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Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes by Shoba Narayan. Penguin Books. Pages 225. Rs 295. THIS book is delicious, tasty and delectable, seasoned with personal accounts of growing up in Madras, stirred with the memories of Grad School in the USA and served hot and steaming with subtle flavours of charm, romance and gentle humour. Shoba Narayan takes you on a gourmet binge as she talks of issues like cross-cultural adjustments, the shocks that a perfectly alien culture has to offer to a girl from a conservative 'TamBram' family, the sifting and choosing of values and lifestyles that all of this entails and finally, the harmonising of the self with the two diametrically differing settings. Every episode in her life is surrounded with the aroma of a dish intrinsic to that part of her life. Shoba is generous in sharing the recipe with the reader at the end of the episode. The reader ends up with 20-odd recipes at hand. There is a seamless intermingling of the food with the book and it won't be surprising if an enthused reader carries the novel into the kitchen to rustle up a dish for the family. Maybe she'll also say to herself: "Oh! That's why my upma (or whichever dish) never came out right. I was over-roasting the semolina." Every memory is associated with a food fragrance. Starting from when she was 6-month- old and was fed her first meal of rice and ghee in the Choru-unnal ceremony to the accompaniment of the recitation of Sanskrit verses. Shoba's tongue-in-cheek comment about the ceremony is the first comparison of cultures that one comes across in the book. The cultural dichotomy continues throughout the book even when she irreverently speaks about the TamBrams (Tamil Brahmins). "We TamBrams, the stereotypes goes, are risk averse, bookish and brainy. We also have a fetish for coffee". Words like TamBrams, observes Shoba, "can envelop an entire community and connote all its nuances, including food, clothing, religion, lifestyle and even intelligence." Again and again the traditional conventionality of her origins finds contrast with her chosen American lifestyle. Although her father is a professor, her family is given to the celebrations of rituals integral to their lives and beliefs. All ceremonies, be it sharaadams, birth ceremonies engagements or marriages, are accompanied by priests chanting shlokas around the fire and ending in a feast. No wonder then that the newness of America is somewhat shocking, not least the freedom to learn what she wants. The most important part of her American experience was that "it offered a world without a context" and she approached it "unfettered with the American stereotypes that I have since learned. Like other authors who write on cross-cultural adjustments, Shoba, too, has to deal with issues of unorthodox sexual preferences, female emancipation etc. In doing this, she compares the aggressive feminism of America to a society in which "women deferred to men in public, but ruled the roost in private." She also highlights the fundamental contradictions between the two cultures. "India's fatalism was in direct contrast to the flux I felt in America`85people 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." There is only one dilemma
that the reader faces when she comes to the last page of the book: where
to keep it; on the bookshelf in the living room or among the recipe
books in the kitchen? |
