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My mom never bothered about this nice distinction...she cooked both raw green tomatoes as well as red juicy ones in various delicious dishes.
The first I saw a tomato was when Father brought a new sapling from Nellore and planted it in our huge kitchen garden in Muthukur in 1953. It yielded a rich harvest like the biblical ten-fold, thirty-fold, and hundred-fold in our fertile soil, and when the seeds were planted again, we had a score of tomato 'trees' yielding a richer harvest for the next 5 years till we moved to a new house devoid of fertile soil.
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Apparently there was once a keen debate whether tomato is a vegetable or a fruit. The matter went to the courts of law and US customs:
...While it is botanically a fruit, it is considered a vegetable for culinary purposes (as well as under U.S. customs regulations, see Nix v. Hedden), which has caused some confusion...
The first I saw a tomato was when Father brought a new sapling from Nellore and planted it in our huge kitchen garden in Muthukur in 1953. It yielded a rich harvest like the biblical ten-fold, thirty-fold, and hundred-fold in our fertile soil, and when the seeds were planted again, we had a score of tomato 'trees' yielding a richer harvest for the next 5 years till we moved to a new house devoid of fertile soil.
Time to say a few words about our kitchen garden in Muthukur:
Those days teachers were transferred frequently from one village to the other till they became senior HMs when they were posted to something like a town where they retired and bought their houses with their retirement funds and died duly in their 'own' houses. Till then they had to live in rented houses and make do with minimum luggage that can easily be shifted on top of a bus from village to village...they literally lived off their non-existent 'suitcases'.
Whenever they were compulsorily transferred, they used to get a so-called joining time of ten days after they handed over charge in their old school and before they took charge in their new one. And also a pittance of shifting allowance. This joining time was meant to search for and find a suitable rented house on a recce mission and then shift-ho with kith and kin.
But if you were on a 'request transfer' (meaning you sought the transfer for reasons of your own and got it after bribing the peons, clerks, and officers in the DEO office) you get no joining time at all, nor shifting allowance....just take off and land like a bird on a different branch...queer!
Father got his ten day's joining time when he was transferred to Muthukur. And on his recce, he latched on to a stand-alone house with a tiled sloping roof. The house itself was tiny but it had a huuuge backyard with a compound wall. Father's attraction was the backyard...he wanted to grow vegetables and save money for his growing family.
Our landlady was an absentee non-brahmin widow who liked to have brahmin tenants...her argument was that brahmins, being vegetarian, wouldn't soil her kitchen and in general keep her house neat and clean and in good repair. So she reduced her rent by a whole rupee and agreed for a monthly rent of just Rs 9 (nine only). After a year she revisited her house with the intention of raising the rent by a whopping whole rupee but on seeing her backyard, kitchen garden, and sparkling floor, she went away without demanding any hike in rent.
For, when she first handed her house to Father, the backyard was a veritable jungle teeming with invasive lantana bushes and thorny shrubs and snakes and scorpions maybe. Father was prevailed upon by my mom and sisters to use the two remaining days of his joining time to clean up the jungle. For a very good reason:
Those were the eons when every house had an open-air latrine near the boundary wall of the backyard, at a safe distance from the holy kitchen. This latrine was surrounded by a ramshackle brick wall reaching half the height of a typical lady. That was all the privacy they got. The brick wall had an entrance...no gate but....just a clearance in the wall where the bricks were missing. This hi-fi latrine had provision to seat on their haunches half a dozen ladies one after the other duly step by step. That the thing was 'occupied' was signaled by the brass utensil filled with water that they carried and placed on the ground at the 'entrance'...no fancy sign-posts. The resulting night soil was cleared by a scavenger visiting at the dead of the night through the backdoor...iff he didn't happen to get drunk on toddy and beat up his wife and kids.
Males were usually not permitted to use this holiest of the toilets except in emergencies. They and their male offspring of a manageable age walked first thing in the morning to the village pond and hid behind the bushes and cleaned themselves with the water in the pond. In rainy season, they had to carry their umbrellas and sit like toadstools. In summer the pond used to dry up and they had to walk all the way to the tank on the outskirts of the village if there was one...otherwise they had to carry their own brass pots.
Kids like me had trouble with grunting pigs and piglets competing for their feast and trying to throw their host off his balance midway. So we had to do a series of hop-skip-and jumps to return unlicked.
Sorry for this vivid description of our village life in all its basic splendor...I just wanted a post dedicated to our Late Lamented Sardarji:
Khushwant Singh
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1 comment:
No more fitting tribute would be possible to that Grand Old Master of Irreverence!
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