Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India Read online

  Acclaim for Madhur Jaffrey's

  CLIMBING THE MANGO TREES

  “A lyrical writer.”

  —

  “A superb example of the happy new trend of food memoirs.”

  “There is some rough history here … but also secret ancestral recipes and luscious tales of picnics in the Himalayas…. With such earthly pleasures, heaven can wait.”

  “Her memoirs are an honest and clear account of a significant time in Indian history, seen though the eyes of a normal—and hungry—Indian teenager.”

  —

  “A vivid and compelling look at [Jaffrey's] childhood in 1930s and 1940s India.”

  — (New Hampshire)

  “An enchanting and heady mix of childhood stories and recipes … each presented in vignette form and packed full of long-savored foods and magical moments.”

  magazine

  “This book is a snapshot of a distinct time in the history of India. It is written in a simple but engrossing manner. With family pictures interspersed, the reader is entertained and enlightened with every page.”

  — (Fredericksburg, Virginia)

  “Jaffrey's voice is warm and intelligent and her love for home, family, and good food all ring so true.”

  —

  Madhur Jaffrey

  Climbing the Mango Trees

  Madhur Jaffrey is the author of many previous cookbooks, including the classic An Invitation to Indian Cooking and MadhurJaffrey's Taste of the Far East, which was voted Best International Cookbook and Book of the Year for 1993 by the James Beard Foundation. She is also an award-winning actress with numerous major motion pictures to her credit. She lives in New York City.

  ALSO BY MADHUR JAFFREY

  An Invitation to Indian Cooking

  MadhurJaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking

  MadhurJaffrey's Indian Cooking

  A Taste of India

  Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook

  Madhur Jaffrey's Far Eastern Cookery

  Madhur Jaffrey's A Taste of the Far East

  Madhur Jaffrey's Spice Kitchen

  Madhur Jaffrey's Flavours of India

  Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian

  Madhur Jaffrey's Step-by-Step Cooking

  Quick and Easy Indian Cooking

  From Curries to Kebabs

  FOR CHILDREN

  Seasons of Splendour

  Market Days

  Robi Dobi: The Marvellous Adventures of an Indian Elephant

  This book is dedicated to

  Bari Bauwa and Babaji,

  my grandparents,

  for

  helping make their grandchildren who we all are,

  and

  to my daughters,

  Zia, Meera, and Sakina,

  and their cousins,

  as well as

  to my grandchildren,

  Robi, Cassius, and Jamila,

  for

  carrying on the line of the inkpot-and-quill set

  so bravely

  and innocently

  Contents

  My Family Tree

  Prologue Sweet as Honey? · Winter in Delhi: The Season of Weddings · The Caterer as Magician · Lessons in Taste

  Delhi—Old and New · Sir Edwin Lutyens and the House That Never Was · Grandfather, “Babaji” · Number 7 · The Lady in White · The Kite

  Summer Lunch · The Red Book · The Story of My Ancestors · Muslim Influence

  British Rule · The Record-Keeper · Mutiny of 1857 · The Reward

  The Freedom of Kanpur · My Mother and Father · A Fairy-Tale Marriage · A Desire to Excel

  Choosing a School · A Milky Nation: The Milk Beauty Secret and Milk for Breakfast · Our Morning Rituals · The Magic Garden

  Summer Holiday · Baby Sister · Starting School and Learning English · The Toffee Man · The Quest for Barley Sugar · My Perfect Sisters

  Fasting for My Father · Lighting Up for Diwali · An Opulent Dining Room · Chewing the Bones · Bookworms · A Role Model

  My Caring, Reticent Sister · The Useful Club · The Death of a Cousin

  Divided Loyalties · Preparing for War · Film Buffs · The Nazi Connection · Wolfie and the Gray Horse · The End of the Kanpur Idyll

  Spellbinding Shibbudada · Two Tragic Marriages · Sadness and a Conspiracy of Silence

  My Gang · Fishing, Shooting, and Swimming · The Watermelon Fields · Ear-Piercing Antiseptic

  The Drawing Room · Winter Evenings: Family, Friends, Lemonade, Nuts, and Pakors · Dining at the Long Tables

  Family Picnics in Delhi · The Art of Getting Thirty People into Two Cars · Cinema Trips · Story Time

  Summer Holidays in the Hills · The Great Exodus · Grandmother's Magic Potion · Mountain Picnics · The Taste of Ecstasy

  A New School · Classmates in Burqas · Hindi or Urdu: A Dreadful Choice · A Lethally Sharp Pencil

  Shibbudada's Favorites · Teatime Tension · A Dream House in Daurala · The Sugarcane Fields · Sweets Galore in the Sugar Factory

  Visiting the Old City · The Lane of Fried Breads · Monsoon Mushrooms

  Learning to Swim and Dance · A Haven for Musicians · Temple Dancers and Tap-Dancers · Dressing as Milkmaids · An Unhappy Teenager · The Drama of the Monsoons · Shibbudada's Quiet Cruelty · The Spring Festival of Colors

  Chicken Pox · Soup-Toast and Sewing · A Fancy-Dress Party

  Learning to Fly · School Days in Summer · Mrs. McKelvie · Discovering Drama · Fearless Amina · Art Appreciation

  The Sisters Return · A Taste of the Future · Mother's Shawls · Kamal's Illness

  The Muslim Twins · Sudha's Vegetarian Delights · Punjabi Promila · Our Shared Lunchtime Feasts · Contacting the Spirit World · The Icy Hands of Partition · Mahatma Gandhi · Spinning for India · Independence Day and the Bloody Aftermath

  Punjabi Influences · Food with New Attitude · Bazaar and Tandoori Foods · A Taste of Spam · Sunday Lunchtimes

  The Looming Banyan Tree · New School Friends and Fresh Tastes · Learning to Love Hindi · Two Types of Indians · Hated Cookery Lessons · Divine Potatoes

  Exam Season · Brain Food · The Honey-Seller · Sweetening the Mouth

  First Jobs and First Loves · Ballroom Dancing · Dressing for the Dinner Dance

  Future Planning · The Radio Station · The Last Large Picnic · Wildflower Hall and an Encounter with the Police

  Kamal's Journey · Shibbudada Interferes Again · Cookery Exam

  A Joint Family in New York · Grandfather's Decline · A Riverside Cremation

  Kamal's Return · A Gift of Coca-Cola · Sailing to a New Life · Mingling the Flavors of the Past and the Future

  Family Recipes

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Sweet as Honey? • Winter in Delhi:

  The Season of Weddings • The Caterer as

  Magician • Lessons in Taste

  I was born in my grandparents' sprawling house by the Yamuna River in Delhi. Grandmother welcomed me into this world by writing Om, which means “I am” in Sanskrit, on my tongue with a little finger dipped in honey.

  Perhaps that moment was reinforced in my tiny head a month or so later, when the family priest came to draw up my horoscope. He scribbled astrological symbols on a long scroll, and declared that my name should be “Indrani,” or “Goddess of the Heavens.” My father, who never paid religious functionaries the slightest bit of attention, firmly named me “Madhur,” which means “Sweet as Honey,” an adjective from the Sanskrit noun madhu, or “honey.” My grandfather, apparently, teased my father, saying that he should have named
me “Manbhari,” or “I am sated,” instead, as I was already the fifth child. But my father continued to procreate, and I was left with honey on my palate and in my deepest soul.

  My sweet tooth remained firmly in control until the age of four, when, emulating the passions of grown-ups, I began to explore the hot and the sour. My grandfather had built his house in what was once a thriving orchard of jujubes, mulberries, tamarinds, and mangoes. His numerous grandchildren, like hungry flocks of birds, attacked the mangoes while they were still green and sour. As grown-ups snored through the hot afternoons in rooms cooled with wetted, sweet-smelling vetiver curtains, the unsupervised children were on every branch of every mango tree, armed with a ground mixture of salt, pepper, red chilies, and roasted cumin. The older children, on the higher branches, peeled and sliced the mangoes with penknives and passed the slices down to the smaller fry on the lower branches. We would dip the slices into our spice mixture and eat, our tingling mouths telling us that we had ceased to be babies.

  Winters were another matter. That was when the vegetable garden came into its own. Around eleven each morning, between breakfast and lunch, we would be served fresh tomato juice made from our own tomatoes. At about the same time, the gardener would offer the ladies sunning themselves on the veranda a basket full of fresh peas, small kohlrabies, white radishes, and feathery chickpea shoots. Some of these we ate raw, and the rest were sent off to the kitchen after a studied appraisal (“Radishes sweeter than last year, no?”). As this was also the season when the men went hunting, the kitchen was deluged with mallards, geese, quail, partridge, and venison as well.

  Dinners were fairly generous affairs, with about forty or more members of the extended family sitting down to venison kebabs laden with cardamom, tiny quail with hints of cinnamon, chickpea shoots stir-fried with green chilies and ginger, and tiny new potatoes browned with flecks of cumin and mango powder.

  Winter was also the season of weddings. My father was always in charge of the caterers, and I was his permanent sidekick. In those days caterers had to cook at their clients' homes, and, certainly in our home, they had to cook under family supervision. So a gang of about a dozen caterers would arrive a few days before the actual wedding and set up their tent under the tamarind tree.

  First my father would examine all the raw ingredients. Were the spices “wormy”? Were there broken grains in the Basmati rice? Were the cauliflower heads taut and young?

  The outward suspicion from one side and obsequious reassurances from the other were a game that each side dutifully played. In reality, we loved these caterers, who were known for the magic in their hands. They could conjure up the lamb meatballs of our erstwhile Moghul emperors and the tamarind chutneys of the street with equal ease. One of the few dishes that they alone cooked was cauliflower stems. For one meal they would cook the cauliflower heads. Then they were left with hundreds of coarse central stems. They cleverly slit the stems into quarters and stir-fried them in giant woklike karhais with sprinklings of cumin, coriander, chilies, ginger, and lots of sour mango powder. All I had to do was place a stem in my mouth, clamp down with my teeth, and pull. Just as with artichoke leaves, all the spicy flesh would remain on my tongue as the coarse skin was drawn away and discarded.

  Decades later, in New York City, when the culinary guru and my friend and neighbor, James Beard, was very ill, I helped him teach some of his last classes. One of them was on taste. The students were made to taste nine different types of caviar and a variety of olive oils, and do a blind identification of meats with all their fat removed. Somewhere towards the end of the class, the big, frail man, confined to a high director's chair, asked, “Do you think there is such a thing as taste memory?”

  This set me thinking. Once, several of us who had known each other for decades were sitting by a fireplace in France, talking and reading. My American husband, a violinist, was studying the score of Bach's chaconne. “Can you hear the music as you read it?” a friend asked.

  It was the same question in another form. When I left India to study in England, I could not cook at all, but my palate had already recorded millions of flavors. From cumin to ginger, they were all in my head, waiting to be called into service. Rather like my husband, I could even hear the honey on my tongue.

  ONE

  Delhi—Old and New • Sir Edwin

  Lutyens and the House That Never Was •

  Grandfather, “Babaji” • Number 7 •

  The Lady in White • The Kite

  The orchard site had housed our family homestead only since the early decades of the twentieth century. My family actually came from the walled city, often called Old Delhi, just to the south, built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. My family referred to it simply as Shahar, or the City.

  There are many Delhis, as we were to study in school, all built either alongside each other or wholly or partly on top of each other, often reusing building materials knocked down in bloody efforts at domination. Our own original family home was in Chailpuri, in the narrow lanes of the Old City. It had as its carefully chosen foundation sturdy stones “borrowed” from the walls of Ferozshah Kotla, the fourteenth-century fortress and palace of a fourteenth-century emperor in a fourteenth-century Delhi.

  Starting with the ancient Vedic city of Indraprastha, which flourished in the fifteenth century B.C., a succession of Delhis was built, first by generations of Hindu rajas, only to be followed in A.D. 1193 by a roll call of Muslim dynasties: Ghori, Ghaznavi, Qutubshahi, Khilji, Tughlak, Lodhi, and Moghul. They seemed to trust the dubious comfort of walled cities, and their leaders chose to name Delhi, again and again, after themselves. This ended, at least from the point of view of my childhood, with the British version, sans walls, New Delhi, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and built in the ruin-filled wilderness south of the Old City walls.

  The Moghul capital, Shahjahanabad, or the Old City or the City, or Shahar, was where the written history of my family began. We were only blessed with our paternal side of it. My mother's side either kept few records or humbly kept its accomplishments under wraps. This written history, bound in red, was kept in my grandfather's home office.

  When my grandfather—Babaji, as we called him—decided to move out of the City to the orchard estate, he was already a very successful barrister. His new house, the one in which I was born, was a brick-and-plaster version of a multi-roomed, high-ceilinged Moghul tent with bits of British fortress and Greco-Roman classicism thrown in to hint vaguely at grandeur. The road it was built on was named after my grandfather, Raj Narain Road (with the patriotic Hindification of names that followed Independence, it is now Raj Narain Marg), and had the number 7 on its front gate. From the time I can remember, we always referred to that house as Number 7, as in “I'm going to Number 7,” or “You know that big tamarind tree in Number 7….”

  Not wishing to waste money, and full of the brio of someone recently “England-returned” (he had been studying law in London), he designed it all himself. As the family story goes, it was at this time that the British had decided to move their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, and Lutyens was in the process of building the new capital, to be named New Delhi. Lutyens asked my grand-father to pick any piece of land in New Delhi and build on it— Lutyens might have designed the house himself had my grandfather asked—but my grandfather dismissed the whole idea, saying, “Who wants to live in that jungle?” Properties in “that jungle” are now worth as much as those in central London and midtown Manhattan.

  Years later, having proceeded beyond my three score and ten years, I was awarded an honorary CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in Washington, D.C., a city very similar in design to Lutyens's New Delhi, in a house designed by Lutyens himself, the British ambassador's residence. As I stared at my reflection there in a pair of dark Lutyens mirrors, dotted with glass rosettes, I couldn't help thinking that my life might have come full circle. I could have been born in a Lutyens house and received a grand reco
gnition of my life in a Lutyens house. But I was not destined for such easy symmetry, for easy anything.

  Babaji's whitewashed house consisted of a central “gallery”— a hall, really—leading to five very large rooms with fireplaces. One of these was the drawing room, and the others served as bedrooms, one to a family. Running along the front and back of the house were two long verandas lined with semi-classical, semi-Greco-Roman pillars. The back, east-facing veranda looked out on the Yamuna River, or, as we called it with great familiarity, the Jumna River. It was here that so many of us, as infants, were rubbed with oil and left to absorb the morning sun. Because the land must have sloped down to the water, this veranda was one floor up, built over a very large, partially underground, damp, always cool cellar, or taikhana. My grandfather used to make wine here from grapes he imported from Afghanistan, but that must have been before I was born.

  Number 7, Delhi, so nearly designed by Lutyens. In front of the house stands our beri (jujube) tree, in which we loved to sit as children. All the young of my generation had our favorite reserved spots among the branches.

  The front, west veranda faced the gardens, which had incorporated the remnants of the old orchard and now included a winding drive to the front gate. The front and back verandas ended in rooms at each corner of the house, the front ones being shaped somewhat like turrets. The functions of these corner rooms changed over the years, but one of them at the back, facing east and south, always remained my grandmother's—and the family's—chapel-like Pooja ka Kamra, or Prayer Room. On top of the house were two levels of flat roofs, the one in the center being higher, and both edged with a battlement-like balustrade.

  But the main house was not large enough to fit the only army Babaji was to see, a growing army of spirited grandchildren produced by his eight children. Some of these progeny lived at Number 7 all the time, and some came and went. Babaji firmly believed in the joint-family system, with himself presiding as the head of his brood, a system that had been followed by his father and grandfather and, indeed, by all his ancestors.