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Cleaning Brown Basmati with My Mother

Mummy

Mummy

A few days back, I discovered brown basmati rice grains hanging off the side of the container suspended by long threads. And then I discovered a worm too. Needless to say, I was annoyed, disgusted… a bunch of non-pretty emotions. I transferred the rice to another container and thought that the problem (and the worm) would be gone. I think it disappeared… but then came back another day.

So I did what I should have done the first time the worm entered my life – I called Mummy.

At my home (and my husband’s home and probably the homes of many friends), it was common practice to buy grains and flours in bulk early in the year. Mom would get thirty-odd kilograms of rice, dals, wheat flour, etc. Clean the whole lot, store it. Plastic was uncommon, we used steel or aluminum containers. A couple for the rice, one for the wheat flour, a couple for toor dal, and so on. Mom also bought spices in bulk… Turmeric, red chilli, garam masala. I remember her sitting on the kitchen floor, the rice spread out in huge steel platters all around her. She would warm castor oil in a little iron ‘karandi,’ pour it into the mounds of rice, mix it up, fill the steel containers. Occasionally, she would throw in pieces of paper too. They worked well to absorb moisture. I am positive that my mother-in-law followed similar tactics.

As a housewife in Mumbai, you have to be smart, resourceful, efficient, skilful. You need to have superb time management skills. You need to know the exact time it takes for you to make twenty-five chapatis so that you can have them ready (along with dal, vegetables, etc.), get dressed, and leave home in time to make it for the 8:13 train. You need to know how to haggle with vegetable vendors, where to get the best greens from, how to determine if the milkman has been adding a little too much water to the milk, how to keep your maidservant happy, if a saree and a shirt are too much/too little to give as Diwali ‘bakshish,’ how much money to give the postman during the holidays, how to use leftover rice efficiently… A whole lot of tricks, small and big.

Managing a kitchen, given a tight budget and limited resources, is a precious skill, and one that my mother, mother-in-law and countless Indian women living in big cities learned and practised. Tips from neighbors, experience of elders, wisdom from colleagues and cousins… a gigantic social network mechanism ran efficiently. I always wonder if Facebook can even begin to think about replicating something of this kind. I doubt it.

Cleaning Brown Basmati

So I cleaned brown basmati rice this week. Sieved the whole lot to get rid of dust and stones, moved it into a huge aluminum pan, warmed castor oil, poured it into the rice, mixed it all up, then moved it into another clear plastic container. The whole enterprise took about an hour.

At one point, I suddenly felt like I was back in my old kitchen (I refuse to call it ‘my mother’s kitchen’ – it is/was my home and my first kitchen, although I never cooked in there!). Potatoes in the corner, the little altar with the clay Krishna smiling sweetly, a sink full of dirty dishes, food simmering on the gas, All India Radio doing its thing in the background, Mummy working efficiently. Geetu and I would be curled up in our respective chairs, reading. Dad would be humming softly, reading the newspaper, muttering under his breath (he’s always working on a mathematical problem!).

Home is a place we always wish to go back to, not knowing that we carry it within our hearts, in our breath, behind our eyelids, always.