These Amreekan holidays will bring the most amazing things. This morning, while my son was designing a glitter and construction paper turkey masterpiece (as opposed to the more traditional hand-tracing turkey art) at our suburban public library’s story hour, I came across a case of pig beef curry. Not just a case, but a vat of the stuff. Perhaps I should elaborate.
A Thanksgiving long ago, when I was just a little gulab jamun myself, I was attending an Indian community Thanksgiving party with my parents. The air hung heavy with the smell of masala-rubbed turkey, and the black label flowed freely (gents only, please, for the ladies, soft drinks, wine or maybe a leetle gintonic). One particular community uncle who was quite legendary for being a teller of tall tales, was relating a story about a hip bohemian cafe he had visited in Manhattan that was so edgy, so inclusive, so multicultural that it served exotic dishes to please every palate. Perhaps depressed by the fact that there would be no mustard-coated shad fish, no spicy mutton stew tonight, but that he would be forced to dine on the unhelpably bland, obscenely large bird that had just been placed, button popped, on the table, this raconteur created a spontaneous example. This cafe was so amazing that it served dishes like…like… pig beef curry! This created an all around uproar. Clearly, this story was as much turkey as our masala-crusted bird, since in the South Asian context, pig beef curry will not so much PLEASE, as OFFEND every palate – Hindu and Muslim alike. An equal opportunity taboo.
Since that time, pig beef curry has become my family’s favorite metaphor for cultural chaos or confusion. "Pig beef curry" my mother might mutter under her breath when a decidedly goth teenager shows up at Durga Puja with a plethora of eyebrow piercings. "PBC" my father might say casually at an Indian wedding when the tuxedoed groom rides up on a horse to the music of salsa and hip-hop. And now, many Thanksgivings later, today I encountered another case of pig beef curry in the form of a large white suburbanite father who had brought his large-eyed, gulab-jamun-like (lightly brown, sweet and round) daughter to the same turkey art fest as my own Junior-ji.
There I was, Kurta clad, very obviously Indian, babbling in Bengali to my children, and I noticed his eyes light up. "My wife" he said tentatively, "is from Calcutta." A Bengali! My heart sang (to the properly intellectually snobby tunes of Rabindranath Tagore, of course).
In the last three years, my husband and I have spent a countless amount of time, energy, imagination, and quite frankly, money behind teaching our children our own native tongues. Language is, so to speak, our family religion. As a daughter of Bengali intellectuals, this is a continuation of my own Bengali poetry, culture and music filled childhood. And so the thought of having access to a nearby Bengali speaker for language-oriented playdates made me heady.
"I speak only Bengali at home, and my son goes to a Bengali class every Sunday if you’re interested in coming, and, well, I have a lot of Bengali VCDs, and it’s so hard to maintain language in this country …" I began with the fervor of a religous zealot.
I should have smelled trouble right then. "Well, it’s all about just continuing, like, the religion, and the gods, right?" Gulab-jamun’s father began slowly, "My mother-in-law, she lives with us, and she’s a Hindu…"
The preposition threw me. A Hindu? Since when was one "a" Hindu and not just Hindu? So disturbed was I, I might have missed some of his follow up comments – so perhaps they were about the existential qualities of Hinduism, but I doubt it. And as a granddaughter of communist revolutionaries, I didn’t have much input on anything beyond the broader philosophic tenets of the religion, and so I kept my non-ritualistic mouth shut.
Forget the father, I thought. Let me concentrate on making my little turkey-painter a new friend. "This is Kirin," I said in Bengali to her. She stared at me, doe-eyed.
"Come on, don’t be shy," the father boomed, "See, your Nanny’s not the only one who speaks THAT language…"
Nanny = Nani my mental computer quickly equated. The "a" Hindu thing had clued me in to lower my expectations. But now a whole new grammatical wrench — "that" – as in "that" (primitive? weird? backward?) language? My nostrils began to fill with a stench of pigs. And beef.
But Mr. America was now warmed up – he tried the same kid friendly approach that I had. He approached my son with a grin. "Say, who’s your favorite movie star?" he asked.
Was this guy for real? I wondered. Like I was letting my 3 year old son watch Tom Cruise in MI3? But then the smell of curry grew stronger. And the tide of power shifted.
"Vinod Khanna? Sharukh Khan?"
I was almost fainting from the stench. "Uh– we don’t really watch Hindi movies," I tried to say as inoffensively as possible. "My son’s never really seen one."
Gulab’s Daddy now looked at me like I was that goth teenager with a thousand piercings. What kind of Indian was I? His look seemed to say. Sure, my son spoke Bengali, but any culture-vulture knew that such trivialities totally got cancelled out by a lack of filmi familiarity.
Heady from his recent victory, he sidled up to me, conspiratorial. Now I was the outsider. He clearly spent his evenings hanging out with his "gods" worshipping, obscure language speaking mother-in-law, singing along to the latest Bollywood hits. I grew a little uncomfortable, and pulled my children close. Was he going to report us to the special consular police for popular culture? "Tell me," he muttered, "where do you buy…."
Grass? My paranoid ears could have sworn he said grass. Did he think I was some bohemian cafe-attendee? Just because I spoke Bengali and didn’t watch Hindi films?
"I’m sorry?" I asked. My hopes for a play-date were long gone. I just wanted to take my turkeys and go home. Maybe read a little poetry.
"Goat?" He clarified, but still in hushed tones. "Where around here do you buy goat?"
His shocked face at my answer, that I didn’t really cook goat either, made me almost laugh out loud. Clearly, there was culture and then there was culture. And one measuring stick could not be used for all the variations. And maybe this wasn’t just a case of pig-beef curry afterall, but a whole new variety – pig-beef-goat curry.
I think this year, for Thanksgiving, I’ll go vegetarian.
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