My granny had a cooking shed at the back of the garden. Our family had been forcibly moved from the Magazine Barracks to Chatsworth under the apartheid Group Areas Act. We had electricity and private flushing toilets for the first time. Kanniamma Govindarajulu, however, insisted on cooking on an open fire.
The shed was a design marvel. I think my two uncles and cousins had hands in building it. My father was no good at anything that had a hint of manual labour. He once hung a picture of Jayalalithaa. That frame was crooked for as long as I could remember.
My granny was meticulous in everything, from the sparkling pots to the symmetrical design in the doilies she trimmed out of the Post to line the shelves. "The rows of straight irons holding up the pots were plucked out of a geometry textbook," recalls one of my cousins. Up against the sidewalls of the shed were slightly raised platforms that held the condiments and also served as a stool for the lazier among us. My granny routinely hitched her white sari and went down on her haunches to tend the pots.
Nestled on one side of the shed was a blowpipe or "oothankol" which we used to stoke the flame. Once on a trip to the Jemma el Fna market in Marrakech, Morocco, I spotted a similar device in the form of bellows. I bought it as a joke gift for my schoolmate, Woolgers, who had a reputation for being a bit of a blower. Twenty years later, he still has not figured out the prank. Needless to say, Woolgers in spite of multiple degrees is slow.
My granny by contrast had never been invited into a classroom yet she could measure spices, lentils and meats in perfect quantities to make the tastiest meals. I salivate at the thought of her crispy, spicy vadas lobbed off a sliver of banana leaf into the hot oil of a cast iron kadai. That is a taste that will have every Durban Indian of whatever faith or class hankering for a nibble.
The thought about the vadas came to me this week when Madhuri screenshot a story out of the Times of India about the LP gas shortage arising from the Iranian shutdown of the Straits of Hormuz as that scary war hots up.
"People are really struggling," said Madhuri. "Hordes of hotels, restaurants and roadside stalls have shut shop as their gas supply has ground to a halt."
My heart went out to Sita in Andheri West in Bombay who hawked a fresh-out-the-pan breakfast of vada, idli, sambar and chutney for all of thirty Indian rupees. While software engineer types wolfed down her plates on the roadside, her main target were the hundred rupee a day construction workers who could barely afford one meal.
On the two minute walk from my guesthouse along Veera Desai Marg past the Iyengar Cafe and the garish wall painting of Shivam Dube en route to the Azad Nagar Metro, I chanced upon Sita as she popped her head under the low lintel of her front door to her stoep shop, tucking the loose end of her sari into her waistband while wielding an enamel slotted spoon for scooping vada out the crackling oil.
My Hindi extends solely to romantic lines out of Mohammed Rafi lyrics and my Tamil is as rough as Sita's cracked heels, but we got talking. My swarthy complexion confirmed me as a kinsman. She was a Tamil whose family had migrated from the south of India several generations earlier. She retained a smattering of her ancestral language in an environment where Hindi was the lingua franca, even overtaking the local Marathi and lesser Konkani languages.
The long months I spent trotting around South and South East Asia was in part to learn local cooking styles and food habits. In Sita, I found the perfect tutor, very much like Subash teaching me his Bombay bhel puri method.
"Don't just write about it, bring that food to the market," urged Riaz.
So brace yourself. I am going to have a reincarnation as a guest Asian chef this Easter weekend at Made in Chatsworth at Depot Road School. The cooking experiments will be washed down with a fresh lime soda in the same method that Nitish demonstrated on the pavement outside the Ramraj store in Pondy Bazaar in Madras.
While I am all excited about my prospects of rustling up a culinary storm, I wonder how Sita and my other Indian friends, especially the construction workers, are holding up. Living as they do, cheek by jowl in dense urban settlements, the option of my granny's cooking fire will be risky.
They will no doubt find a way. People with power and scant regard for humanity forced my family out of the barracks. We were resourceful enough to make a life in Chatsworth. People in power in Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran are at each other's throats and it is the Sitas of the world, miles away from their war games, who are driven to desperation.
Catch Kiru Naidoo and twenty other writers at the Umhlanga Book Fair from Friday until Sunday at the Umhlanga Apart-Hotel on Meridian Drive. Entry is free.