The Cook

Our maharaj was skinny as a beedi, and just as foul-smelling as the crude, local cigarette, an opinion based on the rare times I dared to venture close to him. Maharaj is the name given to a cook. Not to be confused with the royal Maharaja, who would’ve never stepped into a kitchen, let alone cook in it. He was also a little delusional, or at least confused with the similarity of his name and acted in an arrogant, highhanded manner. Or maybe it was because he was a Brahmin and we were of the lower caste, being Vaishyas. He sat on a rectangular, raised platform in the kitchen and from there, he lorded it over us, his Brahmin chest bare except for the obligatory janoi, the thread denoting his higher caste.

The caste system having about as much meaning to a six-year old, as the Bhagvat has to a buffalo, I tapped him once on the shoulder. He turned an apoplexy red, if you could distinguish any colors on his black face, and having been abominably polluted, ran like a screaming banshee to have a bath. Had I been a little older and braver, I would’ve kicked his dhoti-ed ass and reminded him that this lower caste was paying his salary. Mostly, I would have loved to chop off his little pigtail sticking out of the dome of his otherwise shaved head.

We should’ve kicked him out for other reasons. It was no oddity that my weight stayed equivalent to a ten year old, all the way through my teens. He was an awful cook. My poor Ba fumed and grumbled about the food. A great cook herself, she chafed at the bit to go into the kitchen and take over, except, being too old, no one would allow her. "Muo bemano!" she would rail. The vegetables were watery and tasteless, the daal the same consistency as osaman (a vile concoction if there ever was one), and just as unsavory. The lentils congealed at the bottom of the vadki, like sludge at the bottom of a stagnant cesspool. I noticed that Varsha never had complaints about the daal, partly because it made a good hiding place for the peas she never ate. Other times, she squished the peas under the vadki and the times she didn’t, they would unceremoniously be dumped on my thali. The haldi-colored, watery part floated on top, with bits of mustard seeds, kothmir and slivers of coconut.

Coconut. Now here is something that should never have been discovered. Every temple we entered, every pooja we went to, we were given little pieces of copra as prasad. Hours after leaving the temple, the nasty piece of coconut, now reduced to fibrous, tasteless pabulum, and like a wad of tobacco, would be uncomfortably ensconced in my cheek, awaiting a decision – swallow or spit. Swallowing a big chunk like that involved the hazard of choking to death. Spitting it out meant insulting god, a big sin, and wasn’t I punished enough with having to eat the maharaj’s food day in and day out?

The rest of his culinary repertoire was just as inedible and it was just as well that we spent a lot of our time down the road, at White House, where the cook used oil, chilies and salt with reckless abandon. The food was to die for ... and I mean to really die for ... probably leading to the familial problems of hypertension, elevated cholesterol, clogged arteries, and ultimately to numerous heart attacks.