Lela: “Mommy, what is this? I don’t like it.”
Me: “You haven’t even tried it yet.”
Lela stares at the plate of saag paneer, trying to come up with a better way to make me sway from my position. Here is what she came up with: “Yeah, but I don’t like it. I want spaghetti.” Compelling argument …
It was in one of these dinnertime moments that I had a haunting vision of Lela some day sitting in a classroom next to a non-Indian kid who loves saag paneer and Lela asking him, with her nose wrinkled and brow furled, “Saag paneer? What’s that?” I could not stand the thought of my half-Indian-blooded child knowing less about Indian food than some random kid: How can the child of the Indian parent know nothing about her culture? (This is what I imagine the other kid’s parents would whisper behind my back in disapproving tones.) And while the scene in my head is probably somewhat over-dramatized, it did make me realize that I was not doing my job as a parent in the way I intended. I had taken for granted that she would just know this stuff, because, well, I knew this stuff when I was a kid … I never considered why I knew what I knew.
“Dhal, roti, sabzi again?” This thought frequently passed through my little Indian American brain when I was a child, only because my mother, in typical Indian-mother fashion, cooked dinner from scratch about 5 or 6 nights a week, even after working and carting myself and my brother around to our various college-application-building activities. Rather than appreciating her culinary finesse or the delicious Indian food she put on the table every night, I wished I could just have chicken and mashed potatoes like my friends at school. However, what I didn’t realize was that by making Indian food for us every night, my mother was inadvertently passing on to me a tradition of flavors and tastes that I otherwise would have lost by being raised in America. (During my childhood in the ’80s and all decades previous to that, America was not the great foodie menagerie it is today but rather “the great land of meat and potatoes with a side of peas and carrots.”) I had a palate for Indian food. I knew about the variety of dishes and regional flavors because I was exposed to them on a daily basis; they were shared with me as a part of my identity (you are Indian, you eat Indian food).
Food is such a tangible and universal way to experience and understand a culture – we all have to eat, right? Food tells the history, celebrates the traditions and tastes of the Earth that define the heart of a culture. Growing up in a household of mixed cultures, Lela is exposed to many foods and flavors – however, if I wanted to use food as a way for her to connect to her Indian heritage, I needed to make it a part of her life on a regular basis.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t been cooking Indian food consistently up to that point – and by consistently, I mean once a week. After some consideration, I think it may have something to do with feeling like everything had to be made from scratch, because that is how my mother did it. This came with a self-imposed implication that if the food weren’t made from scratch, I was somehow cheating and not a “real Indian.” However, the shame of my child not knowing anything about Indian food outweighed the shame of not being a “real Indian” and I delved into the world of jarred sauces and store-bought naan. After a lot of trial and error of mediocre Indian meals, I finally discovered Maya Kaimal’s sauces at Whole Foods: organic, fresh and really authentic. Now, one of Lela’s favorite meals consists of coconut fish curry and basmati rice.
We have yet to conquer saag, but at least now Lela is no stranger to Indian food. In fact, when I asked her what restaurant she wanted to go to for her birthday dinner, she responded, “An Indian restaurant.”
I looked at her, pleased, but puzzled. “Indian?” I asked. “Are you sure? We can go to any restaurant you want.”
“Indian,” she said, and then, without missing a beat or taking a breath: “Actually, I want a hotdog.”
It seems our culinary adventures have only just begun …
