Coyote Squash curry with
rasam rice was one of my favorite dishes as a long-braided teenager. The tangy spiciness of the rasam gelled blissfully well with the squishy sweetness of the squash. The curry was also blessed with the virtue of versatility - it paired deliciously with chapati or yogurt rice and played a wonderful supportive role to the more flavorful vegetables in
sambars or
koottus. If there were leftovers - a rarity - my mom knew just the person to call to lick the bowl clean.
During my first few years in the US I despaired of ever finding them in the grocery stores. My eyes would glaze over the gigantic bell peppers and eggplants, rows and rows of lettuces and potatoes, baskets of zucchinis and tomatoes, but no coyote squash. I did not even know it by its English name for me to be able to ask the store manager. Its Indian, more specifically Kannada, name is Seemebadhnekaayi (ಸೀಮೆಬದನೆಕಾಯಿ), translating to 'field eggplant', and somehow I knew that name wouldn't cut it here.
One fine day, I came upon it when I wasn't looking for it in the Spanish food section of the local Shoppers' Food Warehouse. After sparing a moment to be amazed, again, at just how many foods Indian and Spanish cuisines had in common, I made a beeline for the basket, picked one up, took it up to my nose and smelt its no-smell scent, felt its tiny, soft thorns at my fingertips and put it back into its basket. But not before burning its American name into memory. I turned my sights to the other vegetables on my list, left the coyote squash where I had found it after all these years and checked out.
A recollection had waltzed in out of thin air, made space for itself and refused to let my mini-celebration be.
In the one of the numerous homes we lived in during my growing years, the vegetable grew in our garden. The plant is a creeper and it wound itself around a medium-sized tree (I cannot for the life of me recall what tree that was), climbed over its branches and draped itself over a part of our roof, grace, strength and determination evident in every twist and turn of its stalk. One of the reasons for its resilience and bounteous nature was, perhaps, that it grew over a septic tank. Much like the fecund pomegranate tree in one of our earlier homes.
And if there is one thing true about septic tanks, it's that they require maintenance. So, periodically, my parents would tell someone to send someone and the message would be passed on until the right person would show up with the tool of their trade - one long wooden (most probably bamboo) pole. They would also invariably arrive, no matter which town we lived in, drunk. As you can imagine, there was not much to convey to them once they came to do the maintenance or to clear a blockage. All you had to do was point them in the right direction and pay them at the completion of the work.
But my dad is one for conversation. He cannot pass up the opportunity to start a dialogue about where people are from, what they ate for lunch, if they had celebrated such and such festival, whether they sent their kids to school, how crappy the weather was, etc. So at one of these septic tank cleaning episodes, he ventured to ask why every person he had seen who came to clean out septic tanks was drunk. Why do you guys drink so much, he asked. That too at all times of morning and night.
"Because it is impossible to do this job when I'm sober, sir," the man said.
That man, and everyone else that came after him, got a bit of extra money from my dad, but the episode had never bothered me until I was well into a number of years of running my own household which happened to be here in the US, when I had experienced first hand what it takes to keep a home - and all its pipes - running smoothly. No matter how much you rationalize it, some of it is just not palatable (such as the times we had to clean up the incredible mess a construction worker repeatedly left in our powder room), but you do it because it is your home.
They do it because it is their destiny, the only thing their birth and their station in society will let them do.
And in case you are wondering, my need to relive the dynamic that my mother and I shared by way of certain foods and the need to replicate it with my own children proved to be stronger than the memories of the coyote squash creeper from my childhood. So yesterday I went and got three of them and made a curry to go with chapati. To my immense relief and delight, C loved it, but it turned out a tad too spicy for D.
P.S. Nino's Mum's lyrical and thoughtful essay related to this topic of caste and untouchability is worth a read.
