Four years after the anthology Madras on my Mind, A City in Stories, here is another Chennai-centric collection, but by a single author. In her debut collection of short stories, Half a Kilo Mixture, Ranjitha Ashok captures the changing mores of Chennai through a host of female protagonists. Most readers, especially those with self-effacing mothers, will empathize with these women who want to carve out an identity for themselves in a family-riddled existence.
In Grocery List, a sharp-eyed woman – an amalgam of aunts we like to spend time with – makes her way through the aisles of a food store. She is preoccupied with the menu for an upcoming party. She will serve mini-idli with red onion chutney as a starter, but those morkali squares – should she top them with tender mango or chopped olives? As she fills her shopping cart, she also muses on life. Her musings remind you of the internal monologues of Isabel Dalhousie, the good-natured and curious Edinburgh philosopher, created by Alexander McCall Smith. Despite all her positive attributes, our wise and with-it Chennaiite still finds it difficult to get service from the young shop assistant.
“Excuse me…” you begin tentatively, hating to disturb her, forcing her to do her job, when she looks up from her cellphone, and snaps: “Did you tell Manejasar I went off early for coffee?” You step back, ready to defend yourself against this accusation, while denying even the slightest knowledge of this infamous ‘Manejasar,’ when you realize she is addressing a colleague behind you.
In the end, the beleaguered shopper – a persona of the author surely – forgets the sourdough bread which the cook wanted, but she has all the ingredients for a stream-of-consciousness narrative. Her hors d’ouevres too were a hit, I am sure.
The author has a wonderful ear for both dialogue and dialect. Burgled is written entirely in Madras Baashai, a dialect of Tamil, with loan words from the many cultures that have inhabited Chennai since its inception nearly four centuries ago. Like Mumbai’s Bambiya, Madras Baashai is irreverent and colorful. Perumal ‘Pers’ Elvis Ganesan, a small-time thief, recounts the story of his life in this dialect.
Many of the stories are fictionalized personal narratives. There are also stories of women who rebel quietly against traditions. In Spice in Waiting, a widow decides to live alone and rustle up onion and garlic dishes for herself, foods which were always forbidden in her conservative family. If you recall that upper caste women were conditioned to give up their favorite foods upon becoming widows, you’ll root for this woman with the tenacious taste buds — a pakora paithiyam who never gave up on the dream of making those aromatic delicacies in her own home.
Two stories deal directly with death, but one is a hilarious account of the departing soul bonding with the emissary from beyond. (When she muses about what they will serve at her funeral feast, the emissary responds: They usually serve what you had liked, but I kind of doubt botanical gin cocktails and dirty martinis will work with yelai-saapad…) Two of the stories reflect on characters from the Mahabharata. A story about a quest for the author of an old lullaby meanders, but you will not begrudge a good writer a few extra pages, here and there.
The contemporary stories of Chennai, of the “strange New World, where horoscopes, arranged marriages, kutcheris and kolams… …. share space with clubbing, ginger-tamarind margaritas, global travel, supper theatres, in a dizzying meld of co-existence,” worked best for me.
Ashok has previously co-authored a non-fiction book on the lives of boxwallahs, Office Chai and Planter’s Brew, with Mr. S. Muthiah, the beloved chronicler of Chennai. She is also a longtime columnist for the fortnightly Madras Musings. Those columns have been collected into a book, Chennai Latte, Madras Brew. But unconstrained by things like word count or column space, she soars.
The very first story, Code, is the finest example of her writing – spare, but full of telling detail. Shared grief brings together two women from two different generations, and diverse backgrounds. (The older woman is the very picture of dignity though she wears nighties all day.) How will they ever move on from the tragedy that has befallen them?
The healing begins when the older woman introduces the younger one to the works of that well-regarded British humorist of the 20th century, P.G. Wodehouse. Every member of her little household was a fan. Amongst themselves, they had often quoted lines from his books to describe annoying relatives, or to make light of difficult situations. Their family of three had derived much joy from speaking in code, and now the mother finds solace in those words.
A minor character in Code is the loyal cook who still stops by, mostly, to shore up the spirits of the older woman, her former employer. She is not unlike Chef Anatole, the Wodehouse legend. When the neighbors attempted to steal this highly skilled cook, her employees rushed to double her wages, recalling the lines:
“Pour out money like water rather than lose that superb master of the roasts and the hashes, or rather of vengaya sambar and sepankizhangu roast … that peerless disher-up of paniyaaram studded with vadu manga pickle.”