Thankfully Undertaken

Dear dedicated reader,

It would have been simple enough, I think, for us to have fallen into away-from-home holiday blues for Thanksgiving. Thankfully, the same indomitable, resourceful spirits which (probably?) inspired us to move here saved the day, bolstered by some non-perishable acquisitions made by Melissa during her most recent trip to the US for the Diwali vacation.

On first setting out to make our holiday dreams into reality, we realized that the principal obstacle was our glaring lack of food preparation facilities. Our comfortable guesthouse, advantageous as its location and all other amenities are, is not blessed by the presence of a working kitchen. Instead, all of our food is brought to us on a twice-daily basis from the hostel kitchen located 100 feet from our house.

Kate (my travel partner of Nepal fame who elected to stay some time with us in Kadod), Melissa and I, after several conferences on the matter, decided that the best thing to do, rather than to try and make use of the hostel facilities for an evening, would be to find a suitable, friendly off-site kitchen owned by an Kadodian family with an adventurous palate and not too many family members (we only had so much pumpkin pie mix, after all). After considering several possibilities, we settled on Daybal’s house.

My phone call informing Daybal of her selection proceeded in the following confused matter:

Me: (hesitantly on hearing lots of noise in the background) Daybal? I have a question for you, but I want you to know before I ask it that you can say no…
Daybal: (shouting over the background noise) WHAT do you people want to ask me?
Me: Well, Thursday is a really important American festival where we make lots of American style food and we wanted to know if we could make dinner for you and your family. But, we’d have to make it in your kitchen.
Daybal: You want to use my kitchen?
Me: (finishing her sentence) To make dinner for your family.
Daybal: YOU WANT TO USE MY KITCHEN?
Me: - To make dinner for your family. Yes.
Daybal: I (long pause) am coming over to your house.
Me: UH, that’s not necessary. We’re about to go out. But… well, listen, let’s talk about this tomorrow when I see you at school?

It was decided that the conference would continue at that appointed time and sure enough, the next day Daybal arrived on my door step.

“What the hell were you trying to say yesterday?” She asked me with confused affection.

“We just want to make some food for your family, but we have no kitchen here, so we need to use someone else’s kitchen. Do you mind?” I asked, hesitatingly.

“YOU people want to use my kitchen,” she said. “It’s fine, of course, but you make me a list and I’ll get whatever you need.”

I politely declined this directive and said we’d bring everything necessary. She started to argue, and I finally just said, “Daybal, seriously, I know that you have to say this because of the rules of hospitality, but please just let us be American this one day and do everything for you and your family because you’ve done so much for us?”

She looked at me for a moment, then laughingly agreed. Thus, our location was set.

All that was left was to acquire the necessary food items. A tentative menu had been agreed upon in our previously mentioned tete-a-tete’s about the upcoming holiday and Wednesday evening Melissa and I ended Spoken English Class early in the hope of purchasing all the necessary vegetables. We were unsuccessful only in our search for corn, but did manage to find potatoes, sweet potatoes, something we mistook for string beans which ended up being akin to a flavorless lima bean, and rolls. The vegetable sellers seemed puzzled about why we would need so much food for just the two of us, but we simply explained by saying we had a religious festival and it was required of us, an explanation which seemed to satisfy even the most pressingly curious.

The next day, our time inbetween having to teach was spent furiously peeling, chopping and generally preparing for the short amount of time that we would have between the end of school and our imposed curfew to cook and pull off this dinner. Everything was sealed, bagged and tinned in preparation for the shift of location to Daybal’s waiting kitchen. We were even able to put a jello pumpkin pie into the fridge, crust in all, using a tin which we normally use to hold papad (a thin Indian cracker served with every meal).

Arriving at Daybal’s, of course, began the process of negotiation over the actual terms of using her kitchen.

“Why have you brought these containers?” She yelled as she watched us unpack various sundry items we had brought with us.

“Well, we didn’t know what you would have…” I began carefully.

“I have containers!” She lovingly chided.

“Well, now I know, and anyway we needed something to carry the leftovers home in…” I explained.

“Leftovers?” She looked at me blankly.

“See…” I began. “This holiday is pretty much about giving thanks and then making more food than you could ever possibly eat to give thanks for. You eat so much that you are stuffed, then you eat a little more. Then, you take the rest home and eat it for the rest of the week.” She looked at me interested.

“And that is the purpose of ‘Thank You Day’?” She asked me.

“That is the purpose of ‘Thank You Day,” I replied, smiling.

The cooking that ensued mostly involved a lot of rescuing spices from Daybal’s hands just before she dumped them into our food. “Don’t you want cumin?” She’d yell just before we rescued it from being poured all over the mashed potatoes.

“Trust me,” Kate, our master chef, kept saying to her, “I have a plan.” Daybal merely responded by looking at Kate dubiously.

As a mediocre chef at best, my job somehow became the meaningful involvement of Daybal’s three children in the cooking process. Her two young daughters took a particular interest in the mashing of the potatoes, a process which they had previously never seen, and soon I was supervising their small arms holding our flat spoon-cum-mashing implement and keeping their fingers out of the pot. Meanwhile, I tried to keep Afifa (at 2 years old, her youngest), from killing himself: first, from falling down the open staircase while running wildly around with a baseball cap positioned over his face, then from sticking his fingers in an active electrical socket while dancing on an unstead table, and finally from poking out his eye with a large meter long stick which he brandished in an uncivilized way while tearing about the two rooms that made up the house. At these antics, Daybal merely laughed and said he was a ‘jungli’ (a kind of tribal person who lives in a jungle, apparently).

Between Kate’s negotiations, Melissa’s stirring and the prevention of Daybal’s meddling, the dinner was finally ready and the tarp upon which I had previously dined for both Eid-Ul-Fitr and during Ramadan was placed on the ground of the common room. Rashidbhai, Daybal’s husband, came and sat with his friend from his work who had been invited to join the proceedings after Daybal screamed at him to turn off the coverage of the Mumbai bombings on the TV and come and sit on the floor with the rest of us.

As we sat in a circle on the stone floor around the food, we three Americans realized that the Indians were waiting for us to show them the proper way to go about eating the food at hand. For Melissa and I, it was a strange but satisfying role reversal.

“So,” I began, “we usually go around and say something that we are thankful for before we begin to eat.”

“Like a prayer?” Daybal asked.

“Well, sort of…” There was a such a mixture of religious beliefs in the room that it didn’t feel fair to call it a prayer, exactly. “Just, something that you are thankful for.”

We were about to begin when Daybal, in her typical way, hit her husband on the arm and asked him what he was going to say. “You have something in mind?” she said to him. He mumbled that he did and explained what it was. Then she did the same thing to his friend and when she was satisfied that they would not be left stumbling for words, she turned back to me and told me I could begin.

“Well,” I said, “predictably I guess I’m thankful for having good enough friends here that they would allow us to take over their kitchen and eat strange food that they might not like and who have welcomed us so much into their lives here in Kadod.” I looked at Melissa.

“I’m thankful for having good friends like you all, too--” began Melissa.

“No man!” Daybal yelled at her. “You can’t say the same thing!”

We all laughed. “You make the rules now?”

“She has to have something different!” She insisted. The circle of thanks proceeded in this ceremonious way, punctuated by interruptions from Daybal’s idea of what it should look and sound like. Once it was finished, after a moment of silence, the eating commenced.

After hours of talking and negotiating, the sound of us all thoughtfully going about eating our food was a nice change, and we Americans were happy to see that our version of Thanksgiving was a hit as the Indians asked for seconds and thirds. The canned cranberry sauce was a particular favorite (probably owing to the typical Gujarati sweet-tooth).

After enjoying the food and the refrigerated pre-packaged pumpkin like dessert (Shout out to Jello for it being surprisingly good), the evening was coming to a close. We hadn’t even touched half of the mashed potatoes that we had made.

“You know,” Daybal announced, “I gave up my diet just for today, just for YOU people and Thank You Day.”

“You know,” I said, “That’s pretty American.”

Best,
Cat