NaBloPoMo 2019: Day 5: Serving Love

Amma had standardized the process of cooking so well that I can’t remember a single instance when there was either a shortage or an excess of food. How can I be so sure? Because “lemon rice” or “chitranna” (which most people make with leftover rice), made only a rare appearance in our house. 

Of course it is quite possible that Amma may have “adjusted” by modifying her portions occasionally and made up the deficit by eating some fruit or kept the leftover rice for herself for the next day. Only much later, when we had all grown up, she gave in to democratically sharing with us anything that was leftover.

Evening coffee and dinner were one of the most delightful times of the day for us. In the morning, everyone would be hurrying and eating breakfast at different times before leaving home. But by evening, everyone would have returned home, and we’d sit in a circle around Amma, who would bring the steel chombu with piping hot coffee, and pour it out into steel tumblers for each of us.

Coffee chombu and tumblers - they're still at home

Chatting about our day, swapping stories and laughing like only little girls can, we munched on the savories Amma had prepared or Appa had bought from some shop (often from Purohit Sweet Mart in Ponda) and sipped the golden-brown brew. How we managed to get authentic south Indian coffee in cha-crazy Goa deserves a blog of its own – wait, I’ve already written about it, and you can read it here. 

For dinner, we girls would lay the plates on the floor in a circle, with glasses of water for each person. Then we'd plonk ourselves down, sitting cross-legged, waiting. Amma would bring and keep all the food and sit down in the center of the circle, and begin serving.

Rice, with a dollop of ghee, came first.

Then came whatever was on the menu for the day – the humble yet delicious parupu (dal) or the aromatic rasam, or the spicy sambar along with some stir-fried vegetable.

This was followed by a practice common in Appa’s family – mixing rice and chutney, or chutney podi or pickle with some oil to lubricate the mixture.

Last came rice and curds that no one could escape eating – you’d be reminded of how not eating curd rice was like killing a cow or a Brahmin (or something like that) to make sure you toed the line. To our young minds then, fear of that sin was more effective than today’s research papers that praise the health benefits of lactobacilli in yogurt!

Only after she had finished serving Appa rice and curd, would Amma serve food into a plate for herself, timing it such that most of us had also almost finished by the time she began to eat. She’d only rarely ask one of us who had finished dinner to serve something for her.

Those dinner-time conversations are still some of the best memories we sisters have. What we talked about has long been forgotten, but the warmth that bonding generated has sustained through the decades, and even when we meet today, like in those days, Appa has to admonish us to stop talking, and get up and wash our hands and plates, because it’s nearing 11 pm!

Writing this post, I’m struck by how well Amma nourished and nurtured her family. She “Cooked food and served Love” always, far before it became the tagline for Bharat Gas. Indeed, the love she lavished on us was the calm center around which all our lives pivoted.