Rites of passage

For some odd reason, one of the most vivid memories I have of that numbing time after my mother died two years ago is the lunch we had to host for friends, neighbours and assorted others after the last ritual that we had to perform as surviving family was done. I, as newly-anointed and very reluctant ‘lady of the house’, was carefully instructed by the priest to include various foods in the meal. Wisely, Father and I chose to have it catered by specialists in the business, who took over. All we had to do was provide an occasional serving dish and then, as hosts, play our appropriate roles. But the team who came in with the food was superbly organised, dealing with all our kitchen idiosyncracies and the non-traditional nature of our lifestyle with élan, dismissing my worries about not having enough ladles and too few stainless steel tumblers with a sympathetic – and rather pitying, I felt, even through that stress of having too many people I did not know in our house – smile and a reassuring word in a Tamil patois that went right over my bewildered head.

But the feast – since it was that – was a vast and varied one. I saw it repeated a few months later at my uncle’s home, when the ceremonies for my aunt who had just died were done with. in our house, it was served up on banana leaves, on the floor, as traditional as Mother would have liked it to be. It started with a sweet, which I still find strange. To me, death was about sorrow, about that lack of feeling that mercifully snuffs out a lot of the horror involved, about a certain robotic regimen that takes over when your mind goes on to auto-pilot. So a sweet dish, a pudding, something that is all about enjoyment and pleasure, seems incongruous, to say the least. But then perhaps it is the logic that we Indians do so well – it’s over, start living life again on a new note, a clean note, a sweet note. I still cannot accept it, but I can start understanding that way of thought.

At our house, we had paal payasam, rice pudding Indian style. It is essentially thickened milk, often overly sweetened, with rice cooked in it so that the rice swells and becomes rich with milk and sweetness and the whole mess is thick and almost biteable. I make it quite often, usually fairly successfully, adding a dash of exotic interest with ground nutmeg, cardamom and cashewnuts and raisins gently fried in homemade ghee. Mother would add saffron, giving the payasam a golden glow, so I do too. And there was always that very jumpy nut that would leap right out of the long-handled cast-iron ladle that we use even now to fry the small morsels in just before adding them, redolent and crunchy, to the payasam - anything that spills, house rules mandate, is up for grabs, first by the youngest in the family, which generally means me. We like it, as does Small Cat, who licks the tiny drops I offer her off my finger and sometimes sits there on the dining table waiting for more.