Jain Spirit 2001 12 No 09

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 43

Reservoirs of Wisdom
polished floors of black and white marble, and heavily carved grandmother relaxed in her kitchen. I can see her sitting teak furniture. The cool quiet was broken only by the gentle, cross-legged on the kitchen floor, her small frame backlit by rhythmic sound of a great fan that turned slowly overhead. As sunshine leaking into the room from the blistering Bombay we left, he pressed a stainless steel pocket knife in the shape of afternoon outside. The servants have finished the washing a finely scaled fish into my hand. The fish could be worn as a up and the kitchen has been restored to order, cleanliness pendant without anyone knowing it contained a sharp little and calm after the messy hubbub of three women cooking a knife under its skin. It bore the imprint TATA STEEL on one of ten-course meal for fourteen family members. Motiba is its sides. As he placed the small knife in my palm he said, speaking to me in Hindi, saying, "Hum nehin jayenge. Hum "Remember, money can be made and lost, but an education can Bharat mein rehenge." Invoking her status as a respected never be taken from you." Awed by the apparent wealth of this elder addressing a much younger person, she used the Hindi man, I found it hard to interpret the wisdom of his words. I version of the "royal we" saying, "We are not going. We are supposed he meant that education could be a sort of consolation staying in India." We've been talking about my aunt's prize if you didn't have money. If you couldn't be rich, at least proposal that Motiba emigrate to America, where her later you could be smart. I still have the knife.
years can be graced by a more comfortable lifestyle. She What I knew best about Motiba were all the things about | bobs her head from side to side in that curious Indian her that didn't need to be told to me. The graceful beauty of her gesture that can mean either "Yes" or "No" or even “Yes long, tapered hands, for example: hands
and No." Tears stream down her that soothed a feverish forehead as no one
cheeks. Motiba is weeping not else's could; hands that coaxed every last "In the kitchen, saris were because she's upset about the drop of juice out of an orange; hands that
prospect of moving to America but could roll out a perfectly round chapatti in allowed to slip immodestly off because she is engaging in one of her less than a minute flat. Motiba spoke no
favourite pastimes. In front of her on more than five or ten words in English. heads and all manner of gossip the floor is a bowl of tiny green As a child, I spoke very little Gujarati, her
chillies, their small size inversely native tongue. So we conversed in a sort
was bandied about with proportionate to the wallop they pack. of private, pidgin language of our own.
Motiba selects one of these emerald Mostly our communication took place in
impunity."
jewels, lifts it delicately by the stem, a continuum of pure emotion, punctuated
and dips it into a small bowl of coarse by soothing clicks of the tongue or
salt. Then she pops the whole thing shushing of the lips.
into her mouth, biting it off just where the stem emerges These exchanges invariably took place in the kitchen, the from the dangerous flesh. Fresh tears spring from her eyes. one room in the house that was off-limits to men. In this "Bahu saras chhe! Bahu saras chhe!" she exclaims in exclusively female zone, Motiba reigned supreme. The men in Gujarati. "It's so good! It's so good!" I sit gape-mouthed the family were more or less kept in the dark about exactly what in front of her, marvelling that such pain can bring so much went on in the kitchen. My sense, even as a child was that as pleasure. "Joie chhe?" she asks me smiling impishly long as food was delivered when and as expected to the dining through her tears and extending one of the lethal little green room, the men had no call to interfere. In the kitchen, saris devils in my direction. "No, no! It's too hot!" I say, leaping were allowed to slip immodestly off heads and all manner of up and jumping back several feet. She laughs, wipes her gossip was bandied about with impunity. Much of the work of tears away with the back of her hand, and tells me that when mixing, chopping and kneading took place on the floor. I grow up my tastes will change. 2 Children ran freely in and out, picking their way through an obstacle course of rolling pins, trays of vegetables, bowls of condiments. Sometimes there were upsets, as on the occasion © 2000, Mira Kamdar. when my then eighteen-month-old sister Devyani caught the overhanging lip of a beaten brass charger with her foot and sent Mira Kamdar lives in USA a couple of quarts of dokhla batter right onto the floor. It had and isthe author of taken over twenty-four hours for the batter to ferment to the "Motiba's Tattoos" proper consistency. There was no way to quickly whip up a available worldwide from substitute. Motiba darted over to the site of the accident, Amazon. The book is serialised scooped up the spilled batter with her bare hands, put as much in Jain Spirit and the second
Motiba's Tattoos of it as possible back into the bowl and said, "What the men part will appear in the next don't know won't hurt them."
issue. It is published by Meal preparation consumed hours of Motiba's time, but in Public Affairs, the lulls after breakfast and especially after lunch my New York, 1999.
AKA HOA R
December 2001 - February 2002. Jain Spirit
39
Jain Education Interational