Autocrat of the Dining Floor

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Autocrat of the Dining Floor

(with apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes)

This is all about my grandmom (Ammamma).

She was born more than a century ago and lived a proud life of 85 years: the wife of a Revenue Official in British India.

We were a dozen or more of her grandkids clinging to her lovingly in the 1950s.

(Padma Bhushan) Ramachandra Guha calls the 1950s a ‘special’, nay, an ‘innocent’ decade of Free India. So were we.

An orthodox South Indian Brahmin family, we were brought up on enormous mounds (or so it seemed to us in our voracious outdoor childhood) of curry, sambar, chutney, rasam, and curd admixed with rice, serially, with ghee as the ‘killer lubricant’.

Whenever she visited one of her children, Ammamma would capture and rule over their kitchen like a benign despot. ‘Breakfast’ started with all her grandkids squatting in a semicircle around her. She would craft giant size perfectly round morsels which would be ‘dealt’, like playing cards, along the ring of our waiting hands. Anyone with an unfinished morsel in their hands would be rebuked as a slow and sloppy eater, and threatened with a ‘bypass’. So, none could waste their time in unholy chit-chat. Concentrated ‘upload’ was the motto. That saw us through five hours of play.

When I joined College, Ammamma used to visit my uncle’s place where I was living. Since my ‘University Bus’ left promptly at 9.30 A.M. it was hustle and bustle for her. At the stroke of 9 I would fetch my plate and squat mercilessly on her kitchen floor.

First would come steaming rice with curry as the breather, and the rest of the items would descend on my plate one by one as the cooking progressed. Since I had to run to catch the bus (I had to walk 5 km if I missed it), I was in no mood to ‘relish’ my lunch (that ‘happy hour’ was reserved for the night meal). Just shovel and scram!

But she was a proud cook and insisted on my ‘feedback’ on each item (I was the day’s guinea pig; orthodoxy forbade her to taste the food before everyone in her family had theirs). I used to say ‘delicious’ in reply to her serial queries. And she would taunt me as an ‘indiscriminate ignoramus’ (as opposed to a ‘connoisseur’). I had little time to argue.

But one day, I had more time than usual at my disposal and I ventured to suggest that the curry could perhaps do with a little less salt. That was it! I was scolded for my ‘lay’ tastes, lectured on the importance of salt as the spice of life and food, and in general brushed off. I ‘had’ it either way.

But, in truth, she was a marvelous cook, and ‘delicious’ was the right word, scolding or no scolding.

Much later when she once complained of a wee giddiness, her physician son brought out his gleaming B. P. kit and discovered that she was running a steady 250/150. He forthwith forbade her from having ‘any salt’ whatsoever.

By then she had acquired the services of a cook, but would herself decide on every detail of every recipe, and supervise the cooking closely.

And strict instructions would be given loudly (for public consumption) that excessive salt is bad for health though good for taste, and so only a ‘sprinkling’ of it should be used in every dish. That ‘healthy’ food would be served for all on the dining floor.

My mother reported that, after the entire family was fed, and fled, Ammamma and her cook would squat face to face for their leisurely meal adding a ‘splash’ of salt hither and thither ‘just for a hint of taste’.

And she lived to a ripe and healthy old age with no ‘side effects’ whatever of a soaring B. P. apart from its nuisance value; while many of her grandkids became unduly health conscious and ceased relishing food what with indigestion, dyspepsia, acidity, sugar and so on before they turned 40.

Ammamma was truly made of sterner stuff!

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