Roti and other memories

Tea was made hot and sweet, back at home, a strong, almost cloying concoction that I can rarely replicate over here. We had some coffee plants at the bottom-end  of the L-shaped garden. They would be plucked sometimes, seeds extricated and dried, occasionally the drying beans would show signs of mould or fall afoul of a passing spray of cat piss. The beans that survived would be ground. Made into, grainy, earthy, cups of coffee. Nowhere as smooth as instant coffee. But I miss it now. In a way that I will never miss Nescafe, or my caffe latté, latte macchiato, espresso macchiato, ristretto etc today.

Amina Saïd in her poetry

talks about weaving a carpet of memory

My carpet is patchy, fraying at the edges…

Thosai, eaten hot off the pan. Appa used to eat thosai on the little pantry table,  next to the kitchen, and not in the dining room, so that he could get them hot and eat them before the cooled. He used to get annoyed when they lost warmth. Saras akka was an expert with the thosai ladle. First she would take a ladle-full, from the thosai mixture. Pour it in a broadening spiral on the hot iron surface, then smoothen it in another spiral. She would make two varieties. Cooked on a flat black slab of iron.  One was a sedate, soft, pancake-like creature. The second was a glistening piece of magic, slathered with a coat of oil and cooked to a crisp so that the bits crackled in your mouth as you chewed. Sometimes she used to cook them with ghee, and those days were heaven. 

I could write poems, books, about ghee. It adds flavour to anything, subtle, aromatic. As if someone melted butter, mixed it with some magic herb. They call it unrefined butter. Perhaps that is what adds the flavour, the impurities, the bits and bobs of unknowns. (like what I imagine the flavour of kassippu liquor to be, brewed in the jungle, derived from whatever falls into the barrel). Or maybe that's not what unrefined means. Anyway, sometimes, on special occasions, you get the hint of ghee in fried rice, lubricating the slide of grain against grain… shiny on thosai…perfuming the decadent softness of Bombay sweets…

Roti. We often used to eat roti. Thin, unleavened bread. A hard pancake of cooked dough. When the roti is hot, scrape a bit of butter on, it begins to melt. Twisting-off pieces, sopping up hodi (gravy) on one’s plate. Maybe scooping up some dhal, add a smidgeon Katta Sambol for spice. In my head I can smell wafts of molten butter, mixed with the coconut in the dough, rising up, mixing with the thick, wholesome, milk-gentle fragrance of dhal… The thought of dhal reminds me of Cadju curry. Piles of cashew plucked, separated from the fleshy fruit, dried and cleaned, cooked in coconut milk until their raw crunch softened into a milky chalk-soft creamy texture. They’d be cooked with peas that would bob about amongst the cadju and rupture in a juicy burst upon biting, or disintegrate.  Sweeter, more vegetal than the cadju.

…and Poll (coconut) sambol. First you use a coconut scraper, (there’s a place called Odiris that makes them), to scrape a decent pile of coconut, holding the half-coconut steady while you turn the handle of the scraper, round and round. Then you mix in chili, lime, and umbalakada - maldive fish – and mix it about, adding in a pile of chopped onion. Its all mixed up until it is a small mound, fluffy, in a bowl. When eaten with bread, or perhaps even roast paan (small, lightly roasted loaves) and spicy fish hodi, with the onion crunching it is indescribable. The savoury-ness of the dried fish adding depth to the chili. and the lime a slash of tartness, mixing in with the other flavours. The bread giving body and chewy-ness, the hodi an infusion of spicy liquid. Smooth, savory heat. (One of the joys of traveling in Sri Lanka is eating in dodgy places, or semi-dodgy places. Once on a long drive back from Yala, Nimalan, Anojan, S and I stopped at a “hotel”, half constructed, ordered food. I remember having the most amazing sambol. Fluffy, infused or rubbed with just enough chili, finely chopped onion, occasional, unexpected pleasure of Umbalakada.) I could eat it for hours. 

The Sinhalese name for eggplant is batu - but there are several other batus. Thalana batu, an almost-bitter vegetable the size of a billiard ball, but oval. There is a smaller batu, called thibbtatu. Tiny, as small as a blueberry, tough and green and it grows in a little bush. I think we had one in Wattala. When cooked the right way, with the little berries split open, (perhaps they open during cooking)  there is a salty, savoury weight of flavour, as if it were meat or fish. Another delicacy were the meaty chunks of madu-maalu, flat-fish. Eat, bites cleaving, viscous glide  of each morsel, cartilage crunched effortlessly. Saras akka used to make Iddli, in her iddli pan, like short, thick flying saucers, small doughy clouds that would disintegrate as you swirled them in Sambhar  (spicy vegetable gravy.) (I used love the way they served sambhar in grungy, dirty Saiver shops – ladling it out of stainless steel buckets).

In Hatton town they used to sell Umbalakada wadai. Small fried dough-cakes with a chunk of umbalakada on top. I walked into Uncle Sivalingam’s house one day, eating one. He said I was like my father, who would eat food sold anywhere on the street. I remember feeling vaguely proud, of being thought of as classless. And maybe more importantly, of being like my father.