Cooking Banana Flower Usuli and Vengaya Kuzhambu
Volume 3 | Issue 11 [March 2024]

Uma Gowrishankar

Volume 3 | Issue 11 [March 2024]

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Mangai boiled milk, gazing out of the window. The jasmine creeper by the kitchen ledge was in full bloom. The mild smell of the flowers mingled with the smell of coffee.

She rinsed the coffee cup in the backyard tap and walked to the thicket at the far end of the garden. Gathering white and magenta bougainvillea, she arranged them in a dark corner of the living room. Removing all other colors from the room, she draped the windows white and chose beige-coloured covers for the cushions. The heavy teak furniture and clutter of newspapers and books on the table weighed down the room. She cleared away the papers, moved the books, and shifted some bulky chairs to the spare room beyond the bedroom. She sat in the now half-empty room, absorbing its natural luminosity, and watched the room come to life, and start to breathe.

Artwork – Purvi Rajpuria, 2024

***

Jambulinga Mudalaiar’s old and sprawling house had been converted into the Guest House of Neyveli Lignite Corporation. As Swami walked into the bar he saw a tall man quickly downing a large glass of beer. Swami had met him at the plant the day before. He was a friend of the mining engineer Paul Eyrich, visiting from Australia. Swami hadn’t registered his name.

‘I am Webster, Paul’s friend.’

‘Are you associated with the Bureau of Mines?’ Swami asked.

‘No. I am a lawyer. I am visiting my brother at the Theosophical Society in Madras. Paul dragged me along here. Neyveli’s heat is quite unbearable.’

‘Madras is more pleasant thanks to its proximity to the sea.’

‘The heat here is the result of what you have done to the land. It’s torn open, scarred, and gaping,’ Webster said wiping his forehead with a bandana.

Swami didn’t know what to say, that was not how he perceived the mines. He felt relieved when the others joined them at the bar.

Artwork – Purvi Rajpuria, 2024

***

‘The mines shore up into hills the guts of the earth’s crust, the dark innards lie exposed as an ugly secret,’ Mangai told him that evening.

He pondered her words for a few minutes, furrowing his eyebrows, surprised that she echoed the sentiments expressed by Webster.

‘The lignite there is about 25 million years old. It is a fossilized vegetable matter that grew on Earth even before humans walked its surface,’ he said, pulling a chair and sitting across from her at the table. ‘I am looking at the secrets of the Earth that these fossils carry while you are thinking of the sordid clay we accumulate.’

Mangai focused on the flowers she was stringing into a strand. Swami waited for Mangai’s response; her unhurried pace puzzled him and her habit of wrapping herself in routines of trivia was irritating. He couldn’t comprehend her enthusiasm for stringing flowers, pickling limes, collecting cotton from the trees to stuff pillows, and taking long walks for miles in the mornings and evenings. He could never make her talk about what these activities meant to her. When he asked her, she seemed disinterested in everything she did. This pretense deeply disturbed him.

Hurt, he said, ‘You seem to want to keep everything you do a secret.’

Alarmed, Mangai responded, ‘There’s nothing secretive about it. I tell you everything I do throughout the day.’

She wrapped the string of jasmine around the bun of her hair. The buds that were strung very close nudged each other as they bloomed. The powerful fragrance of the flowers overwhelmed Swami, and he suddenly remembered it as the smell of his wife in bed. Surprised, he gazed at the flowers as though they were revealing their meaning for the first time.

‘Are these from our garden?’ he asked, his eyes tender with affection.

‘Yes, they are.  Do plants interest you only after they’ve fossilized?’ she asked teasingly, with a smile.

‘But I don’t know much about plants. I know nothing about the ones in our garden. Please, tell me about them.’

She looked at him for a moment, checking if he was making fun of her, and then said, “We have mango trees, guavas, lime, jackfruits, badam, cotton trees, eucalyptus, drumstick trees – about a dozen of them. Then there are the flowering plants, and there are flowers that can be cooked like this one.’

She showed him the banana flower, freshly cut and still dripping milk and staining the tablecloth.

‘Why don’t you start a cottage industry, making pickles, jams, sauces, and squashes?’ he proposed.

She took a sharp breath. ‘Why are you suggesting this to me?’

‘Just consider all the opportunities. You have the time and the resources.’ Swami’s voice rose in pitch, and his ears turned crimson. His enthusiasm tired her, she found it feverish.

She sighed and rose, went to the kitchen to cook dinner. Seating herself on the hard floor, she greased her hands with oil. She held firmly the stalk of the banana flower and peeled away the sepals layer by layer. Bracts of the flower the colour of dark flesh, were scattered on the ground. Delicately, she tugged the pearly florets out, finely chopped them, and soaked them in buttermilk.

The oil spluttered and hissed as she added lumps of mashed dal spiked with red chillies to the pan and briskly stirred until they became crumbly. Meanwhile, the pot containing the sliced banana flowers boiled over with froth. She strained the cooked flowers and tossed them into the pan. Engrossed in preparing the banana flower usili, she didn’t notice Swami’s restless movements in the living room.

He paused his pacing and peeped into the kitchen, observing her as she removed the membranes from small onions. The stone pot smoked with oil, and the aroma of curry leaves as they roasted and turned crisp permeated the kitchen. She added the shallots and poured tamarind pulp into the pot. Her eyes misted and the world appeared to fall away as she watched the kuzhambu simmer. A faint sheen of moisture formed above her lips as she absentmindedly stirred the thick sauce with a wooden ladle.

Artwork – Purvi Rajpuria, 2024