Writing as Therapy

South Indian Green Beans with Coconut

Reading a post recently on letter writing on The Global Jigsaw, another Substack publication, got me thinking about my own letter writing experiences, and took me down this particular rabbit hole - well, two, actually, one personal, and the other professional. I’ll start with the personal.

It was always at lunch time that we received our mail at boarding school. We’d enter the dining hall single file, and walk to our tables. I was at a table with 5 other girls, a rectangular table, and I sat at one of the longer sides of the rectangle. My mail, when I had some, was on the left hand side of my plate. And every day, my first glance as the table came into view around the corner from the door, was to see if I had any mail. And I very frequently did. Because letter writing was a part of the weekly schedule of most people I knew. For my father, it was a ritual every Thursday afternoon, along with the weekly ironing (I kid you not; he still does the ironing). Why Thursday? Because it was the start of the weekend when we were in Yemen.

My mail came in three kinds – inland letters from around India. I had several people who would send me inland letters, with two being particularly frequent – one a cousin and one a friend; there’d be something from them every two weeks – the weeks off were when I wrote back. Then there were the inlands from my grandfather. I desperately wish I still had those.

An inland letter today; in 1985, it cost 35 paisa, while an aerogramme cost 5 rupees

And apart from inland letters, there were two different kinds of envelopes; one when friends or cousins in India wanted to write letters longer than inlands would permit. These would be in envelopes with Indian stamps on them. And finally, there would be the treasured envelopes with foreign stamps – most frequently Yemeni stamps, from my parents. Usually fat envelopes with letters at least a couple of pages long. Always written by my dad. Signed by my mum, too. Daddy always writes for both of us, she would say. And still does.

I didn’t have quite the ritual my dad did, but I frequently did write letters, and always responded to one I received. Couldn’t not. I had the self-stamped inlands and aerogrammes (the going-abroad version of the inlands) that my parents bought me at the start of every term so I had them in boarding school. And when I wanted to write longer letters, I’d wait till one of my aunts came to take me home for the weekend and give them to her to mail off for me with the required stamps.

I didn’t really think about what writing letters meant to me till recently. A friend of mine from college sent me a picture of a letter I’d written her after college – when I was back in Yemen with my parents. A long letter it was, and my first thought, upon reading it, was how…dare I say wise?.. I seemed for my years. How not-superficial some of my thoughts seemed to be, for a 21-year old. 

And reading it got me thinking about how letters were far more than a medium for the exchange of news, as important as that was. I mean yes, sure, news was exchanged, and it was, when I was much younger, the only easy way for news to be conveyed – didn’t have a phone in our house till I was 16 or 17, I think (although we did have one way earlier, when I was 4 or 5; 71307 was the number, have no idea how or why I remember that).

When I think about my dad’s letters to me at boarding school, yes, they were largely newsy. But. I wonder if the process of writing letters for a few hours every week did something else for him. And when I remember some of the letters I wrote back to them – they were definitely more than merely giving them an account of my weekly activities. There is this particular one I remember…I must have been 13, and Bangalore was hosting a SAARC summit that year. The planning of the event was in my face every time I left boarding school – in the form of major road repairs. Beautifying the city in every possible way. And I remember pouring my heart out in a letter – and far from just describing what I saw, I remember going into a diatribe on how hypocritical it was that they were cleaning up – just to put up a front for some foreign dignitaries.  And how repulsive it was that the country was putting so much money into planting flowers and fixing roads everywhere – when…you know….starving people? Not that the city didn’t need it, but surely there were other priorities? Now my 13-year old brain obviously didn’t understand all the complexities behind the decisions to “clean up” the city – but that is not what this is about. It is about the writing. And the depth of thought that the act of writing afforded me.

Well of course, that got me thinking about what I am doing right now. If I’m being honest, I’ve never before been particularly fond of writing in my adult life, despite having done plenty of it. Always associated it with obligation. So why is it different now? Well clearly, for one, there is no obligation with this particular project. So that aside, it would be all too easy for to give you all the possible reasons for my current infatuation with writing (which I sincerely hope is not temporary):  I am writing what I enjoy (true); I care less about what other people think (I’d be lying if I said this); I care less about doing it “right” (true); what I am writing is more meaningful (true); it is teaching me more about myself (very true)…I could go on. But the truth is that none of these things matter as much as something else – that writing is giving me a space to think.  A lot goes on in my head before I put any words to..er..screen (doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?). The process takes me to places in my head, places I haven’t been before, it allows me to breathe word combinations, it allows me, quite literally, to “change rooms in my mind” (and I appreciate, once again, the profundity of what Hafiz said centuries ago.) And this happens all the time, everywhere, as I cook, as I shower, when I am driving the kids to school and happily (if just slightly guiltily) tune them out for just a moment. It’s an escape, a time for quiet contemplation, reflection, in an all too rapid, an almost schizophrenic life where I need to constantly think about, or listen to accounts of, a million things at the same time.

And I am almost gleeful at not only how often I can, but how often I do go into this space. Gleeful because I can do so without having to carve time out of my day, time away from life. Time away, that is almost always accompanied with guilt. There is no guilt in changing rooms in my mind.

And in this space, I make connections. Connections that I didn’t see before.

And as I make connections between what I am saying now and letter writing in childhood, I can’t help but wonder how much I (or my dad) gained from the quiet we had from writing those letters. And what that quiet did for me. And for him.

And I wonder whether my children will, in the future, wonder why their grandparents spent so much time writing letters – letters I am careful to save.

The professional part of today’s rabbit hole is one I’ll be exploring for a while. As long as I have been a sociolinguist, I have been a language teacher for longer; a teacher of English as a Second/Foreign/Other/Additional language - we’ve seen acronyms come and go, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty more. And in my role as an English teacher, I’ve taught countless writing classes – all academic in focus. With rules of correctness dictated by a specific academic community – that of the western world. And I can’t help but think about how much needs to change. How much do we stifle creativity, dampen or kill enthusiasm, with our all too narrow focuses in classrooms? Oh, I know things have changed a lot, and perhaps I am talking more about the contexts in which I currently teach, where my hands are more tied than not. But I’d wager even in other contexts, not enough has changed. Second language writing research is still as rife with voices stressing accuracy (of a grammatical nature, of course) over anything else as it was decades ago. And of course, I have spoken about the disconnect between World Englishes scholarship and the English language classroom many times. So, we trivialize the writing-thinking connection that we so vehemently pay lip service to over and over, by continuing to emphasize a certain structure and accuracy, the kind of accuracy that the academy deems appropriate, above all else.  We don’t allow our students to “change rooms” in their minds, do we?

So. Our letter writing habits have changed significantly; wish I could change them back. Our teaching – or maybe my teaching – needs to change. But in terms of the recipe for today, here’s one that doesn’t need to change.

Oh, I know, my lamest segue yet, but there you have it!

South Indian green bean curry. I remember my first year as a graduate student at the University of Alabama…I invited my professor for dinner one evening. She was south Indian, spoke Tamil. I made these green beans. And remember how delighted she was at the fact that I’d used fresh beans and cut them up “properly like we used to at home.” For this particular curry, “properly” means cutting up the beans into small pieces – about ¼ of an inch or so. Because it makes for a wonderful mouthfeel. Could you not spend the time doing this? Absolutely. You can even make this curry using a bag of frozen beans– I did plenty of times during my graduate student days;  it’ll taste good, but not quite the same.

Some things shouldn’t change.

South Indian Green Beans with Coconut

Ingredients (serves 4; vegan; vegetarian; gluten-free)

1.     1lb (about 400 grams) – chopped up fine, into pieces about ¼ inch long. A trick is to bunch several beans and cut them together.

2.     3 Tbsp oil

3.     ½ Tbsp mustard seeds

4.     1 Tbsp urad dhal (the white dhal)

5.     1 Tbsp channa dhal

6.     ¼ tsp asafoetida

7.     ½ tsp turmeric

8.     2 sprigs curry leaves

9.     2 dried red chillies (or to taste)

10.  1½ tsp salt

11.  1 tsp sugar

12.  ¼ - ½  cup of water

13.  ½ to ¾ cup fresh grated coconut, or unsweetened desiccated coconut

Method

1.     Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet.

2.     When the oil is hot, add the mustard seeds. They should pop. When they start popping, turn the heat down to low.

3.     When the mustard seeds have almost finished popping (you’ll know when by the greatly reduced intensity of the popping), add the channa and urad dhals.

4.     Cook the dhals till they turn golden brown. You can slightly increase the heat as the dhals brown, but don’t allow them to brown too quickly – as this means they are done on the outside but still raw in the middle.

5.     When the dhals are a pretty golden brown, add the asafoetida, turmeric, red chillies, and curry leaves. As always, appreciate the incredible aromas in your kitchen – but stand back as the curry leaves splutter.

6.     Now add the beans, salt, and ¼ cup of water. Cook on medium heat with a lid on for about 5 minutes.

7.     After about 5 minutes, check for water at the bottom of the skillet. If there is none, add another ¼ cup of water, and continue to cook for an additional 5 minutes. At this point, taste for doneness – I like my beans to have a bit of a bite to them. Cooking time also depends on how large or small your cut beans are. If you don’t like them to have a bite, cook them for a wee bit longer, making sure they don’t burn. If you do feel they need more cooking, and if there is no water left, add a wee bit more.

8.     After a total of about 10 minutes of cooking (for my level of doneness and my size of bean pieces), add the sugar, stir, and take off the heat. Stir in the coconut.

9.     Serve hot with plain rice, ghee, and a dhal of your choice. It goes great with any of the dhal recipes I’ve given you so far.