Lord Krishna’s Khichdi

One so-very-long-ago wintry morning, I walked out of the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto, guilty of having spent a whole $30 I couldn’t afford on a cookbook and yet so happy to have it tucked under my arm.

The book was Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cuisine, by Yamuna Devi, a woman from Butte, Montana who learned from Swami Srila Prabhupada and became his personal cook. It had been awarded the 1987 Cookbook of the Year award—a first for a book devoted to a non-Western cuisine, with undoubtedly a niche audience in North America and no glossy photos but a researched, erudite tone that demonstrated that ‘sometimes excellence could win over pizzazz,’ as one of the judges remarked. There was a story of cooking as a spiritual experience of becoming behind it, but I was on no spiritual journey. I wanted it simply because I’d been introduced to this book and reintroduced to the world of Indian cookery by a very dear friend and someone I looked up to greatly, whom I would soon call my husband’s cousin. I was alone, I felt alone, I often sought the the company of books, and I needed to eat. My mother didn’t cook much when Appa wasn’t around (and he was often far away in Nigeria); my sister and I would often come home to sparse meals that didn’t satisfy. Yamuna Devi Dasi’s cookbook was, in this context, a path both outward and inward: a way of escaping my circumstances and a way of knowing what mattered about myself.

My Canadian high school had subjected all students to an elaborate “information session” and presentation on the dangers of cults: Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple and the Branch Davidians placed bizarrely alongside the ISKCON Hare Krishnas. The juxtaposition had confused me greatly. “Did you know the Hare Krishnas are a cult?” I asked my mother that evening, but we were each stumbling through these strange Western worlds in such different ways, I recall her surprise but not her answer.

The indignation and the anger at this absurd classification came later, after I’d learned my first chorchoris from Yamuna Devi, the use of ground cashews and curd to dress simple green beans, a hundred baingan/eggplant dishes, how delicious food could be without a single onion or garlic clove, and how Bengal gram dal and soft rice could be brought alive by feathery, licoricey dill—sathakuppai keerai, in Tamil, though it hardly grows here except in home gardens like ours, and that only in the winters when the sun is still only warm.

That last became my Lord Krishna’s khichdi, the simplest, most wholesome one-pot warming winter meal yet. I’ve always thought of the woman born Joan Campanella but who became Yamuna Devi when I make this khichdi because it’s a fine recipe and because she understood somehow the spirit behind Vaishnava methods of cookery and that, why, there’s a temple inside each Indian home and that’s the kitchen. For a young brown girl finding her bearings against the freezing wind and peculiar stares, it was the most warming thing ever.

Last I checked, the World’s Biggest Bookstore which once could boast of kilometers of shelf-space in one long block on Edward Street had ceded to a complex of condos, and the pejorative labels once used to characterize the Hare Krishnas are now much easier to call out as inaccurate, biased, racist, or all of the above. By contrast, Lord Krishna’s Cuisine is still available in print and would undoubtedly be an important compendium of the Indian culinary writing canon, were we to trace the arc of one. I don’t think Hare Krishna devotees any longer distribute roses or copies of the Bhagavad Gita at airports and subway stations, but Hare Krishna Dhams [temples, places of worship], at least the ones I knew, still go about their work, singing joyously, opening their doors to people fleeing hurricanes [as happened with Rita on the Gulf Coast in 2005] and being open to thinking through new matters as these present themselves in ways other Indian temples in diaspora are far more hesitant to do [as happened with their thoughtful, proactive participation in and facilitation of blood sample collection for the HapMap Project, also in 2005].

If there’s a “cult” worth joining, I’d think it should be this one.

I’d posted a part of this story here on December 20—the anniversary of Yamuna Devi’s own passing. Jahnavi Harrison noted this, assuming I’d marked the date deliberately. But I hadn’t. “A lovely coincidence then,” she said. I couldn’t agree more.