Bhavana K Achamma’s Nilava Pachadi Recipe

Achamma’s Nilava

Pachadi Recipe Bhavana Kunnath, 2021

1. Wash tomatoes and leave them in the sun for 3 days. When I first went back to India I had forgotten most of my Telugu. My Ammamma’s 1 house was tiny —no bigger than two classrooms— and hanging from its kitchen door frame was a swing made out of an old sari for my baby cousin. When the baby was in it, it was untouchable, but when it was empty it was open for conquest and the source of many a battle between me and my fouryear-old cousins. I eventually established my dominance over the swing by threatening to grind them all into tomato pachadi; it was an empty threat and one met with many giggles but they backed off nonetheless. I spent many days holding on tightly to one uncle or another from the backseat of their motorcycles and drinking Horlicks milk with Nithin annaya and “S.S. Winnie” (I only found out many years later that her name was actually Yashasvini). When we left my Ammamma’s house to visit the holy city of Shirdi we stayed in a hotel with a large grassy courtyard where I ran around with Nithin annaya 2 . Our mothers, tired of chasing us, would point up to the moon and spin stories of a great snake that came out at night and ate the moon away bit by bit… a snake that would eat little children too if they weren’t inside and fast asleep. 2. Cut tomatoes into pieces. Add salt and tamarind powder. Set aside for 3 days.

Every visit after that (there have only been a few) started out the same way: we spent a few weeks in my Achamma’s 3 house with my dad’s side of the family, with aging aunts and uncles in the tight and dusty rooms. The only children on their side lived far away in Bhandar, so my afternoons were spent being dragged through the streets of the lively city of Hyderabad visiting temples, offices, and distant relatives always asking the same questions. The air always smelled of exhaust in the city and the streets were never safe to step on with the wandering cows, the strays, the poor, the dung, the potholes, and the puddles, but I always felt that Alwal, that little corner of the grand home of the Charminar, was one of the only places on the planet where you could find a mosque, a temple, and a church at the same intersection. Every time I visited, my Achamma’s and aunties’ eyes always looked at me the same way. With us, youth returned to their stuffy, fading apartment and for a moment my Achamma didn’t have to watch as her own children grew old and grey. After those few weeks, I was whisked away to Vijayawada where my mom’s side lived with twenty people squeezed into one tiny house. There were cousins, aunts, uncles, wives, husbands, and a kitchen that was always alive with noise and movement. My Peddamma 4 had brought my cousins down to visit me there and she pulled Ammu (Yashasvini) and I aside.

She walked us down the streets to the man with a basketful of painted chicks. That day (much to my mother’s chagrin) we came back home with two little tweeting bundles of pink and blue—Ram and Krishna—who insisted on leaving little brown gifts all over the floor. That summer we chased the chicks around the house and played with the neighbor’s girls and fanned each other through the power outages. When the river flooded and water rose up reaching the doorway of the houses on their stone stilts we built paper boats and sent them sailing in the muck. 3. Squeeze the juice out of the tomatoes. Add some tamarind (unground) to the juice and leave it in the sun for 3-4 days along with the tomato pieces (but not long enough for it to smell).

I’ve always felt that there are only two valid reasons for anyone to visit India: religion and family; any other reason was only applicable for tourists who don’t know any better. My parents always ran roughshod over us dragging us from one temple to another. In the end, I think we spent more time standing barefoot in lines than we actually did praying because the lines lasted for hours and sometimes even days, but the actual darshan 5 was never more than two minutes. The daily power outages left my brother and me to suffer many a sweltering night. India has the kind of heat that rises up from the earth and makes the air dance, the kind that burns like the hands of an angry sun breathing flames onto scorching temple tiles, the kind that leaves boils on the skin of young children. If there’s such a thing

From Above, Bhavana Kunnath, 2021

as hell on Earth I think I’d find it in India. But there was always one thing that made the hellishness of the environment bearable: food. All the pain I suffered languishing from sticky sweat and broiling heat dissipated at lunch; when the taste of my aunt’s tomato pappu 6 and my Achamma’s tomato pachadi touched my tongue I found in their food indescribable bliss. By the time our two weeks in Hyderabad were up the jar of pachadi was empty. As I slept in the grimy top bunk of

the train carrying me away, America seemed so distant it was wiped off of my mental map entirely. In the middle of jostling crowds, lively music, roaring street vendors, the sizzle of chaat, the ringing of temple bells, the hum of the adhan broadcast for the whole town, the incessant honking, and the shouts ringing out in Telugu and Hindi, America melted away into a dream I wasn’t sure I had. I tasted love in the fresh jar of pachadi waiting for me when I came back a few weeks later. 4. Put the tomatoes back in the juice The last time I went to India it had been five years since my last visit. My Ammamma and Ammu were waiting for us in Guntur where most of my mother’s family had moved. In Guntur my life was filled with noise by three toddling cousins running circles around me, a Supriya akka 7 who was the older sister I always wanted to be, and Ammu who was the younger sister I’d always wanted, at least twenty riotous aunts and uncles bringing even more children on their visits, and an Ammamma with all three of her sisters (that’s four Ammammas in total) in tow. Some evenings Ammu and I would play chef in the kitchen and make Maggi for all of our cousins, then we’d all gather around —sometimes there were only five us, sometimes as many as ten— and we’d sit on the cool floor slurping the noodles and iggling at the steam rising up out of our bowls. We never really needed to make the Maggi, with four Ammamma’s crooning over us at any given moment we were never wanting for food, but we did anyway because those evenings in the kitchen seemed to sow closed all the time we’d lost apart. There was something in my cousins’ eyes that made them more innocent, something that I just couldn’t remember seeing in the eyes of my American friends. Part of it was a spark, an endless of pachadi waiting for me when I came back a few weeks later. 4. Put the tomatoes back in the juice.

The last time I went to India, it had been five years since my previous visit. My Ammamma and Ammu were waiting for us in Guntur where most of my mother’s family had moved. In Guntur, my life was filled with noise by three toddling cousins running circles around me, Supriya akka 7 (who was the older sister I always wanted to be), and Ammu (who was the younger sister I’d always wanted), at least twenty riotous aunts and uncles bringing even more children on their visits, and an Ammamma with all three of her sisters in tow (that’s four Ammammas in total). Some evenings Ammu and I would play chef in the kitchen and make Maggi for all of our cousins, then we’d all gather around -

sometimes there were only five us, sometimes as many as ten—and we’d sit on the cool floor slurping the noodles and giggling at the steam rising up out of our bowls. We never really needed to make the Maggi— with four Ammamma’s crooning over us at any given moment we were never wanting for food— but we did anyway because those evenings in the kitchen seemed to sew closed all the time we’d lost apart. There was something in my cousins’ eyes that made them more innocent, something that I just couldn’t remember seeing in the eyes of my American friends. Part of it was a spark, an endless fascination that persisted where I had only accustomed apathy to offer. It was the spark in their eyes when they spotted an escalator or an elevator in a public building, in their voices when they dragged me excitedly to ride the “lift” up and down, and in their screams when they were at the top of the “Giant Wheel” at the fair. But the spark was only ever part of the wonder of it all. 5. Lightly cook fenugreek and add it to the tomatoes. Add chili powder, mustard powder, fenugreek powder, and asafoetida.

Sometimes my younger attas7 and my akkas and Ammu would gather around in a circle to play a game. Often they wound up pushing me to sing a song or talk to them in English, “I’ll understand,” Supriya akka always insisted. But American English isn’t English so much as it is its own beast, and when it’s tumbling out of a familiar mouth it’s barely understandable. Simple conversations were easy enough with a suppressed accent but in that rare moment when English slipped out glory in a harsh exchange between my little brother and I, it was well beyond the comprehension of my akka’s English classes (and perhaps that was for the best). For the most part, I insisted that I hadn’t come to India to speak in English and I tucked away my American accent behind a flailing Telugu tongue. Once Supriya akka came home with manchuria and fed Ammu, Dileep, and I like we were children. I’ve chased the taste of that manchuria throughout America, but I have never found a version in any restaurant that tasted as good, as right, as that first bite she fed me. But it was Ammu who went with me everywhere I went and, though she was a year younger than me, the two of us were something like long lost twins. We would tell each other riddles that the other couldn’t solve and played the same games over and over again.

The night I left Guntur we were both inconsolable. I think it was because we both knew that all of the fizzling phone calls in the world couldn’t bridge the gap between our continents. 6. Add in Thalimpu or Blooming Spices— a combination of cumin, coriander, fennel, mustard seeds, urad dal, dried red chilies, asafoetida, yellow split lentil cooked for a few minutes in oil.

The last time I went to India was the first time I visited Kerala. Both sides of my family harkened back to Kerala, but our connections there had strained into an echo when my grandfathers moved to Andhra8. Though every drop of blood in my veins (and the veins of my parents and their parents) was 100% Malyali9, there are few among my family members who can actually speak Malayalam; for the most part, they consider themselves Telugu people. My parents often found themselves lamenting over a language that had failed to pass on to them, a culture

gotten to live, but I found solace in their pain because their loss was akin to my struggle to hold on to my little Telugu window into India. There was a restless peace in our mutual struggles. There was a restless peace in Kerala.

It was the land of the coconut trees and the endless storms. Wild peacocks flitted to and fro beneath the ocean of towering trees that surrounded the houses and the constant rain was like a lullaby that had the unfortunate effect of turning the roads into red sludge. We stayed there with some distant cousins on my father’s side who showed us my Achamma’s childhood home and her former school. They led us deep into the woods to visit some relatives none of us knew and they proudly showed us their sprawling farms. Houses in Kerala are beautiful and out of place, always emerging suddenly from the trees, but this one was altogether different because it was tucked away within the hills. They showed us the jackfruit and the bananas and our family’s ancestral god waiting at the treeline, but it was what they didn’t mention that haunted me most of all. Just beyond the steps of their front door was a jungle. The trees were thick and inescapable, vines toppled from somewhere above, rain drenched every corner, it was opaque in vastness, and it ignited every primal urge encoded in my DNA. I was lost to that jungle and that jungle was lost to me. 7. It should be more solid than liquid. Store it in a jar— it can keep for many weeks. The last time I went to India I watched my Ammamma play with my baby cousins. I watched Koushik run circles around her with Pranathi not far behind on her tricycle and I watched Dimple gurgle in her arms. She had just finished her work in the kitchen and sat down to rest her aching feet, but now she was up and on them again chasing the little demons down the hallway. She had just finished her work in the kitchen and sat down to rest it in a jar— it can keep for many weeks.

The last time I went to India I watched my Ammamma play with my baby cousins. I watched Koushik run circles around her with Pranathi not far behind on her tricycle, and I watched Dimple gurgle in her arms. She had just finished her work in the kitchen and sat down to rest her aching feet, but now She had she was up and on them again chasing the little demons down the hallway. She laughed so deeply and heartily and the laughter burned like warm sunshine in her eyes. I saw her laugh there like she never had on her visits to America. And what was wrong with America? The sofas were soft, the bed never needed to be shared, there were appliances enough to do the work, there were channels enough to pass the time, there was heating and cooling and cars and western toilets. “The houses are so far apart!” my Ammamma had once exclaimed as she struggled to find the words to describe America to the rest of our family. The houses are far apart. The houses, the cars, the people— they’re all so far apart. They’re right next door but they’re unreachable. “It’s so cold!” It is cold. Georgia summers are fiery, but India is a taste of hell. American people are so warm, but sitting there in India with a full house, with houses crammed next to and on top of eachother, with motorcycles and autos honking in your ears, and too many children piled on too little a mattress, America is not warm enough. Sitting in

the airplane on the way home with a jar of my Achamma’s pachadi sealed away in my luggage, America is not enough. 8. Enjoy.

Charminar, Bhavana Kunnath, 2021

Endnotes

1. Maternal grandmother; mother’s mother 2. Older Brother 3. Paternal grandmother; father’s mother 4. Mother’s older sister 5. Opportunity to see a deity 6. Dal; lentil dish 7. Older sister, in this case reference to older cousins 8. In this case the wife of my mother’s younger brother 9. A state in India that was divided into Andhra and Telangana a few years ago; the predominant language is Telugu 10.The language spoken in Kerala; can also be used to refer to their culture