Banu Mushtaq's recipe for Gobi Manchurian

Mint

a day ago

One of the strange things about getting an English education is that you are afflicted with a French education too. And a little bit of Russian too. What I mean is that if you have to study the English classics you are supposed to be thrilled by everything that the English thought was thrilling.
Even if you have never sneezed in the direction of Marcel Proust, you will probably know that someone in a Proust book ate a tiny cake called a madeleine and then had an intense, emotional flashback. Sensory memory, particularly food-triggered memories, are real, of course. Contemporary cuisine loves to build on gastronomic nostalgia. Chefs know that it is like letting you bring an old friend to a party full of new people. Indians love all the heavy emotional artillery associated with food. Our books are full of deliciousness but off the top of my head though, it is hard for me to remember one right this moment. (This is cue for you to please email my editor about all the superb books I have forgotten about or foolishly haven't read yet.) This brings me to the important matter of Banu Mushtaq and the Gobi Manchurian.
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Banu Mushtaq, as you know, is the 77-year-old writer from Karnataka whose book Heart Lamp (translated from Kannada into English by Deepa Bhashti) has just won the International Booker Prize. When you get the book, I recommend you turn to The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri right away. If it was possible to take every last entitled male behaviour that drives women mad and turn it into a crispy pakora, that is what Mushtaq has done in this short story. Many spoilers ahead but really my plot recap shouldn't ruin your enjoyment of this story.
The central character is not a floret of cauliflower. It is a lawyer looking back to when her daughters were young and she needed to hire an Arabic teacher. She is a busy, smart woman who knows her in-laws would enjoy watching her fail at her professional life and/or her domestic life. She is told that her husband cannot be involved in finding a teacher. Her younger brother performs a reluctant, shoddy and snark-filled assist and finds her a teacher. Our heroine is not given a proper chance to vet the Arabic teacher, keen as she is to make sure he is safe to leave with her tween daughters. Her husband won't even promise to keep an eye on the teacher.
As it turns out, the teacher is great at his job. Six months in, the lawyer is startled when she finds the teacher and her flour-smeared daughters ensconced in the kitchen with the cook. The teacher doesn't wait to be fired and flees. Our enraged heroine finds out the teacher is apparently addicted to street-side Gobi Manchurian (or Gobi Manjoori as it is known in my fair land) and he had persuaded the clueless cook to try to make it for him.
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Later, even though the teacher is well out of her children's lives, the lawyer keeps hearing of him and his matrimonial plans. He loses one prospect because the father of the bride doesn't want someone who could abandon his daughter and run back home north of the Vindhyas. He loses another because he accosts the prospective bride and asks her if she knows how to make Gobi Manjoori. Here Mushtaq and her translator Deepa Bhashti have so much fun because each time someone mentions the 'strange" new dish, it gets another name. Gube manchari, gube curry, gube manchali. Gube, the Kannada word for owl, lets us know that everyone is worried that the suitable boy is off his head. The English might attribute wisdom to owls and the French general awesomeness, but Kannadigas know better. The parents of the young women ask each other what kind of nut wants fried cauliflower at his wedding? (Don't raise your hands. I know! Me too!)
The moment that really had me cracking up was when the lawyer speculates that instead of this strange vegetarian dish, if the teacher had only 'demanded biriyani, kurma sukha, pulao or other similar dishes, the girl's family would have accepted happily." I had a non-Proustian flashback to an incident in my former Bengaluru neighbourhood, back in 2014. The groom's side pitched a fit that chicken biriyani had been served at the reception when really only mutton biriyani would do. Wedding cancelled. Back then, the bride had told the press, 'My family also had doubts about his moral character and that set me thinking. Finally, the biryani episode settled it and I knew I would not have been happy in the relationship."
Unfortunately, in this story, the teacher does slip under the radar of watchful parents and canny brides and finds someone to torture. A battered young woman and her brother arrive at the lawyer's office to ask for help to file a complaint with the police. The woman's husband had been asking her to make an unfamiliar dish and beating her for not being able to. The lawyer knows immediately, of course. The dish is familiar and so is the nut. She knows the teacher ought to be punished for his violence. And at this denouement is where the genius of Mushtaq's story lies.
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My friends at the feminist digital platform The Third Eye have compiled an incredible 'Dictionary of Violence"—concepts that help us understand how gender-based violence is navigated on the ground, in families and the legal system. Twelve women from Lalitpur, Lucknow and Banda, caseworkers all, unpacked the words in this dictionary. And at the heart of that dictionary, the heart lamp if you will, is the Hindi word samjhauta—the deal that is struck in the aftermath of domestic violence. The whole world is recruited into the samjhauta that is bargain, compromise, agreement, persuasion and every other word that seeks translation of men's violence into something that women can live with.
At the end of Banu Mushtaq's story about cauliflowers and men, our lawyer makes lightning-quick calculations in her office to save the young woman's future. If she filed a police complaint, the teacher would run away like he had run from the kitchen. The young woman would be neither with husband nor without. Rather than file a police complaint, better to mollify the madman—a decision made all over the world every moment at every level, in war and in peace. And hence, as we leave the lawyer, we see her swiftly searching her phone for a samjhauta—a good recipe for Gobi Manjoori.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories.
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