In her short autobiographical article Indian takeout: Bringing the flavors of Calcutta to Rhode Island in a suitcase author Jhumpa Lahri calls herself “the daughter of former pirates.” An adventurous allusion built around trips planned to Calcutta, situated in the lost and distant ‘homeland.’ The comparison provoking the image of a treasure hunt, the family equipped with a treasure chest the Food Suitcase, would make the long journey to Calcutta where her parents got to delight in the food of their childhood; a literal treasure trove for the nostalgic diaspora. 

“As soon as he hit Indian soil, my father began devouring two or three yellow skinned mangoes a day, sucking their pits lovingly smooth. My mother breakfasted shamelessly on sticky orange sweets called jalebis. It was easy to succumb. I insisted on accompanying each of my meals with the yogurt sold at confectioners in red clay cups, their lids made of paper, and my sister was drawn to Moghlai parathas: flatbread folded, omelette-style, over mincemeat and egg.” 

There was something for everyone to enjoy. As the time for the end of the stay approached the focus would shift to shopping and that is where the Food Suitcase came handy. Food bought by the kilo in the bazaar after rigorous haggling would be packed meticulously by her father who now faced a sudden transformation, from a pirate to a magician and along with him the Food Suitcase transformed into a magicians chest, with enough room for the whole bazaar to fit. The return from India, was punctuated by the presence of the Food Suitcase. The first meal after the return would be a modest affair, “that first meal was never an occasion to celebrate but rather to mourn, for the people and the city we had, once again, left behind.” The suitcase would be untied and “a few pappadums quickly fried and a drop of mustard oil drizzled over the potatoes would convert our survivalist meal into a delicacy. It was enough, that first lonely evening, not only to satiate our hunger but to make Calcutta seem not so far away.” Food as described here was not only used as a symbol for connection with Calcutta but as a tangible part of identity. Certain foods only grow in certain parts of the world, adding weight to the soil back ‘home.’ The powerful image found in one of the popular hindi songs in the movie ‘Upkaar’ released in the year 1967, “O mere desh ki dharti sona ugle-ugle heere moti, o mere desh ki dharti.” Food from the homeland perhaps held even more importance for her family than the ‘heere moti.’

This ‘desh ki dharti’ held rise to the lawful looting of the Calcutta bazaar as it supplied an emotional anchor for the immigrant subject, to bring a piece of the ‘all to warm and welcoming past’ out into the distanced landscape of Rhode island. Providing a sense of rootedness in the foreign land. The role food adopts as an emotional anchor is what makes it become part of a larger fictionalized identity. Jhumpa is of course aware of the difference between the fictions her parents were creating for themselves and their children versus the reality of the migration. How the latter is distorted through these fictions, “one year my grandmother secretly tucked parvals, a vaguely squash like vegetable, into the Food Suitcase. My mother wept when she found them.” Anita Mathur in the first chapter of her book Culinary fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, notes how “ nostalgia is always already predetermined, indeed overdetermined, in scripting immigrant attachment to the past.” Continuing the thought she talks about two fundamental “truths” of the immigrant condition; finding solace in the ‘idealised’ past and recognising said idealization as a fiction determined by excess nostalgia. Similarly Salman Rushdie in his essay Imaginary Homelands speculates the plight of a diasporic writer, “ It may be that when the indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect the world he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.” These broken mirrors seem to provoke the image of distortion but in fact do the opposite, “Mirrors are fragile objects capable of rendering truths as well as illusions…they are products of human labour and they reflect and render, but only that which human beings put in front of them, for a duration of time, the mirror does not choose for itself”(Aijaz Ahmad, “the mirror of urdu”). When an unbroken mirror could more easily be used to distort reality, perhaps a broken one could restore it. 

It is through broken mirrors that I plan to examine a short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies and Brij Lal’s The tamarind tree. Both works carry a culinary discourse perhaps heavier than once imagined. I started the paper by discussing Jhumpa’s autobiographical article which led me to believe that the past left behind by immigrants is perhaps colored over with bright illuminations to deal with the current dislocation. Where the present moment or surroundings fall short of the delicacies found in Calcutta. Broken mirrors act as peeping holes into the imagined past. The food suitcase comes in handy as a tool to keep some parts of it alive. Following this, I will attempt to look at themes of desire, nostalgia and memory all through the lense of characters who find a piece of their identity stuck to the bottom of their palette. I will be talking about people for whom memory is not a constant flow of images and connections but a distorted yet recreating force. Characters unsure of their own connection with “home,” what it stands for and where it is found. Jhumpa uses food as a way to display the ‘deterioration of family relationships,’ ‘culture and community,’ through the displacement of her characters from India to America, most evident in the stories titled ‘A temporary matter,’ ‘Mrs Sen’ and ‘When Mr Pirzada comes to dine’ which I’ll be looking at in a short while. While Brij Lal’s narrative holds up a different light to the idea of community and family, where crossing the ‘kala pani’ has broken more boundaries of social order than one, showcasing a narrative where the choice of migration could not always be called a voluntary one.

The meaning of the word ‘diaspora’ comes from the practice of the scattering of seeds, watching them take root in foreign soil. Does the mango carry its innate mango-ness 12,453 kms away from its ‘home?’ Perhaps not, which is why her father slurps on them only in Calcutta. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s work titled ‘A Temporary matter,’ we discover a broken marriage between Shoba and Shukumar. There is an emphasis we find on the fact that despite still living together they never eat nor cook together. Food as a commonplace activity, eating together as a family for at least one meal a day is what unites many South Asian families. In this house however, it isn’t until a notice from repair workers arrives informing the couple that their power will be cut for an hour every night which forces them to eat together by candlelight. “Tonight with no lights they would have to eat together. For months now they’d serve themselves from the stove, and he’d taken his plate into his study, letting the meal grow cold on his desk before shoving it into his mouth without pause, while Shoba took her plate to the living room and watched game shows or proofread files with her arsenal of colored pencils at hand”. Jhumpa highlights how American, modern relationships often fall out due to lack of shared enjoyment of food, especially the lack of family dinners. The dinner table is a space for an intimate ritual performed by families throughout India, where from the oldest to the youngest everyone would gather to share in a meal. Eating being the primary function our bodies need to survive, would often act as a bonding ritual. The author mentions how the preparation of food in the story is also a measure of one’s affection. Shukumar cooks dinners for his wife throughout the one week power shortage and the enforced proximity brings them closer together. Shoba comes earlier than usual from work while Shukumar goes to the market to buy groceries for their shared and special meals. He shows remarkable concern for his wife’s health in making these dinners, “if it weren’t for him…Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for dinner.” He remembers how for their first anniversary it was Shoba who made him a ten course meal, while for their latest anniversary she had gotten him a sweater. It is clear he prefers the former precisely because of the time and effort a meal takes and the affection transferred through it is beyond anything material. 

In “Mrs Sen’s,” dining again plays a key role. She spends her hours toiling away in the kitchen to prepare decadent meals for her family and the boy left in her charge.

“He especially enjoyed watching Mrs Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Facing the sharp edge of the blade without ever touching it, she took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash. She split things in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices and shreds. She could peel a potato in seconds.” The blade held its own significance in the Indian context, specially during weddings or large celebrations, “all the neighbourhood women…bring blades just like this one, and they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night.” Lahiri seems to not only lay emphasis on dining and the food culture of the South but also showcases a clear lack of community in America. Mrs Sen now chops her vegetables all alone, with hardly a person to sit and enjoy her food. She insists that the boy’s mother “sit on the sofa, where she is served something to eat: a glass of bright pink yogurt with rose syrup, breaded mince meat with raisins, a bowl of semolina halvah.” This episode speaks to her loneliness and also builds a contrast with Eliot’s mother who does not cook for her son, instead “the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was poured herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn’t hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner.” Not only does Mrs Sen take great pains into cooking food for her family, she also goes to great lengths to acquire it. When the man who runs the fish market calls to tell her how he has a whole fish for her, she is delighted and when her husband won’t go and collect it, she steps out of her comfort zone to take a bus out to the seaside, an unpleasant experience. Nevertheless, she instead drives to the market even though she does not carry a license, it seems the dish is very important to her which is why she takes such a big risk. 

A similar theme is carried out in “When Mr Pirzada comes to dine,” Lilia’s impression of Mr Pirzada is also unique. She associates him with the sweets he always brings her when he comes to dine, “steady stream of honey filled lozenges, raspberry truffle and slender rolls of sour pastilles.” Mr Pirzada also carries a photo in his wallet, his daughters “at a picnic, their braids tied with ribbons , sitting cross legged in a row, eating chicken curry off of banana leaves,” the image speaks to how crucial food is in Indian culture. Lilla’s mother prepares the meals, goes to great lengths to do it, “ from the kitchen my mother brought forth the succession of dishes: lentils with fried onions, green beans with coconut, fish cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce.” Every meal became important and took long hours of work but work her mother seemed to enjoy. So crucial was what should have only been treated as a chore that Lilla’s mother would often complain of their neighbours never dropping by, and how she would hunt through the phone book for Indian surnames to find potential friends, all to find a sense of shared culture, perhaps the only people who would understand the importance of a good home cooked meal would be said Indians. In ‘The migrants table,’ Krishnendu Ray notes, “women do express and maintain their social position in the community through food work. They keep accounts of friends and neighbours who have invited them for dinner and the number of times they have been invited.” All that Lilla’s mother lacked in America. Where food was just food, a means of sustenance rather than what it represented to her diasporic self, an identity. The three narratives all led to the same conclusion; food held communities together. It was the red thread in the rich tapestry that was life they craved back in Calcutta for Jhumpa’s parents. 

Migrations occur for varied reasons but most of all in search for better opportunities, standard of living in the new country. What happens when false promises lead to a wide scale migration? How were people able to survive in a foreign land without daily traditions keeping them grounded? Was there anything beyond survival which these migrants could hope to achieve in the new state? These are questions raised in a remarkable ‘girmitiya’ work by Brij Lal about the experiences of indentured labour working on Fiji plantations. The work is included in a collection of stories We mark your memory : Writings from the descendants of indenture(2018). What’s interesting about The Tamarind tree is that it isn’t simply a metaphor for the communities togetherness but a tangible presence in the life of the narrator’s father and the generations that came before him. Between 1879 and 1916, India under the rule of the British, many Indians were convinced  under false promises to relocate to Fiji as coolie labourers on sugarcane fields owned and controlled by the white ruling powers. A large-scale dislocation across the ‘kala pani,’ not only known by this name because of its horrifying depth but because once on it, you had to cross it, never to look back while your contract lasted. It was a symbol of a break from orderly society, a rupture giving rise to the ambivalence in identity. While the black waters ruptured the faith and traditions of the ones aboard, the tamarind tree came to stand as a “terra sacra” for the labourers. A site of memory for all the future generations of girmitiya until its demise in 1962. The tree, very much like the indentures, was brought over from India, crossing the black waters of ‘lost traditions’ and managed to hold a key position in the community’s new life. The idea of retrospective witness through adoption became a source of linkage for the indentures. Each successive generation inherited the trauma as it inherited the fruit of the tamarind. 

As the term postcolonial suggests not the end of colonialism but the troubling continuity of it in its varied forms. Marianne Hirsch’s idea of ‘postmemory,’ which she describes as “a structure of inter and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience,” close to what the tamarind tree came to symbolize. The fruit of the tree held a special place in the kitchens of South Indians, its fruit flavored many dishes. Tamarind pulp was used to flavor curries and rice; rasam, chigali lollipop, sambar. koddel and even varieties of chai. Not only important for daily cooking but the tree also stood for health benefits; tamarind was used to treat sore throats, ulcers, gonorrhea and acted as a digestive aid. It was through the tree that “people resisted assimilation into the ways of their adopted homeland, by re-enacting archaic customs from a remembered past”(Brij Lal). Crossing of the kala pani was an endpoint to their life in the homeland. The conditions were such that crossing the waters meant leaving their entire existence behind. The tree however was carried over, the fruit it bore created a sense of homeland in a foreign country. Feeding the ‘in-between,’ and awkward sense of self carried along by those aboard the jahaj. They were people caught between tensions of culture and history, they shared this awkward space with countless other indentures. People formed connections, jahaji relationships through the shared sense of the homeland gradually being erased from collective memory and once on land it was the tree that held them together. The tree became not only a marker of home, but also an eyewitness to the ‘new life,’ witnessing celebrations, resistance, rituals and most importantly hope among generations of girmitiya. They lived with the idea of an eventual homecoming. However through the use of material memory they continued to find a home in Fiji, with associations they built off the tamarind tree and other artifacts of memory.

The past is always colored in bright illumination. Termed golden and better than the present, in some ways it may be but that view is often subjected to the imagination. The mirror of reality hardly reflects the plain truth. It holds space for corruption and false claims. My inquiry in this essay was to take a deeper look at some diasporic narratives with a special focus on food; how it shapes identity across space and time, inter generationally. Whether fish or tamarinds, people are great storytellers, we build stories and save them in a collective repository; this memory consists both of thought, action and tangible elements. All carrying the power to change histories and traditions. Create new ones, recreate old ones, it is a power brought forth in these short narratives, proving that the way to the heart lies through the stomach. 

Work cited 

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Indian takeout: Bringing the flavors of Calcutta to Rhode Island in a suitcase: Food and wine, 2015.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary homelands: London Review of Books, 1982.

Mathur, Anita. Culinary fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture: Temple University Press, 2009.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houghton Mifflin company, 1999.

Ahmad, Ahmad. The Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation and Community 1947-65. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993.

Ray, Krishnendu. The migrants table: meals and memories in Bengali-American households. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004.

Lal, Brij. “The tamarind tree” from We mark your memory: writings from the descendants of indenture. London: School of advanced study, 2018.

Lal, Brij. Chalo Jahaji: on a journey through indenture in Fiji, 2012

About Author

Rakshita is a student at Delhi University pursuing her masters in English literature. She enjoys theories of post colonialism, diaspora and has a special interest in cityscapes