On Choice

Masala Vadai

A more personal post this week. More social than linguistic.

Diwali. Fireworks. For the kid me, these were simple: sparklers and flowerpots. Sparklers were silver or gold, and came in two sizes, long and short. I know, very descriptive. Flowerpots were what we called these cone-shaped things that were lit on top and exploded into a fountain of sparks. Fountain might have been a better name, but flowerpots they were. Diwali also meant being awoken way earlier than we wanted, and early oil baths – baths that were preceded with copious amounts of coconut oil being massaged onto our heads and bodies. And good food. Fireworks and food made up for the early awakening and oil baths.

I don’t really remember many poojas at home during my early years. Most of my formative years were spent abroad, in Britain, and then in Yemen. I don’t remember my parents doing any poojas at home in either place. And then it was three years at a Protestant boarding school, and of course there were no poojas there. Going to the homes of aunts and cousins during weekends away from school was much more about food than anything. My current, and at best, scant knowledge of Hindu gods and goddesses came from the Amar Chitra Katha comics – the comics we’d buy stacks of before every train trip. I absolutely loved those comics – the depiction of Hindu gods and goddesses probably had a lot to do with my fascination – downright sexy, if you’ll forgive my irreverence.  Even sacrilege. But have you seen any?

See what I mean?

So it was Diwali last Thursday – when last I posted a piece here. Honestly, I didn’t remember that it was going to be Diwali till, as usual, my parents wrote a couple of days earlier and asked me to buy something metal for the day before Diwali. Something called Dhanteras. I don’t know why.

All of last Thursday, before I published my piece, I struggled with the fact that I hadn’t devoted that week’s account to the festival of lights. Guilt niggled away at me. Because I don’t more actively try and remember Indian festivals and celebrate them – as a means of sharing Indian culture with my children. Because I am bringing up my children to be less Indian than perhaps I “should”. And this, I think, is something a lot of third-culture kids go through.

Or perhaps I would just like to think so – to give myself a way out.

So why don’t I bring my kids up to be more Indian? Because a lot of what I associate with being Indian is entwined with religion. Being Hindu. And religion for me brings up two emotions: fear and guilt.

The fear thing started early. Started with seemingly mundane superstitions that my brother and I would laugh about – dos and don’ts. Don’t cut your hair on a Tuesday or a Friday; don’t cut your nails after dark. And then lots of rituals. Washing an idol with milk and yoghurt. Keeping an oil lamp lit all the time. Now while some of these things might well have had logical beginnings, the cutting nails before nightfall, for example, they always seemed to be presented with a missing or else after them. Our sword of Damocles. Or many of them.

And later these…shall we call them traditions?  Graduated from being merely secret-smile-inducing for my brother and me into something more pernicious; something fear and guilt-inducing (largely self-imposed, as the system had been internalized) if I didn’t do something – light lamps in front of idols, for example. And one year, when I had had a particularly emotionally difficult year in Alabama, fear and guilt over the possibility (probability, even?) that my difficulties stemmed from my not having gone on a family pilgrimage to a certain holy city in India during my visit there the previous summer. I had refused.  And therefore, I surmised, I was being punished.

Made damn sure I went on that trip the next time I visited India.

Today, there is a lot I don’t do. And it has taken me almost five decades to feel secure enough in myself to not participate, to allow myself the choice to not participate as opposed to tacitly belong to a certain space, a culture, one replete with reproducible practices, and blindly reproduce them.

So why the guilt?

Well back to being a third-culture kid raising kids of her own. (Which would make my kids fourth culture kids – since my husband is American?)  We celebrate Christmas – but it has nothing to do with religion. We celebrate Halloween because, well, candy. It gives us an excuse to let the kids, for that one day, eat as much as they want. (And no, I don’t think celebrating these two holidays is as simple as my succumbing to the lure and ease of capitalism. Diwali is plenty commercial today.)

So the nagging voice in my head yelled at me all day last week that I don’t celebrate anything Indian. But the simple fact is that we don’t celebrate anything religious. And anything celebratory for an Indian who looks to inculcating some appreciation for Indian culture in her kids seems to be about religion. And for me, more and more, it is clear that organized religion of any kind favors exclusion. Based on the principle of “I’m better than you”.  Or you are not worthy because you don’t believe. Or even worse, you are not worthy. Period. So believe and become worthy. My husband not being allowed inside one of the Hindu temples we visited as part of our wedding trip to South India; my brother and I being allowed, asked, encouraged, to sing in Catholic church choirs when we were kids. We had good voices. But having to sit alone when all the other choir members went to receive communion. South Indian Brahmins (because plenty of Brahmins eat meat, remember?) believing in a sathvic diet – one that raises our consciousness. So someone not following a sathvic diet is somehow less conscious, then? And heaven and hell? I mean.

But my distaste for religion runs far deeper than the personal. The atrocities committed in the name of religion, all over the world, for centuries. The rise of religious nationalism, fundamentalism, across the world. Right now, in India, the Hindutva ideology that is not only pervasive but also being actively propagated by those currently in power. To further the agenda of making India a Hindu nation, and a very distinct brand of Hinduism. As intolerant as it gets.

According to Hindu myth, we are in the Kali Yuga at the moment, the fourth and worst of world ages. A time full of chaos and strife and discord. Ironic that most of it is caused by religion. And then of course, the belief is that Vishnu will come down to clean things up.

Well, stick around and he may show. I don’t know.

Yes, that line happened because I was listening to the Beatles this morning. Thought this piece needed a little levity.

But. I’m not entirely about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Hindu myth has many admirable figures. A remover of obstacles, a destroyer of evil, many kick-ass women deities.  And my children will learn a little about them when I am more comfortable with the blood and gore common in a lot of Hindu myth.

So for now, the Indianness my kids get is mainly from food. And music, which even though it is steeped in religion, is still music. They are exposed to classical Indian music – of both the Karnatic and Hindustani varieties because the music is beautiful. And clothing and jewelry. And oil baths. And rangolis because my kids love art. Superficial perhaps. But deeper connections can be made later – by choice.

And so because of food, at the end of the day, we did celebrate Diwali last Thursday. I made two Indian sweets (which both kids devoured), and spent a couple of hours outside with my daughter, working on a huge rangoli.  And my children learned something about my Indianness.

And as I was finishing this piece this morning, I turned my attention to the news for a few minutes. Read an article on CNN about an Indian river being so polluted that it was spewing toxic white foam. The river Yamuna, a tributary of the most holy Ganges. And pilgrims continued to bathe in the toxic waste. Because we really don’t have “many options”, they said. It is a ritual we must do. Yeah. No choice.

I wonder if this is why I am so interested in food, in Indian food. Because it connects me to home in a way that little else does. Something I associate with every Indian festival, including Diwali, is the vadai (/ʋɑɖɑɪ/). There are loads of different kinds of vadais, more commonly known as vadas (/ʋɑɖɑ/), because vadai is a Tamil word, and vada, a Hindi one. The kind of vadai associated with Hindu festivals is the masala vadai (/mɑsɑːlɑ ʋɑɖɑɪ/), also known as a parippu vadai (/pɑɾɨppɨ ʋɑɖɑɪ/)in Tamil, made mainly of lentils, or parippu. Now the sathvic variety of the masala vadai would most certainly not contain onions, but I give you today, the non-sathvic variety. The masala vadai with plenty of onions. Because onions just make it so much better.

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Masala Vadai

Ingredients (makes around 30 vadais; vegetarian; vegan; gluten-free)

1.     1 cup channa dhal

2.     ¼ cup urad dhal

3.     ¼ cup toor dhal

4.     2-3 red chillies, or more if you want it spicier

5.     ½ Tbsp cumin seeds

6.     1 Tbsp finely chopped ginger

7.     3 sprigs of curry leaves

8.     3 squeezes of asafoetida

9.     ¾ cup of fresh grated coconut or unsweetened, desiccated coconut

10.  ½ cup cilantro

11.  2 tsp salt

12.  1 cup finely diced onion

13.  Oil for frying

Method

1.     Rinse the channa dhal, toor dhal, urad dhal,  and then soak them all (in enough water to cover all the dhal) with the red chillies. Allow the dhal mixture to soak for about 2 hours.

2.     Put the soaked dhals and chillies in a food processor. Do not add any of the soaking liquid. Grind together to a coarse consistency. If you don’t have a food processor, you can use a blender, but use as little water as possible; the vadai mixture should be coarse and not watery at all.

3.     For the last 30 seconds of grinding, add the cumin seeds, ginger, curry leaves, asafoetida, cilantro, salt, and coconut. Pulse till everything comes together – it should be a coarse mixture.

4.     Add the chopped onion and chopped cilantro to the ground mixture. See if you can make balls with the mixture – and if the balls retain their shape. If you think the mixture is too watery to hold a shape, add 1-2 tbsp of chickpea flour or rice flour to help the mixture come together.

5.     Make balls that are about 1 inch in diameter. Flatten the balls with your fingers till you get discs that are about 1 ½ inches in diameter.

6.     Fry on medium heat for about 5 minutes, till crisp on the outside, and a beautiful golden-brown.

7.     Serve hot!