Thumbai & thummapoo rasam

She was just a wild weed who would grow anywhere, after all. She preferred the hills where it was cooler and wetter and there she grew abundantly, in tangled masses by roadsides. But she stayed also in hot plains and by the sea, scraggly but firm, blooming her small-throated white flowers which bees and ants loved. Thumbai, she was called, thummi, thumbe, thumma-poo, dronapushpi, Leucas aspera—but ignored when there was malli and maruvam, roses, chrysanthemums and all those larger, showier, scented flowers and leaves that dominated the practices of worship in the big Siva temples and in people’s homes.

And yet all she wanted was to sit at the feet of the Great ascetic, so she called to Him from her hot, dry, unwatered corners and the unkempt roadsides where dogs and passers-by uncaringly trod, not hoping for much because she was just that wild weed with tiny flowers too hard to pick, after all, only noticed by ants and bees. But she yearned anyway, and so much, for so long, and so unsure of ever being heard that when Siva appeared before her, she was startled out of all words. In that state, she blurted to the Lord of Caves her one greatest wish: to always place her feet on his head.

No, no, no!

Realising the error of transposition, an embarrassed and even more flustered Thumma quickly corrected herself: her head on HIS feet, she wanted nothing more than to always place her head at His feet. Not the other way around.

Did the Great One say anything? Did He smile, perhaps? But He was kind, and so now we always place little thumma poo rings strung together by inserting each flower’s little neck into the next flower’s throat on Siva’s head—though really what they always want to do is fall to His feet.

Like this, thumbai is an unassuming and often ignored little plant which I’ve found growing plentifully on Coonoor roadsides and wherever it finds succor and cool here in Pondicherry. Children who have grown up with these growing wild will remember the little sips of nectar that each tiny blossom holds, and that it’s easier to make flower rings and garlands once the nectar is gone–though of course making offerings to Siva means that we must rely on ants and bees to drink the nectar first before our rings will hold shape.

The Coonoor ladies I asked, workers and cooks but evidently having imbibed hill-station English sensibilities, wondered if these weren’t thistles. How easily we lose our connections with our own natural worlds. “What’s it good for,” they asked next—a question which made me wonder first if there always must be a rationale to eat “strange” weeds and other greens when we hardly have a rationale to eat pizzas and such. Or, if this didn’t demonstrate yet again the scientific bent of local Indian cookery, wanting to know the specificity of everything and deploy it accordingly. “What’s it good for?” I told them what I knew. The most common use is to crush leaves apply topically to insect bites. The leaves and flowers get juiced and become an antidote to indigestion (with a few drops of honey) or dropped (without the honey) into nostrils—nasiyam, a treatment for sinusitis.

The leaves also go into pappus (dals) and pacchadis (chutneys) on my Telugu side and into thuvaiyals and thorans on my Tamil-Palakkad sides as treatments for cold-asthmatic conditions generally, though they are bitter to a fault and must be used minimally or otherwise handled with culinary finesse. Flowers, as ever, are more forgiving.

My own first inclination was to make yet another floral rasam to add to what’s now a growing flower-rasam series: aavaaram, pavazhamallli/parijat, murungaipoo, vepampoo or neem, and now thumbai. But for dry neem flowers, none of these flowers are sold in stores; all have to be found and gathered. In that sense, floral rasams are a bit different from your average tomato or miriyali rasam: they ask you to take a walk, explore your environs, notice the unnoticed, live a different kind of life, nurture things in yourself before you nurture yourself.

This is also the first rasam I’ve made away from home, in the kitchens of Atwood Coonoor, where we stayed last November and I’m grateful to Yudhishtir and Pavitra for allowing me such liberties in their estate and kitchens. Cooking in new kitchens is always so interesting—it compels you to adapt, make do, and still somehow produce. Though I did insist on jaggery in this case: Tamil rasams tend to be somewhat unforgivably sour, missing out the sweetness of even the most bitter things that Andhra rasams capture far better, what can I say.

The recipe is written out below and demonstrated in the video, which was shot while cooking at Atwood Coonoor. If you’ve no other reason to watch it (the morning scenes, the bees, the gaur), then at least take in the music — MS Gopalakrishnan’s handling of Raga Nalinakanthi is superb, beyond compare.