Tuesday 26 December 2017

Of Wasted Wedding Wishes And Cruel Condolences....

                         The traditional North Indian Bridal Chura (red and white bridal bangle set)
                                                      Picture Credit: The Inter Net

A little more than two months ago, I woke up rather early for a Sunday morning. Diwali had just got over and I was feeling languorous. Five days of festivities, coupled with my husband's office and son's school routines on in full force, does not leave much time for leisure. The only saving grace was that since my students in India had Diwali holidays, I, too, had the week off from on line classes. But I had invited our former neighbours for brunch on that particular Sunday, since their daughter was leaving for college in Singapore at the end of October, and I wanted to say good bye to her. I switched on the net, as I waited for the water to boil for my tea. The first group I always check is the security group on WhatsApp and a solitary message had popped in. 'Asian male shot dead in the early hours of Sunday, on XYZ road.' At first I mentally dismissed the message, sorry as I felt for the unknown victim, even as I thought that Asian males should know better than to be out on Nairobi streets at pre dawn hours. I'm ashamed to admit that my second thought was 'must be a young guy coming home from a drinking binge, and probably feeling invincible, as a result of all that alcohol floating around in the blood stream.' (Those who know me well, know that I am puritanical in my dislike of alcohol and tobacco and cannot understand to this day why men and women need to down a couple of pegs or ingest smoke to enjoy life, but I rarely air my views on this particular subject.). I could not have been more wrong about the circumstances of the death, as the next set of messages, which were rapidly pouring in, proved...
In what was later explained away as a bungled police operation and a case of 'mistaken identity', one of Nairobi's richest young businessmen had been shot in his own bungalow. The armoured vehicles had allegedly entered his compound by breaking down his gate and when he tried to retaliate from his bed room window, he was gunned down. Soon his identity was freely being shared on all the Nairobi groups and I was horror struck when I realized I had met his young wife, (who had recently had their baby), a couple of times, a few years ago, because she is very close to friends of ours from our Dar Es Salaam days. She also works for one of the Asian Radio channels as a Radio Jockey and is a celebrity of sorts in Nairobi. And we had heard all about the impending wedding on radio too, at that time...
Brunch menu forgotten, I sat down with my cup of tea and tried to process what the steady stream of messages was saying. I remembered our common friend flying down from India for one of the biggest weddings Nairobi has seen in the last few years. I went onto to Face Book to look at pictures. When you have common friends tagged in pictures, you can usually view them on Face Book. And there she was in all her bridal glory, wearing bangles very similar to the ones in the picture I have shared above, her proud, brand new husband by her side and our mutual friend grinning broadly, especially as she had made a special trip from India to bless the happy couple.... It was hard, SO hard to believe the young man was no more..
Just a week or so before this terribly tragic incident, one of my school friends, who had been keeping vigil outside the Intensive Care Unit in a Pune hospital where her mother had been admitted, shared a couple of stories with me, during her weekly telephonic updates about her mother's condition. She told me about a young girl, from a small town near Pune, who she met outside the critical care unit, who had just lost her husband to dengue. That day, she told my friend, through a flood of tears, was to have been their six month wedding anniversary... "How will I live without my husband?" she plaintively asked my friend. "The way I do.." was my brave friend's reply, even as she showed that young stranger her own husband's picture, whom she had lost to brain tumour very early in their married life. Another young bride, my friend said, had just lost her husband to a massive heart attack and was busy trying to make her new in laws eat a few morsels in the hospital corridor, in the midst of tragedy..
So what happened to all those wedding wishes? Did they never reach these couples? If not, where did they go? You know, all those 'congratulations and best wishes and long and happy married life' ones that we dutifully spout at weddings,( but genuinely mean), just before we systematically attack the lunch or dinner buffet?
I like to believe they float around everywhere and though they may not always be of use to the couples that they were intended for, they do sometimes reach those who were, may be, meant to have them....All those young husbands and wives who were saved by a whisker from an accident, those who survived a life threatening disease, or a terrorist attack (like the young couple who was caught in the Taj hotel just before their own wedding reception, during the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, but miraculously made it out alive) definitely benefited from their own wedding wishes, and those 'wasted wishes' still circulating around in the Universe too...That's what, they say, spreading positivity is all about, after all.
The tail end of November brought more terrible news. My school music teacher's ten year old son passed away suddenly in his school, in my home town Pune. He succumbed to heart problems and could not be revived... Besides being my former teacher's son he was also my son's classmate's first cousin and before we moved to Nairobi, I had often met the boy, who was a mere toddler then, while waiting to pick my own son up from outside the school. So when my cousin from Pune , who was my classmate in school, messaged me the news, I literally had no words left...
I lost a former student too, a few days ago, the victim of a road accident in my home town. He was fifteen years old and soon to appear for his tenth standard board exams.. I have his mother's number in my phone, but I do not have the words to express my grief and sorrow...Many of his classmates and friends are currently my students on Skype and the day after we got the news, every one of them made mistake after mistake in class. All I could say to console them was, 'I know you are upset,don't worry about your errors now. You will do well in the exam...'
When a mother has lost a child, offering condolences seems so trite, it seems as if one is being deliberately cruel. How can you condole pre mature death? Nearly three decades ago, I read an article about facing loss in Reader's Digest which has stayed with me to this day. Never, ever, tell a grieving parent, 'Oh I know exactly how you feel.' NO, you cannot know what a person who has lost their baby in a particular set of circumstances is going through, so do not even bother to try. Instead, send a hot meal, send a prayer, send a warm hug...do NOT send condolences.
Why did I choose to write about this when almost the whole world is on holiday and on vacation in exotic locations around the world and in a relaxed 'end of the year' mood?
My former teacher's Face Book post from a couple of days ago compelled me to put down what has been on my mind for a while. She said there is a word for a woman or a man who has lost a life partner :widow/widower. There is a word for a child who has lost both parents: an orphan. (And also for a child who has lost either parent: motherless/ fatherless). But there is NO word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child... She has requested everyone to remember those parents who have lost children and to say a prayer for them..even as you go about enjoying and living your own life, as you should and you must...
Today it's also been two years since my son's friend lost his little sister. A few hours from now, I will plant a tree in her name in a location in our garden, where, when it grows after a few years, it will be seen from the road this child took to school every day. A school she left too soon...That's my way of passing on my condolences, to all I know who have lost a child. I know it's not enough, it never will be, but it is all I can do...


Wednesday 13 December 2017

My Grand Mother's Pumpkin Ice Cream

 

                                                       Boiled, sliced, orange Pumpkin   

                                                     
                                                       Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,
                                                       Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
                                                       So he put her in a pumpkin shell,
                                                       And there he kept her very well!

These lines, which will have my ultra feminist daughter up in arms, (wives aren't kept, they can well earn their own 'keep', thank you very much, I can hear her say), are from a book which was a childhood favourite: Illustrated Mother Goose, Nursery Rhymes. Outdated and outmoded the rhyme may well be, but whenever I gazed at the pumpkin in my refrigerator, it kept echoing through my mind...And stared at it I certainly did because it sat on a shelf in there for two whole weeks. My husband was on a business trip to Tanzania (he's back now so I can safely declare it in this post!), my daughter isn't home from college for her winter (Nairobi summer) break yet and so with just my son and me rattling around the  house, cooking had been reduced to a bare minimum. The longer it sat there the more distasteful the idea of cooking it became. Being Indian, we have myriad ways of cooking pumpkin: a stir fried vegetable with peanut powder and spices, or steamed pumpkin with spiced curd or sweetened pumpkin mixed with whole wheat flour and deep fried...the list can run on, depending on which region of India you come from. None of these seemed very appealing and then I remembered my grandmother's pumpkin ice cream!
I was ten years old and we were living in Gauhati, Assam and my paternal grandmother was visiting us. My sister and I came home from school one day to find that a lovely surprise awaited us. A mellow yellow, tempting, home made ice cream! We immediately helped ourselves to bowlfuls of frozen gold, for that's exactly what it looked like. My grandmother asked us to guess the main ingredient, but  try as we might, we just couldn't and had to finally, reluctantly, give up and ask her to disclose the answer. It was Pumpkin Ice Cream!
Since that day, until she passed away nearly a decade later, my grandmother often made this particular ice cream, especially when we had guests over for a meal. Our favourite game was asking people to hazard a guess about the core component! Believe me, few succeeded...
My grandmother belonged to that generation of ladies who never really needed a recipe to cook. They did everything off the top of their heads. And silly, foolish, immersed in academics me never bothered to ask her either...And so the recipe for the perfect pumpkin ice cream, instead of being passed on to me, passed away with my grandmother...
A couple of times in the past I did try to make pumpkin ice cream. But either I could clearly SEE pumpkin strands embedded in the ice cream or worse I could taste boiled pumpkin, which was not supposed to be the case at all...So I had given up.
This morning I did not have a very busy Skype class schedule and that pumpkin in the fridge was grating on my nerves, with its clearly printed super market price sticker. Pumpkins are expensive here! The Internet did not yield a satisfactory recipe because every American pumpkin ice cream recipe had cinnamon and other similar spices! We use cinnamon in our curries and biryanis, rarely in our desserts...I decided to make up a recipe as I went along..
So I asked my house help to skin the poor pumpkin and chop it up. She kept complaining how tough it had become...well, it had been aged to perfection! It was finally ready to be boiled, then pureed and mixed into the milky concoction. After simmering the whole mixture for quite a while and then cooling it, it was finally ready for freezing.
                                                 
                                           Bubbling merrily away in all its golden glory...   

I wanted to play the guessing game with my son but I realized that I had given away the secret on the family WhatsApp group, which he read after coming home from school. I tend to forget he's on that group because he has only recently been allowed to use WhatsApp, albeit only from home.
 Post dinner I scooped up some ice cream for myself in a glass bowl. It was amazing, though it still needed a bit more time to freeze firmly, but it certainly brought my grandmother and those long gone days to mind.. But my son was very skeptical and took just a spoonful of the ice cream to begin with. Needless to say, he LOVED it and came back with a huge bowlful. GenNext had become successfully addicted to this nutrient dense, rich ice cream.
  My sister wanted the recipe immediately and I told her I planned to write up the story on my blog and would share the recipe there too. So here it is! I've never shared a recipe in the last six and a half years of blogging simply because there are people better qualified to do so out there but I really couldn't get anything good for the Indian version of this ice cream and so I modified my Kulfi recipe!

Ingredients
Whole Milk: 1 litre
Condensed Milk: 1 can
Saffron: A few strands
Cardamom: A few green pods
Pumpkin: 400 gms approximately.The bright orange one, skinned, deseeded, chopped, boiled and pureed finely, when cool.

Method
Boil the milk in a heavy bottomed pan and let it simmer for around thirty minutes. Add all the condensed milk, along with the saffron and cardamom and keep stirring. When the quantity reduces to three fourths of the original, add the pumpkin mix and keep stirring. Let it simmer for at least thirty to forty minutes more, until you actually see it becoming thicker and creamier.
Remove from flame and allow it to cool completely. Pour it into the vessel or box you want to freeze it in. After a few hours, take it out from the freezer, scoop it up and let the rich, smooth, creamy goodness trickle down your throat! There will be no ice crystals if you have done it right. And yes, allow folks to try it out and play the game with them! That's actually the icing on the cake... I mean the topping on the ice cream!


                                               
Home made pumpkin ice cream, anyone?



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