One of my great-aunts was sponsored by
a dollar-earning nephew to visit several countries that she had on her
wish-list. Even today that’s an expensive gift, but before cable television
came into our lives, this was a very, very big thing. Silk saris were packed
into wheel-less, hard suitcases (yes, that
long ago, when mobile phones were still decades away) and foreign currency
was tucked away in the various pockets of a custom-made wallet that also held
her passport and other documents.
She returned after the spring and
summer months were over in the northern hemisphere. She’d toured museums,
attended operas, window-shopped at some of the most expensive outlets of
sophisticated brands, sampled not less than ten different kinds of cuisine and
made temporary home in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Hongkong,
Sydney. On return, we found her accent
had changed: just a teeny bit, but she no longer called the green notes doallaaars nor the capital of England Lerndern.
We asked her about her experiences and
this is what she told us: “The lobsters in Paris were exemplary. No garlic, no
tamarind, they were cooked with milk and cheese, but it was stuff to drool
over. The mackerals in Dubai were bigger than the Karwari variety, but as tasty.
There were dried Bombay Ducks, too, in the market there. Catfish, if well
marinated and cooked into curry, tasted as good as the shevto. The crabs, huge fellows, weren’t as tasty, but so fresh,
and so fleshy.” The entire conversation revolved around food, fish dishes in
particular. No mention of music,
architecture, clothes.
Nothing has changed since my childhood.
My mother still gets phone calls from her friends in and around Panaji… and
some even beyond Goa’s borders… telling her what they ‘got’ in the market that
morning and how they’re planning to cook lunch/dinner. Prawns, tiny ones,
medium ones, big ones, made with brinjals, into curry or pickled. The small
silvery vellyo cooked into sukke and eaten with the bone. Chinese
and Thai recipes may have come into our lives, but they are still intruders in
our kitchens, to be entertained occasionally.
When we visit cousins or friends, we
are invited to see the size of the surmai
or viswon that they bought that
morning. Like many Goan men, I had an uncle who would buy certain fish just so
that someone else may not, at whatever cost. An ego thing, like whose car
overtakes faster, who sees the first show of a film or eats the first mango of
the season.
With a sigh the previous generation
moans the loss of certain kinds of oysters, kalwan
which have become extinct. The taste of ‘artificially’ bred marine life
just isn’t like the original stuff, they claim.
Those unaccustomed to coconut oil see
visions of hair coming out of their mouth when they are told the crisp fish
surrounded by salad in the plate before them was fried in it. A non-coastal
friend who wanted to try dried fish took a sniff of the raw stuff, turned his
head away instantly and said: “You mean you people eat that?” I took offence.
There’s nothing as satisfying as a sukk-bandya-kismor
with rice pez and solan kodi on a monsoon afternoon.
How we’ve evolved. People have started
eating tuna, once thrown away from
the rapon as a worthless fish.
Opposite the Pilerne industrial estate, like several points in Goa,
fish-vendors sell fresh-water marine life: hilsa
and rohu brought in from
Karnataka, glistening attractively, deliciously. Some of the buyers were
locals. Times they are a-changing and tastes getting more adventurous.
Another great-aunt, when asked after a
journey whether she’d had a good flight, said disapprovingly: “No fish. They
served only chicken.”
Best of all, I like the vocabulary that
has emerged from this love of finny and shelly things. One young man trying to
impress upon somebody just how much he loved Goan cuisine excitedly said: “Why
to eat vegetables and dal, men? We eat fish-food.
It’s good for the health and so-so tasty, no?”
True, true.
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