The Hindi-Bindi Club Read online

  OK, enough on that subject. I’m sending your list of potential boys for Kiran in next email. Talk soon.

  Saroj

  * * *

  Saroj’s Murgh Mughalai

  (Chicken with Almonds and Raisins)

  SERVES 6

  ½ cup blanched slivered almonds, divided

  4 cloves fresh garlic, peeled

  1-inch piece of fresh ginger root, peeled

  2 cups yellow onion, chopped

  2 tablespoons canola oil

  2 bay leaves

  4 whole green cardamom pods

  1 2-inch cinnamon stick

  4 whole cloves

  1 teaspoon cumin seeds

  3 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cubed

  1 cup milk, divided into thirds

  ¼ cup water

  ½ teaspoon cayenne powder (adjust to spicy-hot preference)

  1 teaspoon coriander powder

  1 teaspoon salt (adjust to preference)

  ½ cup golden raisins

  ½ cup fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped and divided

  ½ teaspoon garam masala

  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Spray a disposable aluminum pie dish with nonstick cooking spray. Add almonds. Roast until they turn light brown, shaking and stirring often, about 15–20 minutes. Set aside.

  2. In a blender or food processor, purée to a smooth paste: garlic, ginger, and onion. Set aside.

  3. In a wok or deep 12-inch skillet, heat oil over medium heat. When it’s hot, add the whole spices: bay leaves, cardamom pods, cinnamon, cloves, and cumin. Stir-fry until cumin seeds turn golden brown, about 10–15 seconds.

  4. Add chicken. Sear all sides to lock in the juices, about 3–5 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer chicken to a plate. Set aside.

  5. In the same skillet, add the paste. Stir-fry until liquid evaporates.

  6. Stir in 1/3 cup milk. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until milk evaporates, about 3–5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Repeat twice until reduced to thick sauce.

  7. Stir in chicken, cayenne, coriander powder, salt, and water. Increase heat to medium-high, bring to a gentle boil, then reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer 15–20 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes.

  8. Stir in raisins. Cover and simmer 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

  9. Remove and discard bay leaves, cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, and cloves. Stir in ¼ cup almonds, ¼ cup fresh coriander, and garam masala.

  10. Transfer to serving bowl or platter. Garnish with remaining almonds and fresh coriander. Eat with rice or roti.

  Uma Basu McGuiness: Refilling the Well

  With problems, you have food for creation. You have your material.

  SATYAJIT RAY

  Day after day, I wear my holy amulets, consume herbal roots, perform occult rituals. I battle sweaty, smelly crowds, endless queues to offer prayers at Kalighat. Inside, the temple crackles with a potent energy. Sizzles between secret lovers who have come to elope, circumventing their families. People from near and far offer their fondest possessions as honorable sacrifices. Marigolds, tuberoses, hibiscus blooms. Rupee notes and coins. Slain goats. Long snips of tresses, women’s prized beauty. But where, then, are the heaps of castrated penises? I hear Kali-Ma laughing.

  The first time I read these words scribbled in one of Ma’s tablets, I was a student at Presidency College. I was shocked! Refined Indian women don’t use crude language. They don’t make overt dirty jokes. Such behavior, as innumerable others, falls strictly within the men’s domain.

  If I hadn’t come to America, if I hadn’t married Patrick, if we didn’t have Rani, I would have omitted these passages from my English translations. And in so doing, I would have committed a grave injustice, not only to my mother, but to our posterity who deserve nothing less than the complete, uncensored truth.

  “They won’t give me the tablets,” says my sister Anandita (ON-un-DEE-tha) over her mobile from Kolkata.

  Our connection is so clear, I feel I’m on the adjacent balcony. I hear the blaring of horns, barks of pariah dogs, whistles of night watchmen.

  “Not even copies?” I ask.

  “Not even copies,” she says, frustration evident in her voice. “I tried reason. I tried sweets. I tried guilt. I tried everything. Still, they refuse.”

  I, too, have tried to persuade three of my six sisters—the stubborn ones—to part with their prized volumes of Ma’s writing, so I can translate and include them in my anthology. Tried and failed.

  Some of her writing—a smattering of poetry, a short story here and there—Ma shared with others during her lifetime. But most of her words, written as well as spoken, she guarded. Her inner world was too private. Radical. Damning.

  After filling tablet after tablet with neat Bengali script, she mailed them to her mother, requesting her to lock them up in her metal cupboard. Before Dida—our maternal grandmother—died, she divvied and distributed them among my sisters and me. With precious few mementoes of our mother, we hoarded each and every one. Even a hairpin was an heirloom. So you can imagine how we felt hearing Ma’s voice, recorded in her writing, speaking to us.

  “Bharati claims hers are lost.”

  I roll my eyes. “She’s lying.”

  “I know, but what to do?”

  Cut up their ATM cards, Patrick says, meaning stop sending them money, but that’s too American, too cold for me. In India, family—even extended family—takes care of family. Though we don’t subsidize others as we do Anandita, we do what we can to help with health care, education, weddings. It’s not a choice for me, but a duty.

  “What to do, Sejdi?” my sister asks again, this time not rhetorically, but expecting an answer. Instructions from me. Next Steps.

  In our family, I’m called Sejdi, which means third-oldest sister. Anandita is one of the twins. I call her Choto didi, youngest sister. The other twin, Oindrilla, lives in Australia.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Short of stealing them—?”

  “Impossible. Even spices are under lock and key.”

  We laugh. Tinny, nervous laughs of desperation.

  Though Anandita and Oindrilla are twelve years my junior, my bond with them is tighter than with my other sisters. From their rocky beginnings, I felt protective of the twins. Of all my sisters, they—the ones who never had the chance to know Ma—are closest to my heart.

  When our father arranged Oindrilla’s marriage to a Bengali economist who chanced to move abroad, to Baba’s dismay and my relief, I prayed for the same for Anandita. In Kolkata, the twins lived under a cloud of culpability for their role in Ma’s death. I wanted to get them away from that. But for Anandita, it wasn’t to be. No family could get past her epilepsy. They viewed her as damaged goods. Unacceptable.

  Thankfully, Baba allowed her to attend Santiniketan, “abode of peace,” the college founded by Tagore, our Bengali Renaissance Man. This brought her great happiness and a lifelong network of friends. But he wouldn’t permit her further studies after she completed her B.A., certainly not abroad, not after my example.

  Despite repeated offers to bring her to the States, to have her stay with Patrick and me, Anandita refused to abandon Baba, as the rest of us did when we married and joined our husband’s families. Though Baba showed little similar consideration for her, she continually fretted over his well-being.

  “Who’ll look after him in his old age?” Anandita said time and again. “He has no son.”

  Nephews could light a funeral pyre, but could they care for him the way his own children would? We had witnessed that, when push came to shove in our large joint family with its constant power struggles, a nephew’s loyalty laid with his own parents.

  So it was that Anandita alone stayed by Baba’s side to the end, after which she had no desire to leave Kolkata. There she remains today, in Ballygunge, living with her black cat named Hulo in a luxury two-bedroom flat we purchased for her after Baba passed away.

  “Sejdi?” Anandita says.
“Why don’t you come here? They won’t refuse you in person.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, grip the phone tighter, my palms growing slippery.

  “Baba’s gone,” she says, reading my mind. “Gone-gone. Body and spirit. He isn’t lurking in the neem trees, poised to drop on you if you walk under them.” Only with me does she feel free enough to aim her slingshot at superstitions. With others, she guards her inner world, as did Ma.

  Ma’s deep, dark secret? Encrypted in innocuous poetry, but laid bare in journal entries: her unconventional, independent, clever mind. People could control Ma’s actions, imprison her body, but never her thoughts.

  Now that I think about it, Anandita’s deep, dark secret is similar. She’s an atheist.

  She won’t admit to it. Not even to me. Doesn’t live in a world where one safely can. To varying degrees, most of today’s world—East, West, and Middle; First, Second, and Third Worlds—still largely fears and shuns, if not punishes, nonbelievers, equating godless with immoral. Self-preservation spurs Anandita through the motions of socially accepted piety, not belief in a higher power.

  How do I know? The same way I know about Saroj’s extramarital affair, Meenal’s crush on my husband, and a whole host of other secrets no one suspects. I pay attention. Not only to what’s said, but what isn’t. Not just actions, but inactions.

  Take Anandita’s tireless humanitarian work, as an example. That’s real. It’s her passion, her raison d’être. But observe her body language, listen to her response when people tell her, as they often do, that she’s doing God’s work or earning her wings in heaven. She bristles. Averts her gaze. Turns away. If she replies, she says things like: “I’m doing man’s work.” Or: “It’s not for my karma that I do what I do.” She may quote the Gita: “Let right deeds be your motive, not the fruit which comes from them.” Such qualifiers, disclaimers, hardly register on a radar screen; but over time, tiny blips add up.

  “Sejdi, are you still there?” Anandita’s voice comes over the line. In the background, a dog howls.

  “I’m here,” I say. “And I must stay here. You know that.”

  Because she was there, Anandita’s the only living person, besides me, who knows what Baba said to me before he died, words I could never repeat verbatim, even to my husband, especially to him, because what hurts me hurts Patrick. With the last of his weak breaths, my father used all his remaining strength to cane these words on my soul: Never step foot on Bengali soil again.

  “This is your bloody soil,” Anandita says, and my vision blurs. “Your birthright.”

  I cover my eyes. “Choto didi, please. I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “Yes. That’s right. I won’t.”

  It’s my choice to honor Baba’s deathbed request. This is the sacrifice, penance by which I hope to wipe my karmic slate clean with my father. Patrick understands this. When he and I were in Kolkata, I caught the tail end of a conversation he was having with my sisters.

  “So the Christian notion of Hell exists here on earth for those paying off bad karma?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Moitreyee said.

  “He is getting it,” Tapasi said.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” Anandita murmured from the corner divan where she absently stroked Hulo, a cat who thinks she’s a dog. “The gospels to which humans, in all cultures, cling to ease the pain of living and dying?”

  Anandita knows my beliefs, even if she doesn’t accept them. And, as evidenced in the letter I receive weeks after our phone conversation, she’s clever enough to speak to them.

  * * *

  My dearest Sejdi,

  After great thought, prayer, meditation, consultation with gurus, and pilgrimage to Kalighat, I have reached the following conclusions: You have stayed away long enough in deference to Baba’s wishes. Come back, and we shall do all the necessary spiritual cleansing. As you know, these important rituals are best performed in India, and there’s no holy place better than our Ganges.

  I eagerly await the news of your imminent arrival.

  Yours affectionately,

  Choto didi

  P.S. Your presence in Kolkata is the only hope of compiling a comprehensive anthology.

  * * *

  “I’ll go if you go,” Saroj says, offering her hand to me in pact. “We’ll do it together, at the same time.”

  She understands as no one else can: When you are thrown out of a place, it’s not easy to return, under any circumstances, no matter how much you may want to.

  I take her hand. “You go to Lahore. I’ll go to Kolkata.”

  “Deal.”

  We shake, two live wires of nervous energy coiling together.

  * * *

  FROM:

  “Rani Tomashot”

 

  TO:

  Uma Basu

  SENT:

  January 14, 20XX 02:15 AM

  SUBJECT:

  Life

  Hi, Mom!

  Can’t sleep. Decided to get up and write you. How are you and Dad doing? Do you miss me terribly? Everything here’s fine. I finally unpacked my suitcases. That’s gotta be a new record for me. Just don’t ask if I’ve done laundry. :P

  In the Good-News department: My chronic fatigue has lifted. I’m not feeling the terrible lows anymore. In not-so-good-news: My passion’s definitely missing. My highs are gone. I’m listless. And yes, I’m wishing I listened to you and stayed there another month. Is the latest “being right” streak giving you a swelled head???

  I feel like I’m wasting so much time, on this extended vacation from my life. I know Bryan’s going through the same thing. In our own ways, we’re both floating…drifting…aimlessly. Don’t get me wrong, floating’s a helluva lot better than drowning -- NO danger of that, believe me. It’s just that I want to SWIM again. I want purpose. I want passion. I miss it!

  And now that I’ve written all this, I want to go to sleep…Zzzzz…:-)

  Thanks for listening, Mom.

  XOXOXO,

  Boo

  * * *

  FROM:

  “Uma Basu”

  TO:

  Rani Tomashot

  SENT:

  January 14, 20XX 08:33 AM

  SUBJECT:

  RE: Life

  Dearest Boo-Boo,

  We miss you more than stars in the heavens, raindrops in the monsoons, sands on every beach, and colors in all the world. Raised to the power of infinity -- that’s how much we love you.

  Let’s talk later tonight, okay? I have a proposition that may spur you in the right direction.

  In the meantime, remember we talked about your creative well being dry and how you cannot continuously take from that place without occasionally replenishing it? Boo-Boo, you refill the well by living in the world, =experiencing= life. Stopping to smell the roses is NOT wasting time.

  Love,

  Mom & Dad

  * * *

  FROM:

  “Rani Tomashot”

 

  TO:

  Uma Basu

  SENT:

  January 14, 20XX 03:01 PM

  SUBJECT:

  RE: Life

  What about stopping to SMOKE the roses?

  Seriously, thanks for the pep talk. Nothing on tap here tonight, so call anytime.

  XOXOXO,

  Boo

  * * *

  Kolkata is a city of juxtaposed contradictions. Splendor and squalor. Fragrance and stench. Intellect and ignorance. Humanity and apathy. Culture and uncouthness. Arrogance and humility. Cutting-edge technology and Stone Age backwardness. Generosity and avarice. Joy and despair.

  Once the capital of British India, this wonderful, horrible city represents (to me) a microcosm of the world. The full range of the human experience. If ever there was a place to inspire an artist, Kolkata is it.

  Just what Rani needs.

  I always wanted to show Rani the city
, country of my birth. Really show her, not the emotionally wrenching IN/OUT we did when Baba died, but full-blown adventures on par with our travels in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Bali, and Singapore, like my Indian friends in America who traveled to India with their children.

  “India is as much a part of Rani’s heritage as Italy and Ireland,” I said to Patrick after we returned from two glorious weeks at a rented ten-bedroom villa in Tuscany with my in-laws (before Patrick’s parents passed away, we were fortunate enough to go on two McGuiness family vacations to Ireland and Italy). “She has every right to experience the land, to know the people, the culture.”

  “She does,” Patrick said. “So do you.” That’s my husband, always hearing unspoken words, even more perceptive at reading people than I am. “We could go to other parts of the country.”

  I thought of the spectacular palaces of the Hindu maharajas. The cave paintings and sculptures, wrinkles in time to ancient civilizations. The Himalayas. Hill stations. Beaches and bazaars. Tea plantations. Temples, mosques, churches, and monasteries.

  I thought of all these places and so many more I longed to see with Patrick and Rani, but how could I bypass the one city that dwelled in my heart, my memories? How could I go to India and not to Kolkata? I couldn’t. For me, India began and ended in Kolkata.

  “Do you want to go to Kolkata with me?” I tentatively ask Rani and hold my breath, waiting for her answer. Waiting to see if the coin I tossed into the air lands head or tail up. If she says no, I won’t try to change her mind, I decided. I’ll take it as a sign. A sign of what exactly I’m not sure. Something bad.