| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Food for Thought
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated Sept. 18, 2003
Monsoon Diary: A Memoir
With Recipes, by Shoba Narayan. Villard. $24.95
Western publishers' love of "ethnic" material has
prompted a wave of new writing about food, much of it by Asian
expatriates and first-generation Americans and Britons who've
used food as a touchstone to evoke memory and reclaim their
heritage. In her first book, Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes,
the transplanted Indian food and travel writer Shoba Narayan
has added her reflections.
Narayan writes about the test her family puts her through to
decide whether she would be allowed to go to the United States
to attend college, a test that involved cooking an elaborate
meal for her extended family. "'America is full of muggers
and rapists.' Nalla-pa said. 'Why did you apply there? No unmarried
girl should venture into such a promiscuous society,' Nalla-ma
added." Then her uncle says, "Cook us a vegetarian
feast like this one. If we like it, you can go to America. If
we don't, you stay here." Narayan passed and was allowed
to go.
But she is too quick to accept the disturbing prejudice that
is entangled in her relationship with food. In the same way,
she engages in little soul-searching about her arranged marriage,
which she once opposed but has grown happy in, or her observation
that she learned to cook traditional south Indian food because
she wanted to "dazzle" her husband. The same acquiescence
is more disturbing in her throwaway mentions of India's noxious
caste system, which she says is "an important part of the
way Indians define themselves." These observations lack
the one element that would lend the writing more philosophical
muscle: a critical eye.
Monsoon Diary is light, fluffy and tasty just like the idlis--or
rice cakes--that Narayan writes about. To be sure, her descriptions
of the food, the smells and the characters of India are as delectable
as the recipes that accompany the chapters. "Almost every
station in India sells a regional specialty that causes passengers
to dart in and out of trains. My parents have woken me up at
3 a.m. just to taste the hot milk at Erode Station in Tamil
Nadu. North of Delhi we could buy thick yogurt in tiny terracotta
pots. The earthenware pots sucked the moisture from the yogurt,
leaving it creamy enough to be cut with a knife. Kerala, where
my father spent his childhood and still leaves his heart, is
where I've eaten the best banana appams, fried in coconut oil
on the platform."
Some of the characters in the book are instantly endearing
and identifiable to anyone who grew up in India: Raju, the milkman
who has named his cows after his various wives (he calls one
Tiger); Chinnapan, the ironing man who could pick up red hot
coals with his bare hands; and Natesan, the garbage collector,
who Narayan (in another instance of willful blindness) reveals
was invited into the house for coffee but always drank it "in
a cup that was not used by anyone else." Narayan does not
mention the reason: he was from a once "untouchable"
caste.
Monsoon Diary is at its best when its realm is the India of
Narayan's childhood. The latter half of the book, which is set
in America, is unfortunately filled with cornball anecdotes
and descriptions that could have used some judicious editing.
About America, she writes, "Everyone was moving, searching,
asking for more. People were changing spouses, changing jobs,
changing homes, changing sexes. It seemed like the more choices
people had, the more they searched for something else, something
new, something different." So don't expect any insightful
commentary in this light memoir, but make sure you do not read
it on an empty stomach, as Narayan's culinary writing will give
you an attack of the munchies.
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