Hush Supper Club

(Spoiler Alert – Please read part 1 in order to enjoy the story as it unfolds. The link: Manjuben Part 1)

We left Manjuben’s tale dangling on the phone with a husband as mysterious as she. After the conversation, I tried to picture scenarios where she would find an African-American husband, but none came to mind. From the blank in my brain, an axiom emerged – acknowledging false assumptions opens the mind, but doesn’t necessarily fill it with new thoughts. Dante may know he’s lost in the woods, but Virgil is still needed to guide him out.

Morning brought Rodney and Manjuben to my door. Rodney was the same shade of brown as both of us. I politely scanned his facial features for clues. Did he have typical desi eyes or nose? Is he Indian-American but only speaks English, or maybe he’s from the South and doesn’t speak Gujarati? My speculations were denied with one act – before parting, Rodney furtively leaned in and kissed her goodbye in front of me! Manjuben accepted, looked at me, and looked away. Rodney = pardesi for sure. Well, I didn’t have to worry about judgments coming from her corner. She had enough racy scandal for both of us.

We started with 5 pounds of carrots. There was washing, peeling and shredding, before I added ghee, milk, sugar, almonds, cardamom and saffron, as the humble orange root boiled into carrot halwa. Perfunctory inquires about kitchen utensils and the location of the loo over, we settled into the ease of repetitive chores while I turned to politely pointed questions about my mystifying sous-chef.

Geography provided a neutral opening.

“Manjuben, where in Gujarat are you from? My parents are from small villages outside of Surat.”

“Geetaben, I’m not Gujarati. I speak Gujarati, and lived there, but my family is actually from Sindh and I grew up in Mombasa.”

With one response, my nosy interest in her married life turned to the migratory patterns of my people over the past century. First, the bare facts in her words:

“My family is Hindu and lived in Sindh. During Partition, my grandfather fled to Mombasa for fear of Muslim attacks. The crossing to India was so dangerous that he decided taking a ship to Kenya was safer. We left everything behind. Then in the 70s Idi Amin was threatening to kill all Indians in Uganda. Similar talk started in Kenya, so my father moved us to Gujarat where we had relatives who settled there from Sindh after Partition. My husband and I married young, and we had a son. After sometime, we moved to North Carolina where I lived for 10 years. We have been following Guru Ramji. My husband passed away a few years back, and I was alone and working. A friend suggested I meet someone in our samaj who is also a follower. Though he is half black, half white, Rodney follows Guruji more than I do. He’s also completely vegetarian, and wakes up at 4 am everyday to do meditation.”

The timeline presented, whatever does it all mean? For those of you unfamiliar with the chronicles of the Indian diaspora, we’ll need a map and some history books. Let’s peel the onion, layer by teary layer.

1. Partition – The independence of India from British rule in 1947 came with the creation of Pakistan. The migration and subsequent slaughter of almost one million Muslims and Hindus is called Partition. It was the largest migration of people in history. The ongoing battle over Kashmir has its origins in 1947 as well.

2. In 1972, Uganda’s dicator Idi Amin began a campaign to rid the country of all claiming Indian descent. Thousands were airlifted in the middle of the night to Canada and the UK for fear of rape and beheading. The anti-Indian sentiment was spreading to other countries in East Africa and many who had settled in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa decided to leave for the West or return to India, and particularly Gujarat.

3. In the late 1960s American immigration policy toward India dramatically shifted. With a shortage of doctors and engineers, skilled India workers were invited to the US and given immediate green card status. Those immigrants in turn quickly became citizen, usually in 5-7 years, and were allowed to invite family members to immigrate as well. This is the story of my parents.

But today’s story was about Rodney. So let’s return. In coming weeks, I will share more about Partition, Africa, Hindu-Muslim hatred and the Indian brain-drain to the West.

It seems for Manjuben that death had created an opening, which began for Rodney as an entering. I don’t know what life events brought a mixed race American man to follow a Hindu guru. But what appeared incongruous to me the night before quickly aligned to the tenants of two people’s core belief and practices. Believing is one thing, but life is about the daily acts that express our ideas. Their religious faith meant they acted the same – meditation, vegetarian meals, socio-economic parity. As she shared more about her daily life and duties to her husband, many of my assumptions proved spot on. She felt the same sense of duty toward her husband as any woman in my family. She cooked the food she knew, minus the burning heat, and he happily ate it. He liked his tea at 6 pm sharp when we walked in the door. She was sure to have it ready for him.

They both had grown children, and somehow their life seemed to work pleasantly. More so than my single existence. She does suffer from diabetes and showed off her encyclopedic knowledge of prices and shops. She advised me on where to buy carrots and bell peppers, and gently suggested a new way to wash cilantro and ferment dhokla. Manjuben had a Bollywood story, but her essential nature was still like millions of Indian women.

And for all the virtual voyages she took to describe her origins, it took her all of 20 minutes in my kitchen to ask about my marital status.  Familiar indeed.

Dear Readers, when I wrote promising part two of the Manjuben saga today, I did not account for being on the cover of the Washington Post food section on Wednesday, March 10.  I welcome Post readers and new supper guests.  Unfortunately, the warm hug of emails I have received has delayed today’s story.  I will post part two by Friday, March 12 at 3 pm EST.

For those of you who haven’t seen the Washington Post article, here it is:

HUSH in the Washington Post food section

While HUSH is primarily about culture and cuisine, there will be times when food politics become part of the larger story.  Today is one of those days.  I would like to influence the way we think, purchase and consume, but a few suppers a month will not a revolution make.  For that, we need to vote daily with our forks, wallets and mouse clicks.   To that end, I signed a petition to ask the Department of Justice to investigate agribusiness monopolies that have outsized power over our food supply from seed to harvest to grocery aisle.

I will let the excellent organization Food and Water Watch explain the rest.   Here’s the petition.  Please consider signing it.

Food and Water Watch Petition

‘Her name is Manjuben. She caters and helps in the kitchen.’ said Samirbhai, the proprietor of my local Indian market. My people being a famously entrepreneurial lot, I all but expected the owner to be Gujarati, and that he would in turn have the name of a Gujarati sous-chef for hire to assist with HUSH prep.

I promptly called Manjuben, addressing her in my native tongue. Her accent wasn’t a rough Surati slang like that of my family, rather something softer, kinder, unlike anyone from south Gujarat. I assumed she hailed from the northern part of the state, where people ‘shush’ their ‘s’ and generally display manners foreign to Surati lovers of profanity that could make Tony Soprano blush.

She responded eagerly, first talking of the cost of a rotli order, then marketing her skills with appetizers and sweets. I explained that I wasn’t looking for a caterer, but a helper in my home. ‘Home’ being in the heart of DC meant hours of negotiations over several days to convince her that the big, bad city was worth entering. I tried explaining the metro to her, promising to pick her up at the station and calling her to check up. Like so many immigrants, she lived sequestered in her suburban apartment, venturing out to the market, temple and work, but never leaving the security of her known paths. Entering the city by herself on public transport was almost as daring as traveling to another continent.

The metro option wasn’t selling. Next came driving. She had a car, but had never driven to the city by herself, only felt comfortable driving in daylight, and needed to be home before her husband returned from work. She needn’t have explained any of this to me, since from the words ‘Kem cho’ (‘How are you’ in Gujarati) I knew this woman as well as I knew my own aunts. The easy familiarity lay in the assumption that Manjuben had the same ideas, struggles, and motives for emigrating as everyone I was raised with. Like my father’s sister and two of my mother’s sisters, the story doubtless went something like this:

She and her husband were hard working, but not highly educated. Maybe the equivalent of a high school degree, at most a community college level education. Her English was hesitant, limited and grammatically incorrect (though I had yet to speak a word of English to her). She probably left India later in life, mid 40s or so, in hopes of improving her lot and educating her children. She was shamelessly cheap, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the price of everything from milk to okra to underwear at dozens of shops. She disliked the US, distrusted Americans, espoused openly racist tendencies untempered by direct experience, especially toward African-Americans, and spent most of her time ignoring American life, watching Zee TV, TV Asia and other Indian satellite TV channels, and suffered from various ailments such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

Though I found such a resume tedious in its predictability, it was a resume I could manage with little effort. The racism was intolerable, but best avoided lest we come to a heated debate amidst sharp knives. The rest was the comforts of home. We would work away the day in humdrum chatter involving recipes, gossip, and suitable boys.

Nonetheless, I was nervous at the prospect of sharing hours in the kitchen with a woman who would surely be full of passive-aggressive judgments about my life and lifestyle. The single city life, absence of husband or child at my age, my vagabond career change from respectable World Bank consultant to aspiring (read: broke) writer and underground cook. I had enough of these furtive jabs from scores of relatives and dreaded the prospect of a day trapped with more. But cooking a 5-course meal from scratch for 30 people alone was unthinkable, so Manjuben would have to be tolerated.

All that remained to secure her morning arrival was driving directions. She passed the phone to her husband for the final arrangements as I prepared to talk to some variation on the theme of Gujarati uncle. So imagine my astonishment when a man speaking with a slightly southern American drawl, who sounded decidedly black, answered in English to my Gujarati pleasantries. If filmed, the sound effect would have been the scratching of a vinyl record on a turntable. He introduced himself as Rodney as I tried to cover and switch to English without dropping the phone.

Dear Reader, let me be clear. I have not a single issue with the mysterious Manjuben married to a pardesi (foreigner).  Neither is there the slightest problem with an American spouse of any color. (My love life looks like a United Nations minefield of multinational heartbreak.) The shock came from the how and why, not the whom.  How could a woman with a back story anything like the one I outlined meet, much less marry, an African-American from the South? In what alternative universe would they come to converse, date, and fondle?! And how many of my smug assumptions were now just so much ignorant profiling on my part? It was beyond the beyonds, and made the wait for the coming morning lengthy and spiced with intrigue.

So, what happened? In keeping with the telenovella style of her life, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the conclusion. This much I will say – what began as the most familiar of conversations, morphed into a history lesson of 20^th century Indian migration as told by one woman peeling carrots.

Join Hush tomorrow for more.