'I burnt the rice'
I know when I am upset, stressed, preoccupied or generally not quite with it. I burn the rice. The acrid smell that starts gently, almost pleasantly at first, builds up quickly, just like my regret at the ruined, loss of pearlescent grains and the waste. Harvesting rice is painful, back breaking work in my part of the world - someone - most likely a woman - stood for hours in muddy water in a paddy field, back bent, cutting the grass so that once dry, each grain of rice can be threshed from the stalks holding the paddy. Only to then get stuck to the bottom of my saucepan - oh, the shame!
My relationship with rice is a kind of epistemological flashpoint that brings together different ways of knowing - emotion, memory, experience, knowledge. It also holds my unique neuroses with respect to life and love and family and the ways in which they have changed as I moved between continents. I believe I feel withdrawal symptoms if I cannot eat it for a few days, and there is nothing, nothing like the smell of rice in boiling water, just going opaque as it gets cooked. It’s the petrichor of my muddled immigrant consciousness that can cut through any dark imaginings.
Growing up, during the summer holidays, dinner would often mean balls of the day’s rice mixed with whatever was going - pappu or rasam or buttermilk kneaded and mixed, and rolled with the fingers on one hand, doled out by my grandmother to little stretched hands as me and my cousins sat in a half circle around her on the floor of the house in Chennai. There might be a small piece of something tasty rolled into it - vegetable, meat or fish, and if not perhaps a touch of lime or mango pickle. We would eat, slurping, licking fingers, a whole body experience; oblivious to how the perfect proportions and taste was something we would each chase in our adult lives.
My father would hunt for the oldest rice in the shop/ market. You see, the older the rice, the drier it is, giving more chances to achieve the prized separateness of everyday rice - not atomistic and flakey like pulao rice, and not overly sticky like gruel rice. He would take a single grain of rice and bite down between his front teeth to see how well it cracks under pressure. A faint memory now given the rice monism I live with. Basmati would not stand a chance against the myriad heady smelling rices of my childhood.
I refuse to use a rice cooker, it feels wrong. I want to be involved with how my rice cooks to know that I got the level of water and heat right. Well-cooked white rice does not need much - a little something salty or sharp is sufficient to make a delicious morsel. And when I sip the drained water in which hard to find par boiled red rice has been cooked, with a tiny smidgeon of salt, it feels like a hot, familiar hug.
And yet the starch content in white rice, and the insulin resistance many of South Asian descent suffer from, has also made rice a joy to be consumed in small quantities. Insulin resistance is associated with early life famine exposure, and metabolic signalling can get messed up for generations following famine. It’s mind-boggling to think that my body remembers through space and time, periods when there was not much carbohydrate to metabolise. My plate of rice connects me inextricably to those who did not have any.
On the bright side I have not burnt the rice for many months now!
Happy plates!