Balareddipalle Chinturumindi

It had taken us impossibly long to get there. 27 years and, as though in punishing harmony with that number, 7 nauseating hours from Hosur, cutting through the heart of Bangalore’s impossibly thick traffic, all in the dull grey of a receding cyclone whose drizzle would not let up along the way. Not even for a moment.

Like that, easier to sum up the 7 hours than the 27 years, which had been long enough to crumble one part of the ancestral old house clearly not built to last, while the other had mostly remained intact, with just one portion needing reinforced propping.

All that long while ago, we’d spent a night on the paatha-maadi, the old terrace, some seven of us (that number again) arranged in a line, us the newlyweds. That was a clear night, moon-bright enough to sense a dog coming up to a spot in a corner, chased away by someone who awoke to this intruder. This night was still-rainy, so it was spent in a room that had once been a granary–that was built to last, in the early decades of the 20th century. The dogs were locked out this time, but a mouse woke me with nibbles on my toes; it had come to the granary of course, where all things stored were food. Naturally. I barely noticed, though: the travails of travel had done me in.

Then came “the birth of the simple light,” as Dylan Thomas once wrote of his own stays as a child at Fern Hill in Carmarthenshire in Southern Wales, and we found our ways “out of the whinnying green stable/ On to the fields of praise”–those Welsh scenes and longings about as far and close, as incongruous and identical to how we dreamed of our childhood landscapes, too.

Past the ippa chettu (what I know as the iluppai maram, Madhuca longfolia), walking though a maze of tangedu shrubs (what I know as avaaram, Tanner’s Cassia), which a grandfather had once done a rollicking trade in; up to the overflowing cheruvu (tank) bordered by vavili shrubs (what I know as nocci, Vitex negundo) into which the dogs were happily pushed and not so happily extracted. How much we laughed and rejoiced in the fullness that the rain had brought, though it made the fields over-wet. They sucked us in, nearly knee-deep and threatened to keep our chappals stuck and buried, and perhaps us, too, mudbound. We’d not have minded though, like that being planted where we had already grown.

Home was bare stone surfaces, clear water, no more mud, and a breakfast of atukula uppma (what I know as aval uppma, a spiced flat rice preparation) and this chutney everyone referred to as chinturumindi or chinturubindi, depending on how anyone enunciated or heard the sounds, which I thought I didn’t know until a later dissection: chinta [tamarind] + ooru [literally, to soak; alluding to pickling] + pindi [powder or powdered, alluding to dals/spices that have been powdered]. Technically, what I know as a thuvaiyal, a chutney by any other name but always one that uses grown dals for both flavor and texture, although this version relied rather heavily on just jeera and tamarind and was unlike any chutney I’d thus far known. A sort of cross between a classic gojju and a classic chaat chutney.

The husband would speak of (and long for) something he called just a “thick dal,” and now I realized that was nothing other than a pappu urumindi: a dal chutney, if you like. Had it been made of raw toor dal (just roasted and ground), it would have been a kandi-pachadi, literally a toor dal chutney. But pappurumindi is made from cooked toor/tuvar, to which is then added a spice mix that includes other dals, whose effect is thickening. I’ll get a recipe for that up, next. [Here it is: pappurumindi.]

It is something, finding the category into which a quotidian experience or memory fits; there is so much relief in that sort of “a-haa!” sense-finding, the coherence of things an irreplaceable assurance over idiosyncratic randomness.

Like this, a world not mine became mine by analogy and extension, association and identification, taste and relish, and hardly only because I married into it.