The smell of fish being fried in mustard oil is the smell of my house on any given day. The smell would find its way into all the rooms, clinging to curtains, to my mother’s clothes and permanently settling inside my nose.
Every meal had to be accompanied by fish; there was no concept of a purely vegetarian meal. On special days there would be chicken at home. If a guest announced that she/he is vegetarian (the word used is niramish) there would be a collective gasp. No one knew how to make any pure vegetarian dishes, except for the unexciting yellow dal. My mother would apologise profusely for not being able to serve a more appetizing meal. The concept of paneer was still a novelty back then.
In my grandmother’s house while fish was a regular on the menu, chicken was a taboo meat. She would not allow chicken to be cooked in the kitchen using the vessels from her kitchen. So my uncle and cousins, who lived with her, had to take elaborate measures to cook chicken. This was always confusing for me because my grandmother was not a vegetarian. She ate pigeon meat. The goose-bumpy skin of the pigeon meat was always more repulsive to me than chicken.
My understanding of vegetarianism was a Jain idea of vegetarianism. My Jain classmates would often recoil from the occasional omelets in my lunch box. Binita, whose lunch box I often raided, would scrunch up her nose the moment I opened mine. The only food she shared with me were the pani-puris the Bihari chatwalla came to sell in front of our school during the break.
Binita’s Jain variety of vegetarian food made the food cooked in my house less exotic. The smell of ghee wafted in her house unlike the fish smell that hung in my house. The first thrashing I got from my father was when I went off to Binita’s house after school without informing my parents, tempted by the novel taste of the no onion, no garlic vegetarian food in her house.
Fish, mutton, chicken, pigeon, and duck meat were a regular part of our meals. But pork found its way on to our tables much later. My father grew up in a part of Assam where mutton, pigeon and duck meat were acceptable cuisines but pork was unacceptable. While beef was seen as a major religious transgression, pork in general was considered the unclean meat.
However, pork accompanied by rice beer was a staple in my mother’s village. My father must have had his first taste of the forbidden meat in my mother’s village. Pork which was the meat of choice for the tribal population of the state was not sold widely in the areas where mostly caste Hindus lived. It was Putli bai, the lady in-charge of cleaning in my father’s hospital, who brought pork for us surreptitiously. Now pork momos are sold in every nook and crany of any town or city one might visit in state.
Beef of course remained the forbidden meat at home. When I was in school I was once told not to hang out with my friend Bibigul because she ate cow meat. It was not beef but cow meat. I had my first taste of beef in college when we decided to explore the Tibetan settlement called Majnu Ka Tila in the Delhi University area.
Our logical progression to eating beef was never discussed at home. The only thing that really interests us now when we go back home are the various fish curries at home.
Of things lost and found 