Some Tangy Moments!

Sometimes it’s not the most elaborate affairs that steal your senses, but the simplest. And sometimes all you need is the memory of a taste or a smell to take you away to a time, place, era. For me, it’s the tamarind.

Everyday, on the way to my office I pass this huge tamarind tree laden with  bunches of dusky dusty brown fruit just beyond my reach. Everyday I promise myself one of these days I’m going to bury my dignity and clamber away to the top and satisfy my cravings for the sticky ripe sour-sweet pulp inside. Just like a child. But adult dignity is hard to give up and yet another day passes with nothing more than faint aroma of nostalgia and disappointment.

I had no idea that it was preying on my mind so much till I came across Anita Nair’s Goodnight and God Bless. This is one lady who share so much in common with me that I sometimes wonder if she’s one of my siblings lost at the mela. Apart from a love of Blossoms, the books store in Church street and Chennai this lady has fond memories of the tamarind which is so close to my feelings that I could not help but wonder if she had dipped her pen into my brain before putting these lines on to paper:

Excerpt from Goodnight and God Bless – Seventeen:

“Ever since I was a little girl, I have had a great fondness for tamarind. I like the tree. The teardrop leaves and almost black branches. I like the notion that ghosts and ghouls liked to  inhabit it’s branches… I like the adage that likened a good prospective groom or bride to a well laden tamarind branch. Perhaps what I liked was the physical and metaphysical merged to create a universe and a sersatile one at that. But mostly what I love about the tamarind was the fruit itself.

A moment of heaven and happiness

I liked them green when the tartness made your teeth ache…I liked them semi ripe when each mouthful was a conundrum of: Was that sweet or was that sour? I liked them ripe when the flesh sticks to your fingers as your peel the dry shin off in bits and each mouthful is a taste of heaven…

When my cousins raided the store cupboard in my grandmother’s home for busicuits or jackfruit chips, I was content to dip my hand into the deep earthenware jar in which tamarind was strored. The glistening black, sundried tamarind speckled with rock salt crystals to this day evokes memories of still summer afternoons when the heat paused even the crows’ caw. Of childhood days when you though the world stood on it’s axis and would never move.And you ached to be a grown up…”

The clincher when I read this the first time was the raiding of the tamarind jar. In my gran’s house it was not an earthen ware, but a short, squat little glass jar with a red plastic cover. I could not help but grin from ear to ear thinking of the “raids” that was planned late in the afternoons by me, my sister and my cousin to get a ball of black ‘heaven’;  away under the very noses of the servants while my gran blissfully caught up with her beauty sleep ( which meant one less hawk eyed obstacle to cross!)

Another marvellous memory is going to my native place and clambering up the tree away from the prying eyes of adults and stuffing yourself till you are holding your stomach in agony. But that never stops you from returning the very next day to do the same because the temptation for biting into the soft brown skin is just too much.

But it’s not just the love of the fruit in it’s raw form. I love cooking with it as well. I love mixing it water to make the pulp for making rasam or better still, my new favorite, vatha kozhambu. I love how the tamarind melts to the soft brown almost muddy liquid which goes into making the best compliments for a plate of soft fluffy rice with a dollop of ghee on top.

Like I was saying, tamarind- the taste, texture,feel- is a chapter in nostagia and childhood memories.

So do you have a similar chapter in your life, triggered by a bite or smell of something disarmingly simple? If you do, do share your ‘imli’ stories!