Edible Shoots

Whenever I catch sight of a flock of migratory birds in flight, I strike up a conversation starting with: what are your international roaming rates? Doesn’t it cost a lot to use Google Maps while roaming? Mostly they don’t look like they’ve even heard me. I am not hurt. How could they possibly know my Malayalam?   Nor would they expect me to speak their Russian. Siberian cranes fly eastward searching for warmer places in the Southern part of India. How do they manage flying at such high altitudes crossing the Himalayan mountain range without losing their way? I must be naïve to ask such a question. They started doing it way before the advent of computers, let alone GPS. Siberian cranes use their own inbuilt GPS and coordinates inherited from their forefathers. Finding one’s way home was very much a life skill for our own hunter gatherer forefathers.   But it became a lost art just like our ability to read clouds or being a sure-shot backyard meteorologist. A trade-off wi

An increasing number of people worldwide are ditching “doughnuts” in favor of “donuts”. Even the multinational American fast food company Dunkin Donuts adopted the simplified spelling years ago. Whichever spelling you prefer, the taste remains the same. The other day, I was invigilating a test. When the last test taker had left, I flipped through a textbook a student had surrendered after a last-minute review and forgotten to claim on leaving the venue. The page I opened to was one that told the story of the doughnut. (I had noticed the textbook earlier on but resisted the temptation to dip into it to satisfy my curiosity. It turned out to have been an exercise in delayed gratification.) To my surprise, I learned that donuts came to America with Dutch settlers in the 18 th century. Those donuts didn’t have a hole in the middle as they do today. The story goes like this. Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of the captain of a merchant ship, would prepare her  olykoeks  (

            Two Moroccan beauticians used to live on the other side of my street. We had a casual chat at the Afghan baker’s shop in our neighborhood almost daily.   They would invite me to visit their country, as a kind and courteous gesture, at the end of short exchanges of pleasantries while waiting for our hot flatbread straight from the tomb-shaped, clay oven. I would respond with the same courtesy: "Next vacation, Insha Allah, for sure", hoping to go there one day, but not expecting it to ever happen.        However, last summer vacation my wildest dreams came true. I found myself traveling alone through a mountain village in Southern Morocco, where a Berber widow taught me how to bake flatbread on hot pebbles in the courtyard of her house. Her dexterity in wetting a peel and using it to lay the flattened, moist dough on a bed of hot pebbles was awe-inspiring. She baked each bread to a golden sheen. (Gotcha! Don’t be taken in by my outlandish lies. I was just k

It first rained on Rann of Kutch, the drought-stricken salt desert, on the day Fathima entered the village . Everyone still remembered that day and the girl who had brought rainclouds along into that Monsoon-forgotten hamlet. I recall the images I conjured up while reading The Love Across the Salt Desert by Keki N Daruwalla. No one dared to do the impossible by crossing the desert except those few who did so for “reasons of their own”. Nawab Hussain, for instance, made the journey for “the daughter of the spice seller; she who smelled of cloves and cinnamon”. Ever since reading that story I have romanticized the desert. Here I am now in a distant relative of the Rann of Kutch: Rubu’al Khali, commonly known as the Empty Quarter, a territory shared by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and  Yemen.          The silence, the clarity, the mystery, the remoteness, the vastness, the serenity, the eternity and the capricious nature of a wild, other-worldly desert! Rubu’al Khali, 650,000

"Now, I may look like an eyesore to many youngsters. But not so long ago, I stood tall, keeping an eye on the crop that sustained your grandparents. My presence marked the existence of a seemingly sleepy hamlet in every valley in the vast stretch of apparently barren land. I was all alone all the time, keeping guard. Kasaba, that was the name they called the cylindrical tower made of mud, wood and rock flakes that was me. "Kasabas were built in the same fashion as any adobe building where the people went once their guard was down.  A tubular structure that withstood the perils of the seasons, even though it was simply made of wooden logs, twigs, mud, and rock flakes. I have puzzled over how I survived the sandstorms, rainstorms and even hailstorms that were common before you all were born over here. "People used to mount the kasaba to stay watchful of the crops they were raising. By every growing field, every tribe used to have one or two, depending on the

Coming across something abroad we didn’t care for much back home offers us the opportunity to see it with fresh eyes. This is exactly what happened to me in the case of the frangipani. I’ve known this shrub ever since I can remember; it used to make up the living fence around the yard of my mom’s house. As children we climbed the small trees, not minding their sticky milky-white sap. I took this picture in Jazan, a port city in the southwest of Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea. Frangipani thrives there for some reason or another, which I couldn’t quite figure out. Though indigenous to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, this deciduous plant has been transplanted successfully to many different parts of the world, and could rightly be said to now be a cosmopolitan beauty.  It looks majestic with its succulent green leaves and dense clusters of flowers. The waxy white flowers consist of five petals each with a yellow center; they are especially fragrant at ni

Mandi (مندي) is a special steak and rice dish, a staple at special occasions such as Eid, parties, and wedding feasts among Arabs. Originating in Hadhramouth, Yemen, it soon made inroads into the entire Arabian peninsula, Sub-Saharan Africa, and recently the Southeast Asian countries too, mostly on account of its oil-free and exotic style of cooking. In short, the fat from suspended meat drips onto the rice being cooked underneath. The meat gets exquisitely tender, which is probably why the name "mandi" (from nada ندى meaning 'dew' or 'snowflakes') was chosen. Mutton (preferably lamb), chicken, and camel are the usual meats prepared this way.  Let us start with a three-month-old lamb raised nibbling on tender blades of subtropical desert grass and shrubs, often roaming free on vast stretches of the mountainous landscape. At the peak of summer, these lambs even dig up the land and eat the roots of plants underneath. A pit is dug about four feet d