you can hear the ref fairly clearly.

I know what most of you are thinking: "Ooh, gross, big fat men in diapers!" That's why Thursday's post will be all about how cool sumo is.

International Art in the Living Room

2009-06-11T16:06:00.033-05:00

One of the perks of being married to a guy from India is all the Indian art that's included in the man-dowry. I've picked up a few international items over the years, too, so the sculptural items in our living room are a veritable melting pot of art.

A sweet little peacock from India. He's made a few flights down those stairs you can see a bit of in the lower right-hand corner.

A Hummel given to me by my great-grandmother when I was 5 or 6. (For those of you who will want to know: Grandma on Ryan Road.)

Detail from a plate depicting Lakshmi, the goddess of spiritual and material wealth. Those are elephants on either side of her -- according to this site, they represent the name and fame of wealth, that is, you shouldn't keep wealth to yourself, but share it to bring happiness to others.

The classic flute-playing Krishna; this is the first piece of art I remember asking about during one of my first visits to my husband's apartment.

I believe this is Kathi, a character from the classical dance theater form Kathakali from the state of Kerala in Southern India. He represents "heroes who are not particular about the means they use to gain their needs."

A laughing Buddha to keep us happy. The story goes that he's laughing because he's just learned the secret of enlightenment.

I love the heft of this elephant; it's only about a foot tall but its bulk makes it seem enormous.

A festive clay horse. I asked Mowgli if it had special significance, and he said, "It's just a horse."

The Ashoka Pillar, symbol of India.

The Buddha again, serene this time, and made from a coconut.

Two crystal vases from a trip to southern Poland (Krakow, Zakopane, Auschwitz, the Wieliczka salt mine) with my mom in September 2000. We were there for the nine days between our birthdays, and we spent at least five of those days looking at crystal, amber, blouses and lace. We spent the other four eating, looking at castles and murdering the gorgeous Polish language.

My favorite representation of Ganesh (we have at least four or five), given to us during our reception in India, though I have no idea by whom. His elephant head represents the soul, his human body earthly existence, and his trunk is om, the sound of the cosmos. He is known as the Lord of Success, and destroyer of evils and obstacles.

Nigerian Librarian

2009-06-11T13:43:00.016-05:00

He began to laugh at my old, laminated library card before I could finish saying, "Hi, I'm here to turn in my old card for a new one," but it was a friendly, gently mocking, deep-voiced laugh.

"Yes, I can see that," he said, laughing through the words. I detected a French-speaking African accent and giggled sheepishly.

We both laughed the whole time I was at the desk. He explained the electronic card catalogue, and assured me I could still use the help desk if I found it too confusing. I smiled and said I thought I could handle it. He handed me a brochure on how to use the library, trying to keep a straight face while saying, "it's for new patrons, but because you have been gone for so long..." He soon gave up the charade and let himself trail off into chuckles.

As I was leaving I asked him, "Are you by any chance from Ghana?" It was the first French-speaking African country I could think of.

"No, Nigeria. You were close, though." And this time, the laugh was appreciative.

Indian Death Traditions

2009-06-10T06:22:00.005-05:00

New York, 2 a.m., March 2009

Sometimes it's hard to think of concrete exmples of how my husband has changed my life beyond the obvious things like living together and developing a set of inside jokes. But last Friday, on the way home from a visitation, I found myself looking forward to a shower.

Bathing after a funeral or visitation is an Indian tradition that he must have introduced me to the first time we went to something like that together. It's a purification ritual, but for me, it's also comforting and provides a much-needed transition, since my emotions tend to be right on the surface after being around grief. Which is fine and natural, but not something I enjoy for extended periods.

To do it completely by the book, you'd bathe outside and wash your clothes separately. I settle for inside and in the laundry basket, followed by quiet conversation with my husband.

There are many other distinct Indian and Hindu traditions around death. Washing and preparing the body for burial is an honor performed by a close family member. The family observes a period of ritual impurty during which they cover religious icons and do not visit temples, go to see friends, or attend marriage ceremonies. Hindu rituals are performed at various intervals after the death according to family traditions. In my husband's family, it's 3 days after, 11 days after, and 31 days after the death. I think there's one more interval, too, but after that, the death is observed annually.

My father died a few years ago, in March, but we had a service for him over a year later on his birthday, June 22. The Father's Day onslaught has been getting to me more than usual this year, so I'm considering borrowing (and probably modifying) another tradition from my husband, and hoping that if I do, it will help.

Travelogue: An American in Istanbul

2009-06-06T08:38:00.007-05:00

Recently a friend spent 11 days in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul. I wrote the other day about the amazing Turkish delight she brought back, but thought it would be fun to do a post about the trip. She graciously agreed to answer my questions and share a few photos. Enjoy!

Why do you travel internationally?

I like travelling period, always have. There are many places in the states that I really want to visit, and some places internationally that I don’t. I think the reason I like traveling overseas is twofold. First, I am a big history buff and I love my American history, but we are still a relatively new country and it is fascinating to visit places that have been around for a thousand years or more. Secondly, I enjoy learning about other cultures and finding all the quirks and nuances of other people. But most of all I think I enjoy the realization that everyone is basically the same, no matter what country you call home.

Why Turkey?

I read several books that either mentioned Istanbul or were placed in Istanbul and the city seemed fascinating. The book that was the main inspiration is called The Historian and takes place all over Eastern Europe, but Istanbul really seemed to stand out. I also spoke with several people who had been there and I kept hearing things like “it’s the best place I've ever been” and “one of my favorite cities.”

What does Turkey smell like? (I ask because compared to the U.S., other countries have distinct smells -- for me, Paris smells like freshly baked baguette; China smells like soot and pee and cooking oil. India's smell is indescribable -- too many smells competing for space, from animals and exhaust fumes to jasmine and cardamom.)

Turkey’s smell is more like India’s, lots of smells competing for space. Instead of animals though, it’s people. Some people had some pretty bad funk going on, but then other smells were wonderful like the spice bazaar and the coffee shops and patisseries.

Did you have any trouble with the language barrier?

95% of the people speak at least a little English, so it really wasn’t much of an issue, but Turkish was the first Slavic language I’ve tried to learn (other than a couple curse words and the national anthem in Croatian), so it was a little hard to get some of the pronunciations correct, but I was getting pretty good at it after 11 days.

How did it compare to the other countries you’ve visited?

I found it to be very similar to other European cities that I have been to, except for the Muslim influence and the size of the city. The city really represents east meets west since half of the city is in Europe and the other half in Asia. The food and the carefree attitude of the people reminded me most of Barcelona, but the terrain reminded me of San Francisco, believe it or not. Lots of hills and houses crammed together.

The people in Turkey were some of the friendliest people I have ever met, and the traffic was the worst I have ever seen. I’ve never been to New York, so I can’t compare the traffic and the crowds, but Istanbul has 16 million people and at times the closeness got to me. The Turkish don’t have the same personal space requirements that we do here in the states.

Where did you go, exactly?

We were in Istanbul almost the entire time. We intended on taking a two day trip to Cappadocia (these cool mountains referred to as the “fairy chimneys”), where you can take a hot air balloon ride and stay in a cave hotel, but we got distracted once we arrived in Istanbul and when we finally got around to talking to a travel agent, all their guides were booked. We did take a day trip by ferry to the Princes’ Islands. That was one of my favorite days. We went to the largest island; no cars are allowed, and we took a horse carriage up to a park at the foot of the tallest peak. Then we climbed the peak (and it was certainly a climb) to reach an old monastery at the top where we had a great lunch and amazing views of the other islands and the Marmara Sea.

Did you visit any mosques?

We visited 3 mosques (one active and two former mosques that are now museums) and one Orthodox church. The most interesting thing that I learned about mosques was that Aya Sofia, which was originally built by Justinian as a Christian church, was not designed after a mosque – and the Turks like the design so much that all mosques are designed after it.

Were there things that surprised you?

There were lots of things that surprised me, but two that jump out are:

Istanbul has to be one of the world’s largest melting pots. I have never met so many people from so many different countries all living in or visiting one city. The food options reflected this, as you could get any type of cuisine you wanted. We met an Italian-American from Philadelphia who said that Istanbul rather than New York is the true melting pot of the world, and he just might be right.

About 35% of the women we saw wore some type of head scarf. We saw very few women in the full covering, but what amazed me about them was how fashionable most of them were. Some of them were covered in long coats that were not as stylish, but still came in a wide variety of colors, and others just had the scarf on with funky clothes that covered all extremities, but were still very hip. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised by that as Istanbul is a very fashion-conscious city, but I was.

Beyond the Turkish delight, was there a local food that bowled you over?

There were several local foods that bowled me over. The Turkish meatballs (kofte) were wonderful and they were always accompanied by this simple bean salad that we came to love. We also had kebabs that were the specialty of one of the local restaurants and contained sliced pistachios that were amazing. And a dessert that is hard to describe. The shape resembled a flan, flat and circular. The outside was made of crunchy bird’s nest material (probably phyllo dough cut up), the inside had a creamier consistency like a pecan pie without the nuts. Then it was covered with shredded pistachios and topped with fresh cream. Sounds weird but it was delicious.

Were there any interactions with locals that stick out in your mind?

We took a 2.5-hour ferry to the Princes’ islands, which are a popular place with everyone, so the ferry was really packed. There was a large group of older teenagers, maybe college-age kids who wanted to sit outside (the outside seats were a hot commodity), so they laid down towels and blankets and sat at our feet, laying on each other and sleeping. At first I was annoyed by it, but they were so sweet – not intrusive at all in spite of the fact that they were practically lying on top of our feet. It was fun to watch their interactions and have no idea what they were saying but still understand their joking and teasing each other.

Double Turkish Delight

2009-06-04T06:45:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week the candy stars aligned and we received two kinds of Turkish delight from two friends who had each recently been to Turkey. One is originally from there, and one went as a tourist.

It had been a while since I'd had the kind on the left. It has the consistency of gummy bears, and the flavors are only half what you'd expect: the green is mint, the red tastes of roses. The lemon is perfectly balanced between tart and sweet. The orange is like Brach's orange slices that have been working out and taking steroids.

The kind on the right was a such a revelation that I'm not sure Turkish delight is the right name for it. The texture was more like very chewy fudge, the dark one seemed to be made from dates, I could taste spices along the lines of cardamom, and they all had macadamia nuts. And because I am a coconut freak, the coconut coating made me very happy indeed.

In Turkey, the confection is called lokum, a word that may come from lokma in Turkish or luqūm, the Arabic plural of luqma, meaning "morsel" or "mouthful." It also may have been derived from the Ottoman rahat hulkum or Arabic raḥat al-ḥulqum , meaning "contentment of the throat."

That last theory makes the most sense to me -- my throat is definitely content after Turkish delight.

Tiananmen

2009-06-03T06:09:00.006-05:00

Today and tomorrow mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, or massacre, or whatever you would like to call it.

There are New York Times op-eds and interesting interviews with today's students, to whom the date means little -- at least when they are talking to a reporter. NPR has a great piece on three student leaders who were deeply involved in the protests and how they've continued the long trek toward their goal of bringing lasting change to China.

Last night BBC World News had a riveting interview with Jeff Widener, who took an iconic photograph of a single protester blocking a line of tanks (you can see it in this slide show, at about 2:37). I was due to leave the house to meet a friend, and had considered leaving early to drop by the library on my way, but once I started watching I knew I had to stay for the whole piece, even if it meant I would be late.

They ran footage of the man waving his plastic shopping bags furiously at the tank in the front of the line, the tank advancing, stopping, advancing, stopping. I tried, and failed, to imagine the thought process of the driver, who must have known that his fellow soldiers had slaughtered hundreds of their own countrymen the night before. It's easier to imagine the thoughts of the man standing in front of the machines: I don't care if you kill me.

The photographer related how he'd gone into the Beijing Hotel, found a Western student, and whispered to him that he was an AP photographer to gain access to his room and balcony. He took a handful of frames, then realized a setting was wrong and worried he'd missed the shot. Undaunted, he moved to the next step: getting the film safely past the soldiers, who were by this time very good at identifying journalists.

The hotel guest put it in his underwear, got on a bicycle, and delivered it to the AP office.

Just over a year later, a few months after I finished college, I spent two weeks in Nanjing with my older brother, who had just completed a year of study there. We also spent a week in Beijing, riding bicycles where the tanks had been past places where people had died, eating boiled peanuts and sampling the local rotgut. It was sobering, weird, and moving, and the vast majority of the people were lovely.

Nanjing, Summer 1990

Going Dutch

2009-05-31T18:00:00.006-05:00

Johannes Vermeer's "The Wine Glass"

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) has a friend who has lived in Amsterdam for several years. He swings through town to see family every so often, and we get to enjoy his company over a meal and drinks. It’s a fine, relaxed time that feels like the best parts of college – zesty, deep, respectful debate about everything from the birth of open source software to religion.

Naturally, we tend to talk about life in the U.S. versus life in the Netherlands. Here’s a list of what I learned:

 The housing market there is unsettling people because prices are fluctuating by 10% or so in either direction.

 It’s equally easy to be a vegetarian in either country, although it used to be harder here.

 Europeans don’t wrap up nearly as much of their identity in their jobs as Americans do.

 Temporary resident aliens have the right to vote in the Netherlands. Thus our friend was able to vote for the next Water Commissioner, which might not sound like much, but it is -- 25% of the Netherlands is below sea level and under constant threat of flooding.

 Our friend was the first employee to refuse a company car – in Amsterdam, you really can’t have one because, he says, there’s just no room. Also, when you have four markets, a cheese shop and two bakeries within walking distance, and the bars are a tram ride away, you don’t need one.

 He described the Dutch language as the intersection between English and German. There are two ways to say “cheers”: prost, and gesundheit (if you pronounce the first syllable like you are a Jewish grandma saying “challah.”)

The Joy of Appliances

2009-05-31T08:50:00.015-05:00

We have recently been made ridiculously happy through the acquisition of a new washer and dryer. The old ones were starting to hobble, and it turns out my company's discount on them is significant. Add to that the tax credits available for Energy Star items, which pretty much everything is these days, and we were off to the races.

Here are the space-age machines, stacked because A) they can be, and B) our laundry room is more of a laundry cubby, and expanding the usable space by even a few inches makes our lives much more pleasant. Take special note of the gas line on the left, which I think of as more of a bruisemaker than a gas line. That red knob is 2 feet, 6 inches from the right-hand wall, and while I often curse the idiot who put it there, I am glad they made it sturdy.

Mowgli has a collection of approximately 1.5 million tools and is not at all intimidated by things like the possibility of getting electrocuted, so we opted to have him handle the installation. I admit to being nervous -- you never know what you're going to run into, even in an 11-year-old house, and I had to resist the nightmare scenarios that popped into my head unbidden. I conjured up floods of water cascading into the basement from the first-floor bathroom through an open pipe that could not be turned off while Mowgli yelled instructions to me and I did my best not to scream at him. Which actually happened, years ago, in my old house.

But happily, history did not repeat itself, and everything went relatively smoothly, i.e., we got through it with only two mid-project trips to the big-box hardware warehouse. One of those was for dryer vent parts. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say Mowgli had some choice words for the folks who built our house. He was pretty diplomatic, though: "They're not supposed to do that" and "Those idiots!" were about as salty as he got.

Once everything was hooked up, we inched the six-foot-tall technological wonder into place by shoving our bodies against it in precisely choreographed little bursts. We tossed some clothes in, consulted the manual, poured the right amount of detergent in the fancy little additive drawer, and gingerly pushed the necessary buttons. Then we sat down to watch.

That's right. We sat on the linoleum floor of the laundry cubby and gazed in wonder at the clothes as they tumbled back and forth, making comments like "What's it doing?" and "That's amazing." and "Wow."

The next morning, I found a stack of folded clothes, and a note. Here's a closeup:

In case you can't make it out, it says, "The dryer is so awesome that it even folds the clothes!"

Now that's a good dryer.

We Heart the Spelling Bee

2009-05-28T06:17:00.006-05:00

Over the holiday weekend, my husband Mowgli (not his real name) ran into reruns of last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, which could only mean one thing: it’s time for this year’s bee.

Go ahead, call us geeky, we don’t mind. We know what you may not: the national bee is an amazing piece of theater.

ESPN aired the semifinal round last night, and by the time ABC televises the finals (tonight, 8 p.m. Eastern/ 7 p.m. Central), the remaining 9- to 15-year-olds will have been whipped into a nervous froth of adolescent yearning. But it’s all good, clean fun: they’re competing for brainiac glory, and money.

The top prize includes a savings bond, $2,800 worth of reference works, a scholarship and an engraved trophy as well as a check for $30,000. If you take second place, you receive $12,500. Even kids who misspell in the first round of the semifinals get $250.

Being a former rule-writer, I checked those out. Here’s my favorite: “The speller must not have repeated fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth grade for the purpose of extending spelling bee eligibility.” Imagine, for a moment, the hilarity of exactly how one would intentionally repeat a grade in order to qualify for a spelling bee. You’re ridiculously smart, and yet, and yet, advancing a grade will erase forever your last shot at holding the big, shiny trophy… oh, the agony!

The statistics about the spellers are fascinating, and sometimes counterintuitive; 44 are only children, 63.5% of them attend public schools, there is one third-grader, and 30 spellers are related to a previous national finalist.

And here’s one to chew on: "English is not the first language of 33 spellers, and 117 spellers speak languages other than English." Imagine that for a moment. Create a picture of yourself at 12, 13 or 14, in France, on a stage, on national TV, spelling French words. Merde!

But as you may have guessed, it’s the kids of Indian descent that really float my husband’s boat. When they're at the mike, he likes to reminisce about his own school days and imagine how they prepared, especially when they cut to the parents’ section of the stage. It's a nice bit of side theater for me, seeing my husband dissolve in fits of laughter while imagining the arduous path that led these kids to the bee. For a taste of this, you can check out the documentary "Spellbound."

And yes, in case you’re wondering, we did watch the reruns; we were hoping to see this moment again:

Hair Conundrum

2009-05-26T07:03:00.004-05:00

Among my odd talents is the ability to put my hair up using chopsticks. I did this yesterday while preparing to meet a friend for lunch, and then hesitated. We had talked about going to a Vietnamese restaurant, and I know that in other Asian countries, using chopsticks for non-food applications is a big no-no. Poking your chopsticks into your rice and leaving them there is really bad in form in China -- it mimics the incense sticks (stuck in rice, I think) that signify a funeral.

Gads -- what if my hairdo offended the nice people who make and bring me the yummy food I love so much?

But then I thought, this is America, and they've been here for a while. Surely they've been far more offended by far worse faux pas. I'm not going to Vietnam; I just want a 19.02 with curry sauce.

These are the things that occupy me -- worrying that I might offend someone with my hairdo, and then deciding that it's okay.

Opening the Kimono

2009-05-25T08:42:00.008-05:00

Dear readers, I can't fathom what sort of photo could adequately illustrate my mortification when I realized, after joining Facebook, that I'd ranted, ever so gently, last month, against doing just that.

Here's the pertinent section in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing:

"I don’t want to be found by my third-grade classmates. I don’t want to put myself on display. I don’t want to be lulled into exhibitionism by the atmosphere of unabashed sharing and then regret it later. Yes, I know I can set the privacy levels, but I just don’t want to crack that door. It’s too tempting."

So once again, after more or less declaring "never," I've gone and done it. Cracked the door. Opened the kimono ever so slightly. Uploaded photos. Friended pretty much everyone I could think of, and accepted 95% of the friend requests that came my way.

Still, it's a great place to put omote vs. ura to work, and I'm getting lots and lots of practice in the ancient arts of temptation avoidance and self-restraint. Because as nice as I may seem to be most of the time, I have a serious snarky streak, and hard experience has taught me that it's best to keep it under wraps.

At any rate, it's done, and I don't feel I caved completely, because I joined partially for work -- to study the beast and understand it. Here's a short list of what I've learned so far:

- Posts get sentimental and/or silly late at night.

- People LOVE quizzes.

- People also love to dispute the results of quizzes.

- Quizzes can be gamed.

- It's a great place to seek advice and opinions on things like the best way to quit coffee (thanks again, everyone -- today is Day 3, and I'm not missing it).

- Some people are so friendly they'll accept your friend request even if they don't know you. Okay, so the guy could also have been clueless, or looking to reach a certain friend count, but still. I definitely had the wrong guy, and it was almost certainly clear to him that he didn't know me, and he accepted my friend request anyway.

- It can be simultaneously comforting and alienating.

- It's a very serendipitous environment. I would call it Zen, but I don't know enough about Zen to know if that's accurate. Maybe my next status update should be a social media koan: Is Facebook Zen?

And on that note, I leave you with a random photograph.

Coconut Chutney: Round Two

2009-05-22T11:10:00.010-05:00

The Cuisinart has been sucking up valuable counter space ever since round one. I left it there to remind myself that I needed to go back in for round two while the coconut was still fresh. And since I have today off in addition to Monday, I decided 9:15 a.m. was the time to jump back in.

I went with a different, seemingly simpler recipe this time: fried coconut chutney. Here it is as it appears in the book “Tiffin Varieties.”

And here’s my mise en place (that’s French for “make sure you have everything before you begin, Einstein.”) Clockwise from top right, we have the coconut with a green chile on the rim, salt, black gram dal (hulled, which is why it’s white), tamarind paste, curry leaves and mustard seeds. Alert readers will notice that the recipe above does not call for curry leaves, but since they're an essential ingredient in most Southern Indian dishes, I made an executive decision to add them.

And thus began today's theme of improvisation. My coconut was still in biggish chunks, and I’d need to grind everything together later on anyway, so I put the coconut, chiles, curry leaves, tamarind, salt and gram dal in the Cuisinart and processed it until all the bits seemed small enough. I also added a little oil to help with the frying, and because it was bone-dry.

Once in the frying pan, the oil didn’t seem adequate to keep everything from browning, so I added some water, which cooked out relatively quickly. So I added more, and decided to continue on that track for 15 or 20 minutes.

From the mutating smell wafting up, I could tell the ingredients were melding nicely, so I took a small taste. Friends, either Mrs. S. Mallika Badrinath is a sadist, or I added way, way too much salt. But what I could taste around and behind the salt seemed right, so I rummaged through the Indian mystery shelf of the pantry to see if the bag of dried, shredded coconut I remembered was a mental invention, or actually there. It was there. On a higher shelf was the can of coconut milk I’d bought months earlier, just in case I felt like making piña coladas or coconut curry.

Here are my coconutty saviors:

After the fried mixture had cooled a bit, I put it back in the Cuisinart with the supplementary coconut products and whizzed it around briefly. It was still fairly salty, but because I have great faith in the Joy of Cooking, I added chunks of potato to the new mixture to hopefully soak up some of the salt, and set it to simmer on medium for a bit.

I just tasted it. It’s much better, but it’s not spicy enough, so I added another green chile, cut lengthwise, which I’ll take out later. I think it will be okay in the end, but I’m really glad I also decided to make dal. Faithful, simple, delicious, difficult-to-screw-up dal.

Love Letter to a Lily Allen Song

2009-05-21T05:55:00.005-05:00

For a singer-songwriter-musician, I don’t buy a lot of CDs. It’s weird, but there it is. When I get hold of one I like, I wear it out, and if there’s a track I take a particular shine to, I’ll put it on repeat in my car’s CD player for days at a stretch. For the last month or so, the album has been Lily Allen’s “It’s Not me, it’s You,” and the track has been “Him.”

It’s a song about God that borrows heavily in concept from Prince’s “One of Us.” It’s also a bit sexy, but that makes sense given that Allen has never been afraid to be anything, least of all sexy whilst singing about God.

Fellow blogger Richard Byrne has convincingly argued that Serge Gainsbourg’s “L’Hotel Particulier” is as perfect as pop sex gets; meanwhile, I don’t think I’ll ever hear a song about God that’s more sensous than this one.

In particular, I’m talking about the instrumental break (at 2:05 in the YouTube track below). It starts with a breathy “ah-ah” vocal – an extended version of the lead-in for the second verse – that’s soon joined by a walking bass line. Then it widens into a fattened-up version of the chorus’ musical bed. The synth violins are still there, only now it’s impossible not to notice that they sound as if they’re being played through a trumpet mute for a pulsing effect. They’re propelled along by driving snare-based drum work and an elegantly simple single-line guitar solo. I crank this section up every time it comes on, because I can’t resist the impulse to take a bath in its warm, thick, loungy vibe.

One of the best things about this album outside of Allen herself is the producer, Greg Kurstin, and one of the best things about him is his egalitarian approach to instrumentation – banjo, accordion, and pedal steel are just a few of the pleasant surprises on these tracks. He’s also skilled at quoting musical styles without parroting them. I’m still working out why “Are You Mine” reminds me of the Beatles, though I suspect it’s the piano and the deft employment of the “rule of three” – repeat something twice, then shift away.

Getting back to “Him,” the verses wander through a series of amusing questions such as whether the big man in the sky would drive without insurance, and speculates about his favorite band. But the chorus is where Allen shows us what she really believes:

Ever since he can remember
People have died in his good name
Long before that September
Long before hijacking planes
He’s lost the will
He can’t decide
He doesn’t know who’s right or wrong
But there’s one thing that he’s sure of
This has been going on too long

Finally. Someone wrote a song about God that I can not only believe in, but feel the truth of in my bones. It’s about time. Thank you, Lily Allen.

Coconut Chutney: Round One

2009-05-18T06:14:00.010-05:00

The tools in the photo will not help you crack the coconut.

This weekend, I rode my bike a few times, met a friend for breakfast, and disemboweled a coconut. I'd bought said coconut a few weeks earlier with the intention of making coconut chutney, which is one of my favorite food substances.

I had taken my scratchy-covered brown victim to the garage to drive a nail into two of its eyes; this was how I remembered opening coconuts as a kid. At the beginning of the adventure, Mowgli had said we didn't have the proper tool (a handheld scythe) but I was undeterred.

The nail-driving and subsequent milking went fine, and we both enjoyed the watery milk, which Mowgli says is good to drink in summertime. He also said that if we poured it in the houseplant soil, a coconut tree would grow; this was a shortlived and highly amusing attempt to start a game of "gullible wife."

Back out in the garage, I spent a while whacking the nut with a hammer and marveling at the lively, happy sound it made as it rebounded from each assault, utterly unharmed. Thinking I'd have better results if I put a chink in the convex armor, I found a handsaw and worked up a sweat making an insignificant valley.

Then Mowgli came out and laughed at my feeble attempts. He put on a gardening glove, took the coconut over to the landscaping bricks pictured above, and had it open after two or three thwacks against the edge.

Back inside, I pried frustratingly small chunks of flesh out with a knife until the shell was bare, and was thrilled when my helpful husband said to use a potato peeler to remove the thin inner husk. Half an hour later, I was ready to make the chutney.

The recipe I used is from a cookbook written by Mrs. S. Mallika Badrinath, who's written a series. We have about nine of them; they have titles like "100 Vegetarian Gravies," "100 Snacks Special," and "100 Rice Delights." The chutneys are in "100 Tiffin Varieties."

Once I had Mowgli identify the Bengal gram (the mysteries of the Indian pantry shelf are many) and researched the size of a gooseberry so that I could add a blob of gooseberry-sized tamarind paste, I was ready to go. I ground the coconut in the food processor, added a green chile, the tamarind, the Bengal gram, some salt, and whizzed away, thinking the racket the peas were making were par for the course.

Then Mowgli came by to say, "The gram is not roasted." My shoulders fell forward in bleak defeat. The recipe calls for roasted Bengal gram, and in my excitement to move out of the preparation stage, I had forgotten about the roasting.

I am sorry to say that I scraped all that lovely fresh coconut-tamarind-chile-gram goop into the trash; I just couldn't figure out how to salvage it. And since I had used my last green chile, I couldn't start over, even though I had enough of everything else for a second attempt.

And that, my friends, is why I called this post "Coconut Chutney: Round One."

International Food Field Trip

2009-05-16T07:00:00.007-05:00

As we headed out of the building, one of my fellow travelers said, “I can’t believe we’re really going!” I couldn’t, either – we’d been plotting a lunchtime field trip to Jay International Foods for at least a month. Besides me, there were three young coworkers, all guys, all creative and funny and adverturesome in their eating and cooking.

When you enter the store, you get a small idea of what it smells like to travel the world. Myriad unidentifiable scents form a semi-sour wall built on fresh-fish base notes; I’m always relieved when it fades, as stinkiness is not my favorite part of traveling.

There are at least a hundred kinds of jam: rosehip, plum, apricot. I picked up a jar of ginger preserve. They sstock more kinds of fish sauce than seem logical, tubs of spices for less than half the cost of a single small grocery-store bottle, enormous bags of rice and tins of oil that will last for years. In the frozen section, you can find squid, whole jack mackerel in two sizes, very cute flat fish of some sort, and the infamously stinky durian.

Part of the fun of going to any international food store is gawking at the packaging. We found a bottle of “Chee-zee” spread with a cheesy-looking kid on it, an ingredient list that included “lovely,” and many products that were clearly named but still unfathomable, such as “Beef Iron Wine.”

The dry goods are arranged by country, and because I lived in Japan for a few years, I tend to get nostalgic in that section. This time it was the mayonnaise that made me think of the adventures I had figuring out what to buy in Tokyo’s grocery stores. It was Kewpie brand, with its nonsequitur image of the ‘40s-era doll, in a bottle made of thin plastic that ensures you’ll get every drop out. I’m good on mayo, though, so I picked up a box of Vermont curry mix – this is Japanese-style curry, a block of trans fat and spices that you add to your meat and veg to make a viscous, sweet gravy. One of the guys picked up nori and wasabi, and ingredients for spring rolls.

Another guy needed tamarind paste, but the closest thing we could find was tamarind chutney. I asked a nearby Indian man whether it could be substituted for the paste. At first, he thought I just wanted him to get out of the way so I could get to the shelf beyond him, but when he realized I was asking him a question, he smiled broadly and attempted to answer it. Then he asked me to wait a moment, and called his wife over. She had been in the other aisle, and by the time she got to us, she seemed a little annoyed, said something vague, and gave me a head wag that I had trouble interpreting. My husband has told me many times that Indians hate to say no, and this particular wag seemed too vague for a “yes.”

Later on, still bothered by the Indian woman’s watery answer and the thought of a friend making Pad Thai with the wrong form of tamarind, I asked a store employee about the tamarind paste. “Aisle 17. Chinese and Thai.” Sure enough, there it was, blocks of it stacked up right across from the Indian section, where I had righteously expected it to be.

One of the guys, who had a Vietnamese friend growing up, bought a packet of sweets that were green, chewy, tasted like popcorn, and were filled with a sweet white bean paste. He handed us each one in the car on the way back, which prompted all kinds of commentary and discussion, capped off by a “Thanks, I think.”

We must have stayed for more than half an hour, but it felt too fast. Next time, I want to start earlier and have a meal while we’re out.

Love Letter to a TV Show

2009-05-14T06:46:00.004-05:00

There are many unexpected pleasures in a marriage; some even make you laugh. I’ve had the good fortune to experience one that makes me almost pee my pants laughing.

About six months after the wedding, after selling my house and moving and incorporating my stuff into inadequate closet space, I noticed that my Indian gearhead husband was frequently watching TV, and that often, he was watching shows about cars. Blech, I thought, and blech again.

He kept urging me to sit down and watch with him. Blech once more, I thought, even though I had noticed by this point he laughed a lot at one particular car show. I continued with my important tasks, organizing my sock drawer, deciding where to put my dental floss and so forth.
Eventually I gave in, sat down, and experienced the unparalleled entertainment that is Top Gear. It’s a BBC show wherein the three hosts test fancy cars, make celebrities race around a track in a crappy car to see who will be fastest (Simon Cowell was, for a long time), and undergo car-based challenges.

The most stunning challenge didn’t involve cars at all; the producers sent them to Vietnam, gave them enormous boxes full of money, told them to buy a vehicle with it, and left them to figure out that the only thing they could afford would be a moped or ancient motorcycle. Then they had them drive, on the bikes, from Saigon to Hanoi. Finally, they issued a cruel edict: if the bikes became unrideable, they would have to finish the journey on an American-flag-bedecked motorcycle blaring “Born in the USA.”

It sounds silly, and it is, but it also contained some of the most gorgeously simple anti-war statements I’ve ever seen. Richard Hammond narrating the story of a man on a beach who survived an air assault there and consequently lost his hearing, while the man scratched the story in the sand. A B-52 left to rot in a canal because that’s where it crashed and nobody had bothered to move it. All three men rendered speechless by bullet holes in an ancient monument, and then again by the raw beauty of a valley view.

Here’s a clip from the episode. You’re welcome.

Riffing on International Food

2009-05-12T06:28:00.010-05:00

Breakfast during a ski trip in Japan. Yes, that's a hot dog, but isn't it pretty?

This morning, as I was thinking of a topic to post about, I realized this is the last day I'll see a good friend before she goes to Paris for a week. So naturally, my thoughts turned to food; specifically, the glories of international foods eaten in their home environment. Because seriously, my friends, you have not had a croissant until you've had one in Paris. I know that sounds like food snobbery, and maybe it is, but I'm sorry, it's true.

I've had pierogi in Krakow, dosas in India, and yes, croissants in Paris. But the foods I keep coming back to and getting nostalgic for are Japanese.

Every convenience store in Tokyo, where I lived for a year and a half, had onigiri -- triangular wads of rice stuffed with salmon, or beans, or tuna. They were delicious, simple, filling and blessedly cheap. In summer, they had pre-packaged cold soba -- buckwheat noodles with a sweet, salty soy-based sauce, and a tiny compartment of paper-thin green onions.

Naturally, there is a class of bar food. Yakitori -- literally, grilled chicken, a/k/a chicken on a stick -- was a favorite, as was its cousin, octopus on a stick. Seriously, folks, when you're 22 and you've had a few giant beers after teaching English for nine hours and you've missed the last train, nothing hits the spot quite like grilled octopus smothered in teriyaki sauce.

Finally, the ubiquious sushi; it's in convenience stores, in "kaiten" joints where it goes by on conveyor belts and they tot up your bill based on the plates stacked in front of you,
and at proper sushi restaurants. Someone in the gaijin house where I lived had identified a half-off night at a sushi restaurant we could walk to, and I had some of the best raw fish of my life there. I can't recall what I had -- probably lots of tuna -- but I remember how much I loved eating what the locals were eating, where they were eating it. This was also my first exposure to banana leaves as plates, and using my hands to eat in public.

And now I'm so hungry for sushi that I'm plotting a new career as an international food writer.

Dance Class

2009-05-08T06:46:00.013-05:00

I did not wear these shoes for dance class.

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) and I just finished a beginning ballroom dance class that was mostly enjoyable, but at times seemed interminable (most notably when we were attempting the foxtrot). We learned (and I use the term loosely) cha-cha, tango, waltz, merengue, salsa, foxtrot, and an unnamed dance that our instructor assured us is very popular in the clubs right now, though after doing it for five minutes I have no idea why. It was a horrendously boring side-to-side thing, with none of the variety of the cha-cha slide.

The instructor was a thin older lady who occasionally got confused about whether she was teaching the guy’s or the girl’s part. She was very nice, and from the way she glided about I could tell she’d been doing formal dance all her life, but she also had a tendency to wave her hands and urge us to practice more if we were having trouble with something.

We took the class because one fine evening, Mowgli announced his desire to learn to tango. I think he’d been watching “Chuck Versus the Tango,” but he does often mention, in a very impressed tone of voice, that Robert Duvall is a noted tango dancer. At any rate, it was my job to find and sign us up for a class.

Naturally, being budget-conscious, I headed straight for the online St. Louis Community College course listings, found a 13-week course for $49 per person, and signed us up. At our first class, there were about 30 people in the high school gym where we met. By the end, it was down to 10 or 12.

If you ever find yourself in need of excellent people-watching, I highly recommend a ballroom dance class. We had a pair we called the “happy couple” because they were always beaming, madly enthusiastic, waving their arms and bottoms about and embellishing the steps almost as soon as they learned them. They were sweet and hilarious at the same time. There was also one guy who would sometimes show up on his own, his arms holding a ghostly partner, doing the steps by himself. I always felt a bit too shy to go over and dance with him, but a couple of other ladies did.

I’d been to enough Polish weddings to know how to do the box step and the polka, so I was somewhat ahead of the game. Poor Mowgli had never before had a dance class of any kind. Also, he needs new information broken down into tiny component parts in order to learn it. This was not that kind of class. This was a “here’s the step, here’s the step again, okay now get with your partner, here comes the music” kind of class.

Despite that disconnect, and me having a tendency to lead, and not always being able to go fast enough to keep up with the music, we were doing pretty well by the end of the class. Also, we laughed quite a bit and had many romantic moments on the floor of the U City High gym; it’s kind of hard not to when you're being held by the love of your life.

On my Profile Photo

2009-05-07T07:01:00.011-05:00

Yes, those are my hands. They're covered in mehendi, which is henna paste applied and allowed to dry. It's a decorative art that's thousands of years old and is practiced in many countries for different reasons. In India it's typically associated with special occasions having to do with transecndence and transformation. When I've asked about it, some people have told me it also has to do with warding off the evil eye.

Mine was done in India for the occasion of the reception that Mowgli's parents threw for us last year. A cousin's 13-year-old daughter did the honors; she had a book of patterns with her and let me pick out what I liked, then did the work freehand. She had premixed tubes with tiny tips; she did my hands and feet in the space of an hour.

On my wrists are gold bangles; some are mine, some are my mother-in-law's. I also wore a combination of necklaces, some hers, some mine. The mix appeals to me both in terms of the symbolism of the joining of families, and the trust implicit in letting someone else wear your special-occasion jewelry.

The last of the mehendi wore off three weeks after it was applied. It was still clearly visible when we came back to the States, and a lady in one of the airports asked me if we had just gotten married when she spotted it. I think I said no, it was just a reception, even though it was tempting to say yes. It certainly felt like a wedding to me.