Edible Shoots

     My colleague from Egypt told me once about those times when he was growing up, a child in his village. The men from the cities mounting their donkeys carrying household utensils would go from door to door in the villages to trade their offerings for backyard chicken eggs. They had their designated days for barter, and they knew their potential business partners very well. A win-win situation for both womenfolk in the countryside and door-to-door vendors from afar.   Back in the South Indian highlands, while I was a trainee teacher, I saw women making a difference with the eggs they got from raising chickens at their homestead and selling them to greengrocers in their hometown. Home-produced eggs always enjoyed better prices than the commercially mass-produced ones. The women didn't have a farmers’ market so they sold the eggs to their favorite greengrocers, who would resell them for a small profit. A sincere word of thanks goes to Teena Jewel Kuriakose, living...

We grow happier as we start spotting the first of its blooms showing up. And for a special reason, which we pin on jacarandas in full bloom in the neighborhood: we know that our summer vacation is not far - the one we all have been looking forward to.  All this is thanks to our city gardeners, who made a U-alley by planting the jacarandas in line on either side of a paved walkway alongside a long dried-up river. How did I then know that it used to be a river without there being any trace of water? There is still an arch bridge built during the time of the Ottoman Empire connecting people on both sides. For quite long, we didn’t have a name to call the tree with the purple-blue flowers by. Nor did we feel any need for one. Dr. Paul, the crazy man with a scientific temperament among us, first called it “Jacaranda mimosifolia”; this didn’t take long to become a household name but the “mimosifolia” part was conveniently dropped. No one refuted Dr. Paul as our knowledge of botany didn’t...

  I got up a bit earlier today. Not yet sure if Muradabadi biryani could help to be an early bird or not. For reasons I don't know, something inside me kept saying, “Jabir, get up n go out...” Abha is the most beautiful on Friday morning if you can meet her when she rubs her eyes to the sun. Silent, tranquil,     visible, and almost no traffic to bother about.          It was dark even at 6:30 am. That is quite usual during winter. The temperature was 9 C. Darkness coupled with chill would serve as a good excuse for not venturing out. But my mind justified that it was usual during winter and we would stay warm up while on the move on foot. I let my weekend unfold on its own. Quite spontaneously with no plans...and a walk along ring road done solo. Off script. Walking has always been a meditative affair for me. If my lungs or calf muscles got something, that was only a bonus.

     My mom never made cheese. She never knew what it was like. But she did make a lot of butter and ghee from the milk leftover after we had supplied the neighborhood. Free home delivery was our responsibility. We kids did it well without causing any concern for customer care or ultimately our bossy mom.   We raised chickens, goats, rabbits, and cattle. We also grew a fair share of our own food, like edible leaves, veggies, and tubers, mostly annuals but also perennials. Everybody contributed towards the labor, therefore we hardly ever needed to hire a farmhand. There was no such thing as waste on our homestead. In fact, there is no such thing as organic waste on this planet we call home.   Mom boiled the unsold milk and let it cool off. She then added a little buttermilk as culture  and kept it overnight for turning the earthen milk pot into a pot of buttermilk.  Once she was free from farm chores, she would sit back to churn the curds into little sc...

My granddad on my mother’s side had his own paddy fields. He sold them piecemeal to marry off his eight daughters. However, he continued to farm on fields he took on lease. Nothing could stop a man from doing what he had done all his life. He had his own pair of plowing bulls, two pairs at the most. Like each of his ten children, these bulls too had their own names, no different from those of men.        After every harvest, my grandfather would send a share to each daughter’s house. Having been brought up by a veteran rice farmer, each of his daughters knew very well how to put the paddy to the best possible use. My mom was no exception. She boiled some of her share, at times with bulbils of yam as a treat for us kids. She spread some of it under the sun on a bamboo mat to dry, before gathering it up into a sack and sending us to the miller to make flour out of it. The carriable portion to a teenager, having packed up in a repurposed plastic bag and sealed wit...

63 “Plant Once & Forget” Fruiting Plants for Your Backyard in Kerala I love plants, especially fruiting ones. But I can’t nurture them like I do my own kids. For example, I may, or may not, care to water them in summer. What to do? Well, I’ve stumbled upon the perfect solution drawing on veteran planters and personal experiences. Here I am to share it with you happily ever. If we are away or too busy to give time to our green friends, the six-months-long dry spell in Kerala can be a trying time for many fruit trees we wish to come to fruition in our backyards. Many may wither and die back depending on the water retention capacity of the soil they are in. However, thanks to the six months of Monsoon, we can still grow a lot of fruit plants depending solely on the rain in this, God’s own country. What matters most is the choices we make and a little bit of homework before we line the plants up on the ground. Here is a range of drought-resistant fruit plants for your next...

      The picture we conjure up in our minds when we hear the word "home" is usually not far from the conventional roof-over-our-heads. However, it can hardly be stranger than what tribesmen of Habla once called their home. You might have seen an eagle perching its eyrie on rocky cliffs at a high altitude, or wild honeybees suspending their giant beehive in the armpit of a gigantic mountain cliff. But do men do the same? Maybe biomimicry is not as new as we thought it was – even though my natural inclination would be to resist the idea even if the girl I was madly in love with insisted on it.   Please excuse my camera for not being my own substitute pair of eyes, let alone for those who know Habla only through hearing or by reading about it. I understand I am doing an injustice to things I am talking about by showing a picture which is necessarily reductive, detracting from Habla’s true magnificence. However, it is a compromise; less is certainly better th...

        I lifted my pair of eyes from the book to unintentionally meet those belonging to a lady sitting in a circle not far from me. "In her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place". She was just distributing candies to her team from a half rolled down plastic bag. I averted my eyes, looking away, appearing indifferent, wearing a contemplative mask. I readily wear one of those during dreamy breaks I occasionally take during reading. It helps me digest, and by doing so I offer religious obedience to my ophthalmologist's advice.   After a short while, I went back to my book to pick up where I had left off. Time passed. No sooner did I want a break and was about to get up, two candies flew and crash-landed, one on my lap, the other on my book. The one that landed on my book made a resounding noise like that of a boot heel on a wooden panel. The lady looked like could be my mum's age, and was by a man seemed her k...

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 tra...