Biting through the Skin

An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland

By NINA MUKERJEE FURSTENAU

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Nina Mukerjee Furstenau
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-185-1

Contents

Author’s Note……………………………………………………..xiPrologue………………………………………………………….xiii1. Transformation………………………………………………….12. Two Brides……………………………………………………..153. Little India……………………………………………………224. Journey………………………………………………………..315. Table Grace…………………………………………………….426. Small Things Satisfied…………………………………………..497. Indian Breads…………………………………………………..538. Grand Lake Menu for a Guru……………………………………….599. An Indian Kitchen in Kansas………………………………………6810. Attic Fans and Flying Typewriters………………………………..7711. Mother Tongue………………………………………………….8212. On the Road with Amiya and Rani………………………………….9213. All Our Tupperware Is Stained with Turmeric……………………….10014. Strength of a Nation……………………………………………10515. Street Foods…………………………………………………..11416. Six Recipe Cards, a Wing and a Prayer, Circa 1984………………….12117. Bishshwayya……………………………………………………13418. A (Not So) Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Didu’s House………….14619. Pop Culture India………………………………………………153Acknowledgments……………………………………………………165Recipe Index………………………………………………………167

CHAPTER 1

Transformation

There is something to be done at this season. Something to be done.I tap my pencil on the island counter and look outside my kitchenwindow at rolling Missouri farmland, brittle-brown and orange asit always is at this time of year. The festival of Bijoya Dashami means goodwishes need to be passed on to family elders and friends; I know it. But becausethis festival day occurs on the tenth day after the first new moon of autumn,a day highlighted on the cycle of the Bengali calendar but not on mine withthe cute photos of dogs, the dates change within the season each year. I amnever quite sure when the calls to the elders should be made, and there is noone to remind me here in the county of Howard, in the state of Missouri, inthe United States.

In the Indian state of Bengal, my family’s homeland, Durga Puja marksdays of celebration when the goddess Durga, deliverer of dangers includingthose of selfishness, jealousy, prejudice, hatred, anger, and ego, visits each year,and the day she departs, Bijoya Dashami, is for inclusion, for eating well withothers, for the blowing of conch shells and the scent of food. Each autumn,when the weighted air of the summer monsoon rains lifts, three separategoddess festivals occur: Durga first, then Lakshmi, goddess of wealth andprosperity, feminine beauty and grace, and then Kali, fearsome destroyer.These three pujas are celebrated by various food-related activities: for Durga,Bengalis start by fasting one day, eating simple vegetarian dishes like tastyand comforting aloo dam and luchi the second day, and then switching tosucculent meat curries on the third day. Day four is the day for sweets tobe given and received, among them my favorite sandesh and the seeminglyfancier rosogolla, bobbing in syrup. Elders are offered pronam, or respects,men give each other three hugs—right side, left side, then right again—andchildren receive blessings. Hopeful thoughts turn to peace and prosperity. Onthe final night, the carefully crafted figures of Durga, sometimes made of clay,sometimes of wood or other materials, almost always painted and dressedartistically, which have been set about on pandals during the puja, are sent ontheir way in the rite of bhashan by being immersed in nearby waterways. Thecommunity reconnects with friends and loved ones in public and expansivecelebration. It is the perfect time for it: the autumn in Bengal is for rejoicing.The monsoon is finished, the hills become a mixture of gold and green, andrice ripens in the fields ready for harvest.

But mine is an American tale.

It was impossible for my parents, with such joyful and poignant memories,to re-create these times in America’s heartland. And so it was small details thatwere weighty in Kansas, where I grew up. My mother fussed about correctlypreparing the foods, how many dishes would be served, what clothes I wouldwear. There were no grand celebrations to attend that would have tempered thisfocus and made it preliminary and ultimately unimportant to the event. Holyfestivals were done behind closed doors in my childhood; they were privateaffairs where our attic fan blew away cooking aromas before guests arrived.Perhaps because I had never seen an autumn in India or felt the air lift andlighten after the monsoon season, the idea of rejoicing didn’t occur to me.

This autumn another festival season comes in serial celebrations: days ofcelebrating Durga, then Lakshmi at the autumn full moon, then Kali fourteendays later on the new moon, one after another. The pujas bring another chancefor me to connect to this vast and rich history of my family. I mark my calendaron the days that the Indian Association in a nearby larger town is hostingevents in honor of the goddesses. Then I note that a service club I belong tois having its annual ham and bean dinner to raise funds for scholarships onone of the puja days. I am really needed as a dishwasher. Not to worry, thereare two other Indian events. But an interview for Savor Missouri, a regionalfood and wine book I am completing, simply must be on one of those otherdays, and the interview is in a town four hours away, necessitating an overnightstay. Durga, deliverer of dangers, and Lakshmi, goddess of wealth andprosperity, feminine beauty and grace, are yet again set aside. Fearsome Kali,whom you really don’t want to rouse, frowns.

Dishwashing duties in the kitchen of Fayette Middle School supercede Durga?Kali, for goodness’ sake? Generations of my Bengali family, of Mukerjees,of Banerjis, and others, in a long, friendly grouping smile sadly and quizzicallyat me from Indian antiquity. That’s it? I picture them saying. And I swear I seemy maternal great-grandmother, Renuka, cross her arms and tap her foot. Andthe old man just over there, Rup Chand, my father’s grandfather, lifts his palmsup in amazement and then sits down heavily, shaking his head.

It gets worse. The day of the festival, I stand on a rubber mat in the cafeteriakitchen of Fayette Middle School and I realize not one person in this groupof friends knows I am missing such an important Indian event. When I turnquickly in my tennis shoes, a sharp squeaking emanates across the kitchen,but the twenty or so other women hard at work stirring beans or makingcorn bread do not notice. My wet rubber gloves are yellow, and the stainlesssteel spray nozzle runs amok only occasionally when I fumble. My denimapron has damp splotches where the superheated water bounced off a bowland caught me in the stomach. If I had been at the puja, I would have beenin a sari, probably my pale celery-green silk with the delicate ivory borderembroidered with gold, and my feet would have been bare. The silk wouldhave flowed around my legs and made a rustling noise as I sat cross-leggedin the temple hall. I have known these ham and bean ladies seventeen years,yet I have kept India, and a good half of who I am, a secret.

Inside my small pocket of culture, I squelch water beneath my feet in amiddle school kitchen while yearning to visit a temple. It has taken my lifetimeto reach this impasse.

In the 1960s, my hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas, rich in its own story ofassimilation, had no particular interest in differences. There I was playingsoftball, riding my ten-speed, and going to the Dairy Queen, eyes bright,fingers sticky, all the while losing my identity. Securely hidden behind ourfront door, however, India could be found in the aroma in the air, the taste ofcardamom, the brush of my mother’s silk sari, and the cadence of my father’sspeech. In pre–long-grain rice America, eating was cause for inquiry, and sowe kept our traditional foods private. If a friend came over, soda and chipswere provided. If a meal was called for, then burgers it was. My lunch at schoolmay have consisted of peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese or tuna, justlike Beth’s or LuAnn’s or Kathy’s, but not dinner, and it was during five o’clockmeals around a shellacked wooden table in Kansas that I found passion.

India held court around Mom’s table. The impact of warm spice aromas,the taste of bitter gourd and cooling yogurt, signaled a cultural boundary Icould cross even with my American upbringing. Flavor and taste were myinheritance. Though I lost the dress, the ease of language, and the rituals ofIndia, the foods of the subcontinent were ever there. Simple cauliflower andpotato bhaji; thin jhol curries, redolent of cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves,eaten with a bit of aromatic rice; warm luchis rolled up around a little sugar,all so satisfying. Like many American immigrants, I held my home cultureclose to the vest, near the heart. I did not share well then. Not sharing was arecipe for sorting people who did or did not want to know; a recipe for privateversus public foods; for a vastly different world outside our front door.In many ways, my family wanted to be ordinary in Kansas, yet maintainingour heritage meant we were not even close. Half my world became secret.Necessitating this secrecy was a grand move.

In the early days of a 1964 Chicago summer, a small moment occurred. Myfamily, surrounded by boxes and bags packed with all manner of possessions,trundled themselves off to Kansas from the Windy City, the second suchmove in a year. I don’t know if there were kitchen utensils involved, nor amI sure of particular furnishings that were carted into the trailer, but withinthe clothing boxes saris were carefully folded so as not to form odd creases,probably with the silks separated from the cottons. I feel certain that two redchildren’s coats with pointy hoods trimmed in white fluff were pressed downinto cardboard by my mother, and I know that a sled emerged Kansas-side,so it must have made the cut.

After wending through Illinois, my father merged onto I-69 South in Kansas.My parents did not snack in the car, that New World lack of respect forexpensive cars not imaginable to them. They stopped, as they almost alwaysdid in later years, at the Pleasanton hamburger joint north of town near therailroad tracks for chocolate-vanilla ice-cream twists. A full hour and a halfsouth of Kansas City, they came upon the valley of Fort Scott. The land, flatfor miles, dipped slightly and broadly there, visible only with a squint and atilt of the head, and there was a surprising amount of vegetation, deciduousand leafy, along fencerows and in woody copses.

It was a long drive and they may not have seen the valley. My mother, busycomforting my brother, Sandeep, and me, and my father, preoccupied by thetwo-lane road, would not have noticed anything dramatic. The valley becamemore perceptible to us over time as we lived in southeast Kansas, especiallyafter a tornado season or two when twisters were noted for sailing over lowspots in the land.

Whatever they saw is specifically lost to those moments in the car. Theywere six months fresh from India. Chicago, their first home in the UnitedStates, had proven too cold, too large and impersonal, though full of pocketsof Indian immigrants around the city: groups that socialized, raisedchildren with common ideals, and conducted religious festivals together.They traded that comfort for a small Kansas town with almost no Americanminorities and absolutely no other Indians until years later. My mother wastwenty-two and my father thirty-five. As we came into Pittsburg, Kansas, atown of twenty thousand people nearly a thousand miles south and west ofthe better-known Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, there was a cemetery neatlyplotted on the right.

India was at war with China along its Himalayan border when my parentsleft Asia in 1963. More of India’s resources were poured into defense. Myfather felt stifled there, like there were barriers to rising professionals, notsupport. He watched men in his village ride their bicycles to work, ties flappingagainst white button-up shirts. A bike seemed a paltry reward for hard workto a young man who had heard about the Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, andBuicks in the United States. More could be achieved —television and wordof mouth told him so.

My parents arrived in North America to find agitation here, too. The UnitedStates was facing rising troubles in Vietnam, and Martin Luther King haddelivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in response to civil rights issues inAugust. The US postal service had issued zip codes for the first time to implementsome order, lava lamps and touch-tone phones had been launched, anda loaf of bread was twenty-two cents. When my parents purchased a television,a cheery Dick Van Dyke was on weekly. Just thirty days after arrivingin Chicago, Mom walked into the lobby of the hotel where my parents stayedbefore finding their first home on US soil and noticed a gathering crowd. TheChicago passersby and hotel workers jostled for a view around a television setas the news broke: Kennedy shot in Dallas, November 22. Eyes wide, Mombreathed slowly and watched the crowd react—stunned disbelief and worry.

My parents cared about these things. Their lives, encased in the little carheaded south toward southeast Kansas a few months later, echoed on anotherscale the seismic changes of country. My father’s father was an accountantin Hazaribagh, a small town (even with a population of over one hundredthousand people, fourteen tigers, twenty-five panthers, and four hundredsambar deer in residence in the nearby national park, it did not get “city”status in India) in what is now the state of Jharkhand, India, and came fromgenerations of Mukerjees there. My mother came from the Banerji line, mostrecently of Ranchi, a larger town a couple of hours away over rough roads.My parents came from good families and inherited status, and they left allthat behind for the promise of a life built on what they did with their ownhands—a bigger world than what India offered in the early 1960s. My dad wasone of many Indian men who left the country that decade in droves, the Asianbrain drain. There was no urgency in their lives, no knifepoint of decisionother than that of youth, pressing intelligence, and drive. The foods, familyconnections, and familiar ease of their own cultural and spiritual life trailedmy parents like diminishing waves, and they may not have known for yearswhat was in their wake. They had a vested interest now in this new land andin the belief that they had made the right choice.

Perhaps it was disconcerting for my parents to hear the bickering of politiciansand the unhappiness of a culture in flux when they had just given upso much to come to the United States, but I think it also energized them.Here they could participate, have opinions, weigh in. The same could be saidin India, but this was the New World. The old one was stagnant. My fatherwatched the nightly news at 5:30 P.M. with the express purpose of having anopinion to discuss with his coworkers at McNally Engineering Company thenext day. Being informed equaled nationhood.

But nothing in my life of play and preschool passed judgment. I was simplythere, coming back to myself again and again. The food of India was my tetherto heritage. My mother kneaded whole wheat flat bread, roti, on our kitchencounter and mixed rice with yogurt for my breakfast. Flour dusted her handsas she pulled the dough into small balls from the larger lump, as she palmedthose balls into smoothness before using the rolling pin to make the requiredthin rounds, ready for the hot, flat cast-iron pan on the stove. Lunch was oftendal and a vegetable. She mashed the simple meals and I pumped my chubbyfists and swallowed. She dusted her fingers free of wheat flour into cottonkitchen towels, gathered her fingers to her thumb and helped me. And since Icarried my world with me, my surroundings had no influence except to offerup an alphabet block or a blue ball. To offer up a familiar texture of ceiling asI went down for a nap. There was no comfort or theology outside myself. If Iwas surprised to find myself in the basement of a southeast Kansas preschoolat Pittsburg State College, it was by the capriciousness of the outside humanworld, not my own within.

Long before I began reclaiming the food story of my grandmothers, I bentforward, fingertips outstretched, and snared a Tootsie Roll off the asphalt atthe Pittsburg, Kansas, homecoming parade. Because I was young, not yetthree feet tall, I was at the front of the parade crowd. Rising up from the candygrab, I could see the 4-H club and their horses coming. The wind flipped thebrims of the riders’ cowboy hats, the girls raising their hands to keep themin place, the boys just tipping down their chins. The glistening coats of thehorses rippled in the sun. Their legs looked enormous and their hooves madehollow clopping noises on the pavement, muffled once the Pittsburg HighSchool Marching Dragons started up behind them. Eyeing the horses, thepom-pom girls holding the band banner marched in place trying to create alarger gap. A little backwash of clarinets and flutes crowded the trombonesand trumpets. The drummers in the back rows started to step higher. Theprecision of the lines warped until the director walking alongside signaledthe row leaders. It could have been a pileup with a less skilled band.

In front of me, Shriner clowns in tall hats maneuvered their big-wheeltricycles so that by turning the handles hard, they kept from grazing toesat the edge of the parade. They lifted their knees, covered in ballooning yellowfabric, almost to their chins before pushing downward to the rhythm ofsqueaking pedals. Other children darted out, quick and sure, and nabbedwrapped candy thrown on the pavement. My father would later become aShriner, and though he never rode the asphalt on a trike, he did many thingsto raise funds for Shriner burn hospitals around the country. He emergedfrom Harzaribagh in Bihar, India, the son of Dwijen Nath Mukerjee, an accountantfor the government of Kashmir and for the military in World WarI, and Indu Banerji of Kolkata, to mix with Shriners in Kansas. Years later, mymother would rise in the ladies auxiliary of the Shrine, Daughters of the Nile,to be Queen of the Nile. For her crowning event, she had all the ladies wearIndian saris instead of evening gowns. She had me and my teenage friendsmodel Indian selwar kamis in a runway walk on a stage that same evening.India emerged that night but many might have mistaken it for a variation onthe Shriner use of symbols of Eastern desert kingdoms. It was thrilling andmysterious and all wrapped up in the clothing of one evening event. Mostly,though, unlike many immigrants in American cities who socialized mainlywith others also displaced from homelands a world away, my parents madea conscious effort to be in this land. They tackled moving to a small Kansastown with verve and a sense of adventure.

My father had met Ed McNally in India when Ed was checking on the Indianbranch of his Kansas engineering firm and foundry. McNally’s companydid coal systems engineering and plant design. By family account, Ed offeredmy father a spot in Kansas if he should ever be interested in living in a smalltown in the United States. At the time, Baba worked for a large internationalengineering firm based in Chicago. After one winter in Chicago, though, usedto warmer climes as well as a dense and enveloping community of peopleinvolved in their lives, my parents chose to move.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Biting through the Skin by NINA MUKERJEE FURSTENAU. Copyright © 2013 Nina Mukerjee Furstenau. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS.
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