Of Nannamma and 2-minute Noodles
In my earliest memories, I see her behind the stove, moving with grace and efficiency. She would be standing strong, her shiny silver hair with coconut oil, tied in a neat bun, her soft cotton sari tucked around her waist, and a big red bindi at the center of her forehead, right below the middle partition of her hair, the small bump in her forehead, and her ever intoxicating laugh.
My Nannamma (Telugu for paternal grandmother), was the primary caregiver for my cousins and me. In my case, she was my first caregiver. My parents worked very hard and had to be away from home. Long before TGIF was a cool phrase, the six-year-old me had labeled Fridays as ‘Mummy-Day’ because Mother Ramavarapu would come home to spend the weekend with me. Though I looked forward to Fridays, it was Nannamma who greeted me every weekday after school with the aroma from her kitchen.
Food was very important to Nannamma — the one that did not just satisfy hunger, but your soul. And in our small garden, she grew her soul. She had a green thumb, everyone said. Anything she planted, grew up fast and healthy as if she were breathing life in them merely by her touch. She raised papaya, banana, roses and hibiscus, curry leaves, pansies, jasmine, neem, and most prized, the gongura. For a Telugu household, gongura is no less than a passion. Gongura is from the same genera as Hibiscus, and ours was a beautiful, red-stemmed plant. When I was 7–8 years old, Nannamma showed me how to pluck gongura leaves from the plant which stood as tall as me. She said, “break the leaves from its base and never bother the leaves on top. You should always let them grow.” For festivals, she would cut pieces of banana leaves, oil them to make obattus. That fresh lime for our poha came from the lemon plant she planted. Every morning, my cousins and I plucked flowers for her puja from the garden.
Nannamma was a trained gardener. While feeding us our lunch of Pappu-Annam (boiled and mashed daal, mixed with rice) with a copious amount of ghee, she would tell us how she and her 10 brothers and sisters had designated gardens when she was a girl. “We just got rice and daal from the market,” she said. Everything else needed — for food, decorations, and puja — all were grown in the gardens. But her favorite would be the mango trees she and her siblings planted. There were several varieties of mangoes: totapari, langda, banganpalli or safeda, neelam, imam pasand, dasheri and so many more. Every summer, as a young girl, she would put a swing on her mango tree and enjoy the fruit. “You kids have not tasted the mangoes as I have”, she would say proudly. However, her legacy of summer swing and mangoes continued well through my childhood.
Nannamma was an exceptionally strong woman, both, physically and mentally. She taught herself to read and write so that she can teach her children because education was so important to her. She was brilliant at math, a trait that her children and grandchildren have learned from her. A connoisseur of cricket, an avid reader, an eager traveler, but above all, a phenomenally empathetic woman. My grandmother, along with my mother has instilled the idea of femininity — grace with a brilliant mind. Nannamma would often say, “it is all because of the good food we ate as kids that I am still so strong.” I believed her and often thought; was the food she ate sweeter? Did she also get excited to see potato curry her mother prepared for lunch, like me? Will this food I eat makes me as strong as her? Will I ever grow up to have strong arms like her? Will I look as beautiful as she does in her cotton saris, red bindi, and hair tied in a bun? Can I even dare to become like her?
Nannamma was a phenomenal cook and she knew how to use every part of the vegetable. Nothing ever went to waste. Gourd peels were nicely collected and made into chutneys. Seeds from bitter gourds and pumpkins were collected, sundried, and fried for an evening snack. The stems of leafy greens, onion peels, and other vegetable refuse were collected to put into the garden to compost. And just like that, without ever telling me, she taught me the greatest lesson of life — respect the earth and everything that comes from her.
Her relationship with food permeated to form new relationships. She was friends with all the vegetable sellers who came to our house every other afternoon. They would call out her name in a peculiar tone, “Ae Ma gou! Sabji liben?” (O Mother! Will you take some vegetables?) My grandmother would get some fresh produce from them. Sometimes, she would offer them tea and snacks and listen to their stories, exchange recipes, and talk about the wild leafy greens, the vegetable vendors would introduce her to. While they were busy, my cousins and I would steal some green peas or carrots from their baskets. My grandmother would offer to pay, and sometimes they would say, “It’s ok Ma. Kids have eaten. Be it your house or mine, doesn’t matter.” It is true, that it takes a village to raise a child, and I owe it to Nannamma that my cousins and I had several villages to fill us with gratitude.
Nannamma showed us how to love others through food. Anyone who visited our house was served food. “It doesn’t matter what you have. But always share what you have,” she would say. On weekends, she would grind enormous batches of batter for idlis. My father and four aunts would wake up in the wee hours of the morning to assist her. By 7:00 AM, the piping hot idlis, tangy sambar, and coconut chutney would be ready. Mostly it would go for the prayer meetings and donated to the people who come every Sunday at our doorstep for alms. But a fair chunk would end up in our bellies, satiating us with love. It did not matter whether she was cooking for 10 people or 1000. The taste would always be the same — soft idlis that would melt in your mouth and chutneys that make you do that little jiggy when you have tasted something wonderful.
While Nannamma was probably the best in everything she prepared, she always failed to make my then favorite, Maggi noodles. The instructions were as simple as they can get; boil 2 cups of water, put the noodles cake in water, and add the tastemaker. But somehow, Nannamma could never master the art of making Maggi. She said, “When you have so many things that are good for you that you can eat, why do you crave this snake-like food?” But a heart wants what a heart wants. I would see the lunchboxes of cool kids at school who brought Maggi or other noodles regularly. It was cold, lost all its texture, and honestly tasted nothing good. But it was something I desperately wanted, to fit in with the kids in school who sometimes made fun of the tangy pickles and dosa in the form of tiny pancakes which gave me the name ‘attu-Smrity’* that lasted till middle school. I wanted to be ‘normal’ and have a ‘normal’ lunchbox, with Maggi. It did not matter how much effort that Nannamma had taken for preparing that fermented rice-batter bite-size dosa in the shape of planets and lovingly say, “I have put Sooraj-ka-pariwaar (family of the Sun) in your lunchbox, today.” Nothing mattered because all I wished was to be like everyone else, with Maggi in my lunchbox. On some rare occasions, we would be allowed to have Maggi, and my cousins and I would carefully divide it amongst us so that each of us got an equal share. Nannamma would never be pleased with us eating Maggi and was very vocal about her disapproval.
It is only now that I realize her vehement disapproval of instant ramen. Maggi was not just another snack or junk food she disapproved of, rather, it was the value attached to it. Opting a quick, easy, and out of packet food made her cooking irrelevant and redundant. While she gave the lack of nutritional value as her primary argument, it was our desperation to leave the south Indian identity to adopt one of the masses that bothered her the most. She tried several times, to teach my cousins and me to read and write Telugu or appreciate the bliss of hot lemon rice on a cold cloudy morning. But we learned English in school**, spoke Hindi around the house, and wore the little knowledge of Telugu as a badge of honor. I abhorred the idea of introducing myself as Smrity Ramavarapu and for years, went around saying, “My name is Smrity Rao”. Though not entirely wrong, this was not the identity that my parents and my Nannamma gave me during my baalsaara (Telugu naming ceremony).
The question around ‘identity’ only comes to the surface when the ‘identity’ is disturbed. And in our case, this disturbance came in the garbs of ‘inclusion’. Food forms the basis of collective identity and collective belonging. However, by the same token, food can be the basis of otherness. Claude Fischler, French sociologist, and anthropologist, specializing on food habits, writes, “Human beings mark their membership of a culture or a group by asserting the specificity of what they eat, or more precisely — but it amounts to the same thing — by defining the otherness, the difference of others. Endless examples can be found to illustrate the fact that we define a people or a human group by what it eats or is imagined eating (which generally arouses our irony or disgust): for the French, the Italians are “Macaronis”, the English “Roastbeefs” and the Belgians “chip-eaters”; for the English, the French are “Frogs”; the Americans call the Germans “Krauts”, and so on. Within the same culture, a group often defines the neighboring group as “…-eaters”.
Coming out of Nannamma’s kitchen, into the modern, industrialized, and fast-changing world, I was just an ‘eater’, a pure consumer for whom the production, history, and origins of food did not matter. My choice of food was packaged, prepared before it arrived at my doorstep, at a factory that had no knowledge of my existence. My noodles looked like everyone else’s: cold, consistent in flavor, smell, and texture, and without any soul. My noodles were, what Fischler would call it, an ‘unidentified edible object’. When I do not identify the food I eat, what my Nannamma said, is for the soul, how does it transform me? In the dynamism of social, cultural, and economic aspects of food systems, how do I begin to situate myself in relation to space?
I am not dramatizing to say, two-minute noodles completely eroded my identity. No. In fact, it gave me a social cushion to enter the globalized world we suddenly found ourselves in and after 25 years, critique it. It gave me a flavor and experience that generations have shared and when I say Maggi, one knows what we are talking about. Maggi is a new identity. We know the midnight hunger pangs were satiated by it, cheap college dates would be sharing a cheese Maggi, the craving for its spicy flavor on a rainy day, or just a plate to share while bunking a class. Maggi was the personality in several moments and memories. However, it is not the identity passed down from generations and the identity attached to instant ramen is as ephemeral and replaceable as its demand in the market.
My grandmother’s kitchen is still hers, though she passed away six years ago. I say it is her kitchen even though it is Mother Ramavarapu who prepares all my favorite meals because I know her soul never left that place. Though she was paralyzed for the last 11 years of her life, she still tried to make hot rice for me and my brother, until it was too much pain. She would still clean spinach, peel the peas with her one working hand. She would praise our sub-par cooking as if they were made by a Michelin star chef. She knew that we show our love through food too, just like she taught us.
With her passing, there is no swing. No more vegetable sellers or their stories. But her lemon tree still branches out next to her kitchen. Her neem tree still blooms, on which two crows caw every day. Someday, I will put a swing for my children, and sit under the warmth of the summer sun. I will tell them the stories of a phenomenal feminist who raised me, my Nannamma.
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Fischler, C. (1988) ‘Food, Self and Identity’, Social Science Information, 27, pp. 275–293. doi: : 10.1177/053901888027002005.
*Attu roughly mean thin pancakes made from dosa batter.
** Rather tried to. My school, though an English-medium had teachers speak in Hindi in classes except for English. As a result, many of us could not speak in English very well but could read and write very well, quote Shakespear and Byron in our sleep. A story for the next time