Vegetarians, Indian.

               “I’m no longer non-vegetarian,” Bai Goanna told a gora friend. (A gora, dear politically correct vocabulary using readers, is a skin-pigment-challenged individual from beyond our western borders. Those from Down Under are also included.)

               “Means?” gora friend asked.

               “I now eat only vegetables,” Bai Goanna said. But gora friend didn’t know that she wouldn’t eat vegetables from a meat-stew.

               “Why not?” gora friend wondered. “They’re vegetables.”

               “But they’re from a meat-stew,” Bai Goanna explained. Gora friend is yet to figure out her logic.

               Shri Husband, when told about the incident, gave his unasked-for opinion about how complicated Indian vegetarianism is. “We can’t just be vegetarian. You have to specify: no garlic-onion vegetarian, no-tomato vegetarian, eggs-allowed vegetarian…”

               I mumbled: “Some people eat only unfertilized eggs, so they’re eggatarian, a kind of vegetarianism.”

               Shri Husband’s decibel-level rises when he’s interrupted. The reverse never matters. So he said a little louder, nudging my ten words out of the way: “Whether or not unfertilized eggs can be included in a vegetarian diet is debatable. There are other complications… we have days of the week fasts when being mere vegetarian isn’t enough. You can’t eat fish or meat on Mondays and Thursdays. Then there are God-days. Tuesdays for Ganapati, Saturdays for Hanuman, Fridays for the Bollywood-promoted goddess, Santoshi Mata.”

Bai Goanna wanted to know why some people thought fish was a fruit of the sea. I said: “My grandmother’s old neighbour’s aunt-in-law used to say it isn’t sinful to eat fish because no one killed fish. It died on its own when it was taken out of the water.”

“Great logic,” said Shri Husband, “Especially when your grandmother’s old neighbour’s aunt-in-law is the authority.”

“Old people know best,” I protested.

 “Yes,” he agreed. It’s always dangerous when Shri Husband agrees. It means a debate is imminent. One-sided, mostly.

He continued: “Our fasts are hard to understand. Mostly you are ‘allowed to’ eat enough to stuff three stomachs, but it’s a fast. This ‘allowed to’ business has fluid rules. On some days, you can’t eat rice, but you can eat rye. No mustard seeds, but groundnuts are ok. Saboodana and rajgira is always ok. Milk and its products maybe, maybe not, depends on which god’s promise you are depending on to resolve some self-created problem. Same with sour foods. You can cook chicken in this vessel but not that one…” He added that he didn’t blame Bai Goanna’s gora friend’s inability to understand her food habits, more so when she’s ok with wheat rotis on some days, but avoids bread altogether because it contains yeast.

“But yeast isn’t non-vegetarian” doesn’t make sense to her. Bai Goanna believes mushrooms and masoor dal, too, fall in the non-fasting category, though she isn’t sure why.

“Let’s do relay-fasting,” Shri Husband suggested to Bai Goanna. “I’ll eat steaks and chops on the day you eat aloo-parathas and when I eat chana-puri, you eat chonnak-prawns, what say?”

I took Bai Goanna’s side: “If it’s her food preference, so be it. Let her turn Jain vegetarian if she wants to. She can have Jain-Mughlai then.”

“Akbar, Jehangir and their kith and cooks wouldn’t understand the term. Jain-Mughlai indeed.”

A thought struck me. I stared at Bai Goanna: “No garlic, onions, carrots, radish or potatoes? What then will you eat?”              

               First, she started off by having a shelf for herself in the fridge. We couldn’t put any dabba/vessel with a hint of chicken/fish/meat/egg on that shelf. Had we the money, she would have asked for a separate choola/kitchen/house.

Then followed the interesting part. She downloaded and learnt from friends recipes which were ‘strict’ vegetarian. To our table came the Gujerati daal-dhokli, a pulse stew with strips of boiled dough in it, which she labelled ‘Indian lasagne’, quite different from the yellow snack, dhokla. Lightly sautéed okra stuffed with spiced besan. The white, light kadhi made of stabilized curd eaten with several kinds of easy on the stomach khichdis. Sweet and sour red-pumpkin dishes from the heartland of the country. South Indian savoury goodies flavoured with sesame seeds.

From strict vegetarian Bai Goanna was turning pure vegetarian. Or the other way around, I don’t know the difference. Then she became shudha pure vegetarian, something called saatvik (I won’t bother to explain this concept, because unless you’re a wannabe spiritually evolved person, it will take more than 1000 words to explain and that’s beyond what this column allows). So curds (but not buttermilk) and cheeses were scratched out of grocery lists. From within the plant kingdom, after excluding fungi and underground growths, she kept out of her diet aubergines and other wicked, tamasik, rajasik stuff (won’t expand on the meanings for reason given above). Bai Goanna was convinced she would become patient, kind, observant, energetic, with good humour and great health. Diets do that, even modern science agrees, Shri Husband pointed out after reading an article.

Bai Goanna next gave up eating anything too sour, too bitter, too sweet, too spicy and ate only when hungry… which was hourly, for she wouldn’t eat more than quarter of her stomach’s volume and the fresh, matka-cooled water that filled the remaining three-fourths didn’t keep away the pangs for over 60 minutes.

Interestingly, the fasting habit has stretched from fasting and fasting through Lent, fasting and feasting through Ramadan and fasting some more in Shravan. There are medicines and breathing/meditating techniques that help curb appetite (for food, may I clarify) and some asanas, too. Bai Goanna’s trying them all out. After all, nothing like eating less in these times of high prices and thinness still in fashion.

When Bai Goanna told the above mentioned gora that many of her friends were non-vegetarians, the gora assumed we ate no vegetables. We discovered then that the word non-vegetarian was a very Indian one. Only Indians from India or those with a strong Indian connection know what it means.  

Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in