Bodies in Motion (28 page)

She stirs the potatoes one last time and then starts the rice, lacing the water with saffron threads, a sprinkle of salt, and a tablespoon of ghee. She cooks the last curry standing in only her underskirt, a straight shift of unbleached cotton from waist to ankles. This is the most difficult dish—not because it is so complex, but because fish is fragile. It must be handled with care, neither over-nor underdone. All the preparation must be done first, the sauce built carefully. Onions and ghee, cumin and mustard seed, fenugreek and cinnamon, cardamom pods and cloves, chili powder and a spoon of the dry-roasted spice mix. Salt. Tomatoes and vinegar and tamarind pulp, turning the sauce dark and tangy, so that already it smells of the sea. The rice is boiling; she pauses to turn down the rice to a simmer, to cover the pot with a lid. Then she returns to her sauce.

Add a little water, cook it down until it is almost ready—and then slide the cubed fish in, so gently. Make sure all the fish is covered with the sauce, then just let it simmer until it is done, without stirring at all. If you stir too hard, the fish will break apart, will dissolve into fragments. Her fish are soon simmering; she stirs the potatoes one final time; they have been cooking for an hour now and are meltingly soft. Mangai turns off the heat on the pot. The rice finishes, and she turns off that one as well. And then she is only waiting for the fish, counting the time in her head, watching seconds slide by.

When Daya died, Mangai went to the funeral. The priest had carefully not looked at her as he spoke the final words. She had not cried, not in front of the villagers. That night, she rowed her boat out into the merciless sea; she lay down in it and let the water carry her where it would. But when the sun rose, she found that she was not so far out
that she could not row back. She returned to the barren shore. Mangai gave away all her saris and began dressing in white. At first the seconds, minutes, and hours had seemed unendurable, but eventually she began taking pleasure in them, in every second that slid by with her still in the world. It was a quiet pleasure, most days. Quiet was enough. Most days.

When the fish is ready, Mangai turns off the last burner. She takes a plate down from the shelf, battered tin. She fills a tin cup with cold water. She serves herself rice, fish, leeks, potatoes, eggs. There is enough on her plate to feed a man four times her size. She undoes the tie on her underskirt and lets it fall to the floor. Mangai carries the plate and cup over to the wall; she sits down, cross-legged on the dirt floor, with her naked back against the wall, with the water sliding down, running along her wrinkled skin, over her ribs, pooling in the hollows of her hips. She takes a drink from the cup, and a sharpened edge cuts the corner of her lip. She balances the plate on her bony right knee, and, shuddering with pleasure, she eats.

I must first offer grateful appreciation to the University of Utah's Steffenson-Canon and Neff Fellowships for essential financial assistance in writing the dissertation that became this book, and to several professors in my doctoral program who offered guidance and insight, sometimes at the most unexpected moments: Vincent Cheng, Francois Camoin, Robin Hemley, Kim Lau, Kathryn Stockton. Special thanks to my thesis advisor, Katharine Coles, who gives more useful critique in five minutes than most people can give in five months. For invaluable historical advice and assistance (all errors are emphatically my own), I am indebted to Professor Anand Yang (University of Washington), Professor Choudri M. Naim (University of Chicago), and Mythri Jegathesan, graduate student at Columbia, whose work on child and female soldiers among the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) has proven invaluable. And from my MFA program at Mills College, thanks to El-maz Abinader, Ginu Kamani, and Julie Shigekuni, talented writers and wise professors all.

In New York, I send thanks to Duncan Bock, Andrea Hirsch, Charles Melcher, and the rest of the fabulous crew at Melcher Media, who invited me to edit
Aqua Erotica
, which led to my writing “Seven Cups of Water,” which enticed me to write this book. Thanks as well to Bob Mecoy, my Crown editor on
AE,
and now my cherished agent.
And bright shiny new thanks to Marjorie Braman, my editor at HarperCollins, for having faith in me and my book—may that faith be richly rewarded.

Academics and editors offer skills, experience, and insight, but I have always relied at least as much on a community of friends and friendly acquaintances to guide my writing. When a writer works on a book for a decade, the list of those people she has to thank grows impossibly long. Undoubtedly, a few will be forgotten, and I can only hope they will forgive me. Remembering everyone I can, I send gratitude to my sisters, Mirna and Sharmila Mohanraj, to my parents, Dr. N. A. C. and Jacintha Mohanraj, to friends Todd Belton, Beth Bernobich, Lisette Bross, Kirsten Brumley, Shannon Clark, Marcia Dibble, Sapna Gupta, Nalo Hopkinson, Paul Ketzle, Debby Levinson, Michael Maltenfort, Elaine Martyn, Debbie Notkin, Karina Roberts, Shmuel Ross, and Aparna Sharma, all of whom have put up with endless ramblings from me about this book and have often given helpful words in response.

Thanks to my journal readers, to my Clarion class, to my colleagues in the Ph.D. program at Utah, to the members of SAWNET (the online South Asian Women's Network), and the members of Chicago's SAPAC (South Asian Progressive Action Collective), all of whom offered support, encouragement, and critique along the way. Extra-special thanks go to Kate Bachus, Jed Hartman, Karen Meisner, Dan Percival, and Benjamin Rosenbaum; you guys give great crit! And finally, much love and gratitude to David Horwich, who spent far too many hours helping me untangle an almost impossibly snarled web of family history and chronology; again, any remaining errors are my own.

About the author

Meet Mary Anne Mohanraj

About the book

Make Sure You Have Enough Onions: Cooking with Mary Anne Mohanraj

Sri Lankan Timeline

Read on

Return to Sri Lanka

Author Recipe: Sri Lankan Curry Powder

An Excerpt from Mary Anne Mohanraj's Forthcoming Novel,
The Arrangement

About the author

Meet Mary Anne Mohanraj

M
ARY
A
NNE
M
OHANRAJ
was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1971 and raised in the United States. She received her doctorate from the University of Utah, specializing in postcolonial literature and creative writing.

She came to writing in a decidedly curious manner. “My boyfriend in college (in 1991) was a computer guy—I think I was the only English major in my department who actually used the Internet,” she says. “I found the newsgroups (forums) and, like most people, I checked out the sex newsgroups. I started reading erotica online and was startled to see how bad most of it was—incoherent grammar, unintelligible spelling. I was an English major and had only read good literature. This was my first exposure to really bad writing. I read those stories and thought, ‘Well, I can do better than
this
!' Famous last words.”

Mohanraj taught composition and creative writing at Salt Lake City Community College and the University of Utah, and currently teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Vermont College and Roosevelt University
in Chicago. She is the executive director of DesiLit (www.desilit.org) and of the Speculative Literature Foundation (www.speclit.org). Prior jobs were “very boring, mostly secretarial,” she says. One experience, however, merits attention: “I got fired from a filing job once, because they said I had ‘a bad attitude about alphabetizing.' I actually enjoy alphabetizing, so I don't know what they were talking about. My partner's job is actually more interesting than any of mine; Kevin's a mathematician and spends most of his time thinking about what happens in more-than-three-dimensional space. They pay him to do it, too, which is the astonishing part.”

Now at work on a novel,
The Arrangement,
she is the author of two literary collections—
Silence and the Word
and
Torn Shapes of Desire
—and
A Taste of Serendib,
a Sri Lankan cookbook.

Asked if she observes any beverage ritual while writing, she replies: “I'll generally go through four cups of tea in a day. I start with Ceylon breakfast tea (two cups), then maybe drink a cup of chai (I like the Stash brand), and if I'm still going in the afternoon I'll have a cup of Darjeeling. I take all of them with milk and sugar; most Sri Lankans picked up British colonial habits regarding tea. If I have guests or I'm feeling fancy I'll use some of the gorgeous loose tea I brought back from Sri Lanka, and I might even brew it with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. But most days I'm focused on work, and for me tea bags work just fine. I'll often make my tea with a book in my hand. Once I burned my arm pretty badly with steam from the kettle because I was caught up in a good part of a book and wasn't paying attention.

Mohanraj lives in Chicago.

About the book

Make Sure You Have Enough Onions

Cooking with Mary Anne Mohanraj

Food plays a crucial role throughout
Bodies in Motion
. Below is an excerpt from Mary Anne Mohanraj's cookbook
A Taste of Serendib.

 

Make sure you have enough onions. This is critical. You always need more onions than you think. A three-pound bag might be enough—better to get two just to be safe. When I first started cooking in college, my roommates were amazed by how many onions I bought. They would flee the kitchen with their eyes burning while I was chopping. And when it came time to cook the chili powder (“fry it till it makes you cough”), they flung open windows or left the apartment altogether. But they always came back to eat when the meal was ready.

In college was the first time I cooked entire meals—and was also the first time I cooked for anyone outside my family. I was at the University of Chicago, many states away from my mother in Connecticut, and it wasn't long before bland dorm food had driven me to attempt to reproduce her curries.

She never taught me how to cook; growing up I had one kitchen chore: chop the onions. I must have been about age twelve or so when she first trusted me with a sharp knife. She set me up at the cutting board with the knife and three onions, enough for a single dish. She showed me how to cut off the ends, slice the onion in half, and peel it. Then she had me
slice the length of the onion as thinly as I could. When an onion half is being sliced, you turn it, holding it firmly, and cut crosswise making a fine dice. Practice until you can do this quickly—despite what you may hear about keeping onions cold in the fridge or putting a slice of bread on your head to suck up the fumes, cutting them quickly is the only way I know to effectively reduce tears.

I never cut them as finely as my mother did; I wasn't a particularly careful teenager and often my chopping was more a matter of five cuts along the onion's length, rather than the ten or fifteen that she required. My mother mostly put up with my coarsely chopped onions, though occasionally she'd take the board away and finish the job herself. Her knife flying across the board, neat mounds of tiny onion pieces would pile up. When the chopping was finished she would slide the onions into a large pot, add two large cooking spoons of vegetable oil, and start sautéing them over high heat. Once I grew halfway competent at chopping onions she began to let me stir them.

Chopping and stirring—these seemed to be the most tedious parts of cooking, and it was all I was allowed to do.

We came to America when I was about two and a half. I grew up in Connecticut eating cereal or toast for breakfast and a sandwich of cold cuts or a mass-produced hot meal at school for lunch. My dad was a doctor, but my parents were careful with money—we only ate out at real restaurants on birthdays or other special occasions. So I mostly had very simple American food during the day and I had my mother's cooking every night—usually plain white rice, a meat curry, and a vegetable. If we had guests,
then
we might have appetizers
(fish cutlets, meat rolls), more vegetables, more meat, and accompaniments (chutneys, sambols)—but mostly it was rice and curry. Yet I was never bored; every night it was a little different.

A lot of people think their moms are the best cooks in the world. I won't claim that. I do know that my mother was and is considered a
very
good cook, not just by me but by everyone we know. Of course part of it was that she had the time—my father worked and she raised us. She kept a spotless house and took similar care with her cooking. As I grew up I knew fewer and fewer people who cooked like that—people who really cared how finely the onions were diced and how long they'd been sautéing. Most of my college friends couldn't cook at all—or if they could they could only make spaghetti. If they were brave enough to sauté a little ground beef to toss into store-bought sauce they were culinary wonders!

So in college I started trying to cook too. I called up my mother and asked for her beef and potato recipe (still my favorite). I was frustrated that she hadn't somehow magically infused her cooking ability into me, but I realized that it would have been difficult for her to even teach me how to cook; I spent most of my teenage time either studying, reading novels, or talking on the phone. If she had tried to get me to sit still long enough to teach me to make a dish from start to finish I would have undoubtedly complained. I know I complained about all that onion chopping and frying.

I couldn't make the dish properly at first—I
didn't have the right spices for the meat. I couldn't go to the store and buy what they call curry powder! That is fine for northern Indian cooking but it's nothing like what we use. In Sri Lanka the spices are dry-roasted separately, then ground and mixed together. They become dark and very aromatic; it's a flavor completely unlike what you'd get from using Indian curry powder, and the dishes turn out a dark brown rather than a pale yellow. These days I take the time to go to the Indian grocery store, buy bulk spices, and make my own Sri Lankan curry powder. It's easy with a coffee grinder dedicated to spice grinding, and slowly roasting the spices, stirring occasionally, can be a pleasant way to spend a mellow hour. Back then I waited for my dad to pack up some curry powder and send it along.

Some photos from Mohanraj's 2005 trip to Sri Lanka appear on the following pages.

Sri Lankan Timeline

 

Fifth century
B
.
C
.:
Migrants from India settle on the island. The most prominent group were the Sinhalese. The prehistory of Sri Lanka is still very unclear, as the main source for reconstruction is the
Mahavamsa,
written by Buddhist monks in the sixth century
A.D
. (or possibly later) and possessing a strong religious bias. The original Sri Lankan tribespeople disappeared within the next few centuries, either through intermarriage or death.

Third century
B.C
.:
Tamil migration from India begins.

1505:
The Portuguese arrive in Colombo.

1815:
The British become first European power to control the entire island, now known as Ceylon. They bring in Tamil laborers from southern India to work tea, coffee, and coconut plantations.

1833:
English is made the official language.

1931:
The British grant Ceylonese the right to vote.

1948:
Ceylon gains full independence in the wake of India's 1947 independence.

1949:
Indian Tamil plantation workers are disenfranchised.

1956:
Solomon Bandaranaike is elected Prime Minister on a wave of Sinhalese nationalism. Sinhala is made the sole official language. Sri Lanka witnesses its first ethnic clash since independence when Tamil civilians are set upon by Sinhalese mobs.

1959:
Bandaranaike is assassinated and succeeded by his widow, Srimavo, the first female elected head of state in the world.

1972:
Ceylon changes its name to Sri Lanka. Buddhism is given a primary place as the country's religion, further antagonizing the Tamil minority.

1976:
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), one of many separatist groups, is formed under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran.