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I was talking of my childhood in our village where our cows, their cow dung, our rice fields, and our housewives in their kitchens used to lead an uncomplicated uncivilized symbiotic existence, each supporting the other unconsciously, and voting en masse our Nehrujee's Socialistic Congress with wee hiccups induced by bowls of free-flowing toddy under our palm trees.
Two full decades later I had a chance encounter with barley water, this time I being the culprit rather than Father. In 1966 I was happily sharing a two-room Bachelor's Flat BF-1/6 with my senior colleague Dr AVKR and we were eating in the Gokhale Hall Mess at IIT KGP. But one fine day I got an allotment order asking me to shift forthwith to a 2BHK Bungalow C-23 with a huge unwieldy courtyard that was full of lantana and serpents. I tried to refuse the offer but was told that if I didn't shift to C-23 within a week, I had to pay the rent of BF-1/6 plus penal rent for C-23 as well. IIT KGP was queer then and I guess it continues to be so now since it is in its genes.
So I shifted bag and baggage to C-23 and meanwhile Gokhale Hall Warden passed a law that no one not living in his Hall could eat there. So I had to buy a couple of kerosine stoves and start cooking an excuse for lunch for me in a hurry. This Qrs had a temple type front verandah in which I sat for a month forgoing my Durga Puja-Kali Puja Combo vacation and did some calculations and published an eminently forgettable single-author paper with the bombastic title:
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I was talking of my childhood in our village where our cows, their cow dung, our rice fields, and our housewives in their kitchens used to lead an uncomplicated uncivilized symbiotic existence, each supporting the other unconsciously, and voting en masse our Nehrujee's Socialistic Congress with wee hiccups induced by bowls of free-flowing toddy under our palm trees.
At daybreak the maid would appear hounding us out of our cots laid in the street, for, she had to sweep and cleanse the forefront of our home. And after her AAP broom-work, she would fetch some roadside cow dung and mix it in a bucket of water and eject it forcefully with both her hands to let it dry, and go away to return later to do the utensils. And my mom would come with her tin of rice powder and bend and make a rangoli with it expertly with her thumb and forefinger.
And I asked Father why waste rice powder on dried up cow dung. And he said that the rice powder will vanish in a couple of hours...families of street ants would crawl in and happily eat it up; and feeding ants is a charity that our forefathers in heaven would reap rewards from. I see something similar in the Hyderabadi streets these days still. The Muslim traders here lift up the shutters of their shops of a morning and the first thing they do is sprinkle handfuls of grain on the fore-grounds of their shops, and within seconds a flock of waiting pigeons swoop down on the ground and have their fill...why go to Trafalgar Square?
Civilization soon took its toll and rice started to be exported and got expensive. And the rangolis were then on done first with chalk powder and then with powdered lime. Our ants went hungry and ancestors forlorn.
Rice powder didn't have much of other use in our kitchens except when Father took over the cooking 3 unholy days a month and poured more water in the curry than could be absorbed by the brinjals and the curry threatened to come out soupy instead of our favorite dry. And Father would shout to mom sitting and relaxing in the side room what to do and she would instruct him to sprinkle a fistful of rice powder in the kadai...rice powder is a famous absorber of water and the curry would come out dry enough and enriched by the sweetish taste of rice.
Rice suji (fine-ground broken rice) had its sway in our kitchens. It was the basic ingredient of idlis and dosas. And mom would fast every Saturday night to please our Balajee God of Tirupati. But this fasting was funny...it simply meant that she would forgo cooked rice and curry and sambar and the usual stuff. But she wasn't supposed to starve but have light tiffin instead. Since idli and dosa were too tasty for fasting, rice suji would be fried and cooked in water in a kadai and salt and chilli powder and curry leaves added to it. The result was a simple and stark dish known as Uppindi. And mom would partake some but most of it would go to others like her kids and husband who would gorge on their full meals and then swoop down like pigeons on mom's uppindi for a change of taste.
The only other grain I recall in our household then was barley seeds. These were stored in tins on the attic and brought down whenever I had fever...roughly once a month. As soon as my fever touched a degree or two of Fahrenheit, Father would proclaim that I should be on starvation mode...no rice, no curry, no sambar...not even uppindi. And he would gleefully boil some barley seeds in water, decant the water, throw away the barley seeds, and ask me to drink his barley water whenever I felt hungry. And the look and taste of stark barley water would repel me to such an extent that I would rather go to school than cut it with the excuse of fever. I used to beg Father to mix a spoonful of sugar with the damn thing but Father would say that sugar is an antidote to the wellness of barley. I hadn't yet read Father's Holy Bible then but if I had, I would have felt like Job:
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
he fleeth also as a shadow,
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
he fleeth also as a shadow,
and continueth not
Two full decades later I had a chance encounter with barley water, this time I being the culprit rather than Father. In 1966 I was happily sharing a two-room Bachelor's Flat BF-1/6 with my senior colleague Dr AVKR and we were eating in the Gokhale Hall Mess at IIT KGP. But one fine day I got an allotment order asking me to shift forthwith to a 2BHK Bungalow C-23 with a huge unwieldy courtyard that was full of lantana and serpents. I tried to refuse the offer but was told that if I didn't shift to C-23 within a week, I had to pay the rent of BF-1/6 plus penal rent for C-23 as well. IIT KGP was queer then and I guess it continues to be so now since it is in its genes.
So I shifted bag and baggage to C-23 and meanwhile Gokhale Hall Warden passed a law that no one not living in his Hall could eat there. So I had to buy a couple of kerosine stoves and start cooking an excuse for lunch for me in a hurry. This Qrs had a temple type front verandah in which I sat for a month forgoing my Durga Puja-Kali Puja Combo vacation and did some calculations and published an eminently forgettable single-author paper with the bombastic title:
"Temperature dependence of nuclear quadrupole resonance in cyanuryl chloride"
It appeared in Sir CV Raman's home journal. Somehow, then on I didn't get to publish any more single-author papers but 2. Other 40 odd were all with my faculty colleagues and project students.
Anyway, this self-cooking lone-eating existence was an eminent bore to me...not so much the cooking but cleaning the resulting utensils. So, being a timid bachelor, I engaged an old man as my cleaner rather than the default young lady. I soon learned that he was a migrant from Srikakulam, had no family to look after him, and vice versa, and eating and sleeping here and there. And one day he asked me if he could sleep in one of my unused rooms in C-23 and I agreed.
Within a week he caught a passing fever and was bedridden in my Qrs. And I didn't know what to do and what to feed him that night.
I then remembered Father's barley water recipe and ran to the Tech Market before it closed and asked for barley seeds in the Saha Dukan. And Saha Babu told me that there was a new product released just then in the market called Robinson's Barley Powder coming in a tin. I bought one and took it home and following its instruction leaflet made a barley water mix and took it in a tumbler lovingly to my old resident servant. And lifted him up and gave him the Robinson thing to drink. He sipped it and coughed and sneezed and threw it up on my face and got up and ran like a rabbit in a hot chase to the bathroom and discarded the contents of my tumbler in the sink and ran away into the dead of the dark night...
That was when I decided to shift to the expensive Guest House-turned-Faculty Hostel and tried to learn some table manners unsuccessfully...
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