The desire of food

I remember the first time I met my husband’s (then boyfriend) mother like it was last week. A memory that is etched in my mind because of its equal parts significance and embarrassment. It was Tamil New Year, and one of those Indian holidays where you feast like there’s no tomorrow. I had been promised good food, the best I’d had since living in Bangalore, a chance to meet his family, and even though it might be awkward, it was something that needed to be done. Plus, I wanted to meet these people I’d heard so much about. Even if they hadn’t heard about me.

As I sat on the back of his motorcycle, wearing my nicest salwar kameez, on the way to his apartment, I asked what he’d told his mother.

“That I was bringing a friend.” He said over his shoulder. “From the office.”

I knew from our previous conversations about dating, there was no word for “dating” in Tamil, his mother tongue. That the concept of dating was foreign to his parents who had met on their wedding day. That especially, in small towns, like the one he was from, things were just done a certain way. I understood, myself being from a small town in the foothills of Appalachia. Things were just the way they’d been done for years.

So I was just a friend. In a lot of ways that made things easier. I would not be perceived as shattering the dreams of his mother whose potential brides he was constantly refusing to meet. Or a threat to their way of life and tradition to her son I’d been seeing for at least six months at this point.

As we went inside his apartment, the air was filled with spices, the sound of twin pressure cookers whistling their journey towards done, and the light bickering of his grandmother and mother, two women who’d coexisted for decades together. They said hi to me and then the three of them spoke in Tamil together, while I stood awkwardly on the sidelines, smiling as if I knew what was happening. Eventually we sat on the floor and ate together. The food, indeed, was what he had promised. Amazing but simple. A complexity of flavors not overwhelmed by spice. Vegetables and lentils and ghee doing that magic dance on my tongue where they joined hands, bowed together, and then went their separate ways.

I sat there, trying to jump in with comments on how delicious the food was now and then. But his grandmother didn’t speak English at all. His mother and I stumbled through each other’s accents. And then apparently, Prabhu had been cooking up his own plan this entire time and announced he was going to take a nap.

I’m not sure if my eyes betrayed the panic that leapt up at every pulse point, banged those cooking pots in my brain, emptied my mind of every topic that I had ever relied on to have small talk. The traitor didn’t even look at me as he picked up his plate and walked toward the bedroom. And shut the door.

I smiled like a crazy person at these two women who were speaking between themselves. What could we discuss? What was within limits of being a friend from the office.

Food. Cooking. Common ground. We all ate. And it was so apropos.

“So Prabhu told me you don’t cook with onions and garlic. Why is that?” I asked this casual question because I, like them, was vegetarian. I got the ethical, and all other aspects, of being vegetarian. But what had perplexed me was why in his particular caste and community they eschewed the beloved onion and garlic.

“Oh…” his mother looked thoughtful. “Because they increase desire.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Clearly this must just be some simple issue of word choice.

“They increase the heat in the body. They cause desire.”

“Desire for what?” I asked, sipping the delicious South Indian coffee that was a mere three inches tall. What I really wanted to know was if I could have another cup without seeming greedy.

His mother said something to his grandmother and they murmured back and forth.

“Loving feelings. Heat in the body. You know, desire.”

And at this I spit out my coffee.

She looked at her mother and more murmuring about why I would ask such a thing. She’s quite dense, isn’t she? That look said. Why does she keep asking us about desire? The murmur said. Is she sleeping with my son? The side eye said.

This is what I got for trying to have small talk with the man’s mother, who of course, I had heat and desire for, and at all costs needed to hide it. The most awkward conversation possible with a woman who I wanted to approve of me.

“Oh, uh…So tell me how you cooked the aubergine,” I asked quickly, trying to pull a hood over the idea of desire and not have her look at me with the obvious suspicion she must have already. She’d basically found the most tactful way possible of not saying, “It makes you want to jump someone’s bones.”

She explained the process for cooking the eggplant, and I kept wondering about how garlic and onion, the two stinkiest vegetables on the planet, were supposed to incite passion. Then I thought about the Italians. And that summer in college I spent two weeks in Rome, amazed at the amount of cat calling that could be thrust upon a person. Maybe this garlic and onion desire thing was something.

So I went down the internet rabbit hole trying to find this out. Turns out there is a belief in Buddhism, that you can’t eat “pungent vegetables” which include garlic and onion, and some pretty interesting Reddit threads. (Not to mention an article where someone said salad was a turn on. Uh…")

The next time his mother refused to eat something that caused desire, I was married to her son, we were sitting in our apartment when she’d come to visit, and I’d given her some wasabi peas to try.

She ate two and then tossed the rest of them.

“You don’t like them?” I asked.

“They produce heat in the body.”

Got it. Now I knew. No more questions.

But really…wasabi peas?