The Cooking of India [antikvár]

Tassage to India's (cooking I began my writing career when I was 19, at Wellesley College, with a book called Home to India. I was feeling far from '' Home, "and knew I would be returning after I graduated, but somehow it seemed necessary to me at that time to put down on paper something of what I felt about my own country. The book began with my return from boarding school in England and with my grandmother wondering despairingly wherever in India she would find a man tall enough to marry me (I'm just under five feet eight; she was just under five feet). Since I was scarcely 16 at the time, the matter didn't seem of primary importance to me, and I made the mistake of saying so. She replied severely that she had been half my age when sloe married. The episode is still fresh in my mind, and I remember my grandmother's answer rather shook me, even though I had known it for years. I kept a decorous silence during the rest of the family greerings and comments, and immediately after those formalities, we were all ushered into the dining room for an elaborate meal that included all the favorite dishes of my childhood. In a way, these minor incidents summed up the two major preoccupations of my grandmother—and millions of other Indian women of all classes as well. Marriage and food. It was really from that moment that I began to realize how forgetful I had become about my country, how much there was to learn and relearn, and how ill-equipped I was to grasp even a small part of it. In the two years that followed, I started on what I now think of as my "real education" about India, and it left me with a lifelong, indelible engagement with that impossible, diverse, wonderful, muddled, extraordinary, exciring and maddening country so that even after years of foreign travel—even after being married to an American (who was six feet tall)—it will forever remain "Home" in my mind. I know that I have had certain advantages in trying to write about India. To begin with, my father was in the Indian civil service and at one rime happened to be stationed in Madras, far south on the east coast of the Indian peninsula. Equally fortuitous, my mother (always a decisive and progressive woman, if not an outright rebel) was at college in Madras—the first giri of the Kashmiri Brahmin community to insist on higher education. It was there that the two families met, and the elders, my grandparents, arranged the marriage between, on one side, a very beautiful, if unpredictable, daughter for whom they had practically given up hope of finding a suitable match —after all, she was over 21—and, on the other, a brilliant and stubborn son who insisted that he wanted an educated bride, not simply a conventional housewife. It was considered a most unorthodox contract, the first of its sort in India, between a family from the far North and another from the far South, totally different in every way, even language. (To this day my parents speak to each other in English, their only common tongue.) Only one