Plane food that isn't so plain, after all

At 33,000 feet above sea level, we were–to borrow a line from Singapore Airlines–flying the friendly skies. I didn’t hear any comparisons to any other aunties’ culinary sleight of hand.

Six soft cubes of paneer snuggled in a bed of mildly spiced spinach gravy. We had the option of eating Saag Paneer with a flaky paratha or with vegetable Biriyani topped with toasted raisins, almond slivers and caramelized onion. Or I could dip the paratha in Panchratan dhal, a five-lentil staple of Mughal cuisine. To cool off, I’d finish with the raita in which cucumber had been diced into tapioca-sized pebbles and seasoned with kala namak.

Our children–who are still shopping around for the world’s best Gobi Manchurian–were seated to my right and tucking in fast. They didn’t have time to talk. The paneer critic of the family, our daughter, was digging into the white cubes with no cheesy comments about how underdone or overdone they were. Had this been a product of my kitchen it may have been creamed by her–even if I’d created it from scratch from a recipe by Tarla Dalal.

The way I sauté paneer cubes when I make Mutter Paneer never fails to bring on a saucy dig or two in my kitchen.

“You still haven’t figured it out,” she will say. Then, she will sharpen her knife. “See how Vanitha Aunty does it, she doesn’t toast or sauté the paneer.” Minutes later she will prick me with a poisoned fork. “Why don’t you just ask Vasanthi Aunty?”

Vasanthi Aunty, the mother of a close friend, is second only to Julia Child according to the ruthless Reichl that I gave birth to 18 years ago.

“Vasanthi Aunty makes the best pasta even if the sauce is out of a bottle from Safeway.”

“I guess I’ll just eat dinner at Vasanthi Aunty’s then.”

“Of course you can tell who made it, mom. Vasanthi Aunty.”

I don’t know how this Aunty does it but it seems when Vasanthi Aunty boils water, it always tastes just right.

For the next two weeks, I tell myself, I needn’t fret over critical appraisals of my cooking. The best part about vacation is that the whole family can unite in criticizing someone else’s food. Eating out on a vacation can be such a cementer of relationships.

“Any more coffee or tea, ma’am?” The Jet Airways attendant in a turmeric-colored coat on the San Francicso–Shanghai sector hovers around me, beaming down at my empty tray.

“No, just water for me, thanks!” I say, handing over my tray with a smile.

I tell my daughter to make sure she eats the gulab jamun on her plate. I didn’t believe she would praise it sky-high (surely, it couldn’t beat Vasanthi Aunty’s?) but I want to tell her it feels quite authentic–without making any unnecessary references to any other cook’s jamun. The best jamun tastes of khoya, sweetie, so try it, I say. When my teeth sank into the Jet jamun, I remembered the khoya I once bought at a street stall in Delhi’s Ajmal Khan Road.

You see how our family dinners are turbulent while on the ground and how this meal aboard a plane was an elevating experience.

And just so we can taxi everyone and everything down to the same plane, even the aunty whose name shall go unmentioned for a few weeks could learn a thing or two from Jet Airways’ chefs to heighten her cooking, couldn't she?

Life Lessons on Bad Wedgie Days

When the kids and I leave for India this Friday on a short holiday, I won’t have to lift a finger. The two children will grunt and heave and load the airport cart and unload it at the counter. And I will hover over the luggage proceedings, occasionally conducting the stressful affair with my fingers while shouting out a few commands for effect. “Put it here!” “Just lift it this way, not that!” Most of my suggestions will be met with a “Mom, please?” or a frosty glare or both.

Understand, they’re not just loading my luggage these days. They’re scanning all my bags. They’re picking my locks. They’re throwing open my lid and unpacking my layers. They’re rearranging me. I’m always at Insecurity Check.

When I was twenty, I was sure there really wasn’t much left in the world for me to learn. At thirty, I was pleased that I could teach my toddlers a whole lot about the world. But now that I’m way past forty (but nowhere within crying distance of 50) and my children are in their teens, I’m often reminded by my flesh and blood that my understanding of world affairs is not quite whole. Apparently, it has holes.

They are becoming my teachers. Let’s rewind to one of my earliest lessons: phonics taught the Challenger way. My son was seven and my daughter was 11. I had learned phonics by osmosis. My children taught it to me the right way.

“No, mom, candy has a short vowel, a ‘breve’, not a ‘macron’, don’t you see?” my seven-year-old pointed out when I peered over his shoulder at his homework. My daughter glared at me over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses, insisting that “these are just the rules of phonics and if you understand them, they’re really quite simple.”

“Does it really matter?” I’d said. “I speak well enough, who cares about short and long?”

Twenty-seven years after I got my college degree I still find myself defending, feebly, the way I learned something.

The kids and I never agree on how we add, subtract, divide and multiply. They wince at my old-fashioned way of doing math. But, they admit, grudgingly, that it works – even smarter than their way sometimes.

Over the last decade, I’ve also been primed on things that I’ve not particularly wanted to learn–like the ‘wedgie’.

“You don’t know what a ‘wedgie’ is?” my daughter shrieked one day around the time she began middle school, buckling into giggles at the way the word rolled out of my Indian tongue. At the debriefing session, I was informed that it was–and I quote the Webster’s here–the condition of having one’s clothing wedged between the buttocks. I told her that not knowing about it for the first 15 years of my life in America hadn’t affected my life–even on a bad Wedgie day.

But, last week, my newly minted college student told my virginal ears about the significance of a sock on the doorknob of a closed door in a college dorm room. “Did the roommate forget to wash a sock when she went out to do a load of laundry, may be?” I ventured. Then this Indian American parent was gently escorted to the sofa and talked to about the ways of the birds and the bees in college. I gathered that some college students needed the privacy of a dorm room and the collusion of a roommate to use a room. The sock in question, she said, is a state of high alert for a roommate to not walk into any hanky-panky.

I reached for my curried smelling salts. So much for a recent lesson from my Cosmo-girl.

Then there was another from my Wired boy. Just last weekend, my son’s ego took a big beating; he lost out at several tournaments, tripped up at school and got a bad rap from one of his teachers. On one of his worst evenings, he sat moping in his room, wondering why he was a monumental failure. A few minutes later, he walked back into the kitchen and got himself a glass of milk. He sat down at the counter, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions in hand.

“I’m going to be sad exactly for an hour,” he said. “After that, it’s time to move on and see how I can do better in everything.”

And just this morning he told me to stop overreacting because he refused to wear his sweatshirt. He suggested I lower my voice because, when I cursed, our good Korean neighbor would most definitely hear my expletives, especially with the garage door open and all.

So I picked up the debris of my scattered self, zipped up and turned the key in the ignition. He and I were on our way to school.

Don't worry, there's also the Potty Pass

"Mom, don't worry," my son reassured me last night. "There's also the Potty Pass."

"YOU are DEPENDING on THAT to pull up your Biology grade in FRESHMAN year?" asks his sister, her jaw hitting our limestone floor. "Mom, your son won't graduate from high school and that's that!"

My daughter, the drama and dance queen, is back after her first quarter at Northwestern University. Her AP BIO grades in high school wouldn't have got her the Nobel but, wait a minute, we're talking about bombing freshman year.
She always refers only to her Freshman and Sophomore years.

"In Freshman year, you can't get anything but A's."
"In Freshman year, which idiot bombs Biology?"
"10th grade math, Trig Honors, is such a joke. It's for babies."
"Sophomore English? I slept through it."

But when I say, "Sweetie pie, come here, let's talk about 11th grade," she's nowhere to be seen. Has she apparated to Chicago? Because I've been looking and I can't find the broom.

In our home, subjects like grades spark spontaneous combustion and allergic reactions. Sometimes they bring on the flu–or, as in my daughter's case, the floo powder. And at most Indian-American homes–assuming we're talking about the sane, everyday-fare Indian–the day begins and ends with looking at something called THE ONLINE GRADING SYSTEM.

At most high schools, parents have access to their kid's grades through the school website. The access to the system is password protected. This is typically accessible to parents until 11th grade at which point your kid will go in and keep switching the password on you many times over exactly around the time the progress report is due to come out.

The online grading system is how I power up and end my day. My morning cup of French Roast from Cupertino's potent Roasted Coffee Bean in hand, I turn on THE SYSTEM. I don't need breathing exercises from my Art of Living workshop any more. My son's grades keep me in shape. I inhale sharply as I type in my password, hold for around 30 seconds and release when I see that the grades are on the other side of the B mountain.

Of all his numbers, his Biology grades give me the hot flashes month after month. The labs seem low on oxygen. When the marker for his labs points to zero again and again, I tell my son I'm feeling the onset of the Vaso-Vagal syndrome.

He's concerned, he's such a good boy. "Mom, don't worry. I forgot to put the date. You get a zero until you put the date back in. I'll handle it."

Another time he ponders the situation as if he were Gregor Mendel. "Mmm...it must be a technicality. I may have forgotten to write my name on the top right hand corner of the paper. So I'm sure my paper's in the "No-name" bin. I'll handle it right away."

Ye another time, he muses: "There's something wrong with the Scantron system. Look how I'm acing the essays."

And that's how, as we inch towards the end of the semester mark, our son has begun to bet on the proper functioning of his urethra: if he doesn't take a bathroom break, he will get an additional 10 points. (And that's not forgetting the Kleenex points: if you bring a box of tissues, add 10 more points to your Diffusion lab)

But look at the bright side, friends. When your biology grade depends on holding your bladder for eighteen straight weeks, you know your career choice likely lies in Economics, Chemistry, French, Music, Math, English or Physics. Or Driver's Ed.

High school is about finding what you want to do in your life. The potty pass is taking us closer than ever before to finding the truth.

Sweet Feet

SWEET FEET

I just received this charming two-year-old pair of feet in my inbox.

Don’t they talk to you? I see them fidget. They squirm. They stop and pull at the elastic bands. Pretty soon these feet walk up to mom, tug at her sleeve, point down and say “Mo…om”. The right leg is sore and stiff as the gold anklet lodges in the back between the shoe and skin, chafing the folds and burning a red welt.

In a few minutes, a little after they hear dad say “cheese”, the shoes go flying, one dropping inside a magazine rack, the other screeching to a halt by the fireplace, landing face down. Toes jump free from their black cage. Feet puff and fill out again. They mow through the carpet until bedtime. They pummel a rag-doll, squish a grape, kick a juice carton around the coffee table and trample a Sony remote. Larry King and his suspenders flash on to a screen, taking the feet by surprise. Shrieking with fear, they dash to mom in the kitchen and take cover behind her legs. The ratty old man can’t get us now, can he?

Sixteen years from now, these feet will peek at other feet, size up the pumps and wonder why someone would wear something that’s “SO NOT with the times and so 2000s.” They’ll scrape the floor at a college-prep place for an exam that has replaced what used to be called the SAT. They’ll drag and swagger around the bed when the same voice floats from the kitchen day after day: “Stop dragging your heels. Did you or did you not do the bed yet?”

If they’re lucky, these pretty twosomes will get a foot in the door of a good college where they’ll write a paper on how the country got back on its feet in 2009 just as President Obama was sworn into office. When they go for their first job interview, we’ll just hope they don’t get cold feet and, most of all, that they can think on their feet at all times. And we’ll pray that they don’t play footsie with the wrong kind. Who wants feet of clay?

Thinking too much never helped anyone get an A in English

My 14-year-old son is now confronting a new problem in high school. He is, according to his English teacher, “thinking too much”.

He came home last week with an 84 out of 100 in a vocabulary test because he, unfortunately, has been thinking too much about words and their contextual, non-contextual and metaphysical meanings.

Why won’t my son think straight? Does he want to be left behind at school?

And with this event blotting the joy from our November holidays, I offer the following points of advice for my son so he won’t languish in high school and embarrass his high-achieving Indian American parents who, like all other Indian American parents, have very specific dreams for where their son will be going to college in 2012 even though they themselves have attended questionable community colleges and state universities.

1. Don’t read between the lines. Stop wondering WHAT is in a name.

Did I ask you to plough through Kafka on the shore during the holidays?
Haruki Marukumi’s work is not for the wimpy and it does you little to tax your brains to solve riddles. Even though Wikipedia may offer some other explanations, "Kafka" is really just a proper noun. That's all.

2. Will you stop reading comics?

Yes, I know Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer winning Maus is wondrous but you shouldn’t read artwork and writings about the holocaust anyway because it’s amassing knowledge that, once again, will cause you to start thinking about things which is precisely what we’re trying to avoid doing. Ditto with your fondness for Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

3. Consider your other media options, honey

I’d rather you spent some time in other media, sweetie. Too much reading is why you’re reading too much into everything and ending up with shameful grades like 84 on 100. Your ancestors never settled for anything other than a 100 on 100 and they often went after the extra-credit 4 points by demonstrating that they had memorized meanings word for word in the same order that they were given them. And, honey, I’d rather you arm yourself with some sleight of hand for the challenges of the next generation. Playing Halo may teach you to worm your way through a burning 5-star hotel, a priceless skill in these troubled times.

4. Stay left-brain-centric. Where did right-brain get us anyway?

Don’t trust everything Daniel Pink says in his work ‘A Whole New Mind’ about why right-brainers will rule the future. Mr. Pink says folks like your dad are passé. He says your mother will rule the future. We know who brought in the green in this family so far and who will bring more of it in the future. Let’s not kid ourselves here because I need to use our family credit card for that gorgeous pair of Blahniks that I'm buying at Nordstrom this Christmas season.

Keeping that in mind, make a decision by the end of 9th grade on whether you’ll concentrate on computer science or bio-medical engineering. Everything else is fluff, son, that won’t bring in the moola. No, not economics or investment banking, please.

5. Don’t look up the word

Are you looking up a word in the dictionary as you read? Yet again? Munchkins, I told you it’s such a waste of time because it interrupts the flow of your reading and it’ll get you thinking which, as you know, is risky. What did the teacher say was the meaning of that word? THAT is the meaning and nothing else. No, no, looking up “Rotogravure” in the dictionary is pointless. How many times are you going to encounter this word again anyway?

6. Sweetheart, the classics are overrated

You’re nuts to go through with this crazy plan of yours to finish all the classics of English and American literature before you’re done with high school. I’ve analyzed Canterbury Tales, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Mill on the Floss in the days when there were no Cliff Notes and Wikipedia. It hasn't helped me any. Why should you care what happens to Michael Henchard in Mayor of Casterbridge? Has it shaped anything in you other than, say, your resolve to not lie or drink? But, son, what am I here for? I could tell you that in one-tenth the time it takes you to read these books.

Finally, dear, I’ll leave you with this thought about which, again, I don’t want you to think too hard. Just remember that when English poet Alexander Pope wrote these famous lines in the 17th Century,
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”,
he didn’t have access to Google and Wikipedia.

Late to school? AGAIN?

How do I explain to my son’s high school office that being marked tardy several times in a row for the same English class is really quite unfair to a family with exceptional values? Being one minute late to class shouldn’t really have to matter in the big scheme of things.

“Mr. So and So,” I would say, “Let’s look at the cultural issues at hand.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And look at what your own Evelyn Waugh said about this trait: punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

“Are you trying to say I’m in a dead-end job?”

“No, just that Indian Americans and their children operate by a different clock.”

“Really? And what kind of clock is that? I bet it’s from Ikea.”

I don’t know how he knows that most Indian Americans shop at Ikea but I bought mine at Costco on clearance. I’m certainly not going to tell him that since it’s not in my culture and, certainly not to my advantage, to tell others about good deals. The early bird gets the worm and the rest simply squirm.

But what I would like to tell Mr. So and So is that like the Americans who seem to exercise their privilege to switch their clocks back and forth twice a year, Indian Americans like to change their clocks everyday. So if it’s school, we may be a few minutes behind. If it’s a daylong picnic, we will–likely–stroll in by lunchtime. If it’s a party, our clocks are running close to an hour late; for a 7PM party, do always invite us at 6PM, won’t you?

I will remind him about how much Indian Americans have accomplished here in the United States and gently urge him to look up the roster of past valedictorian and salutatorian names, many of which start or end in “Ram”. I will suggest that while punctuality may be considered a virtue on the North American continent, everywhere else, including Europe–except in Switzerland where their hands were tied to the hands of their clocks–it’s not even a concept for which, I’m sorry to have to use the dreadful word, the time has come. Now let’s look at just one of the things my ancestors in India have done, despite this one fetal flaw, Mr. So and So. In the 5th Century AD, an Indian invented the number Zero and also came up with an approximation for Pi. You must realize that had it not been for an Indian who lived many thousand years ago, you may not even have a school bell.

“So, given our background, would you forgive that one micro-chink in our armor, Mr. So and So, and reconsider dropping one of the tardies so my son doesn’t get Saturday detention before this semester ends?”

And, if Mr. So and So does, I promise to buy him a cuckoo clock from Switzerland for Teacher’s Day after setting it to five minutes behind the school bell.

Fight or Flight? Pulling the plug on “Fight Club”

On occasion, our family watches R-rated movies together but one movie made me question the wisdom of that. In Indian American families like mine, “Meet the Fockers” isn’t considered a family movie: I was trashed by a friend or two for watching it with my teenage kids and squealing with delight over the crude humor.

But last week my 14-year-old insisted we rent “Fight Club”. His best friend (he’s 14 also) claimed it was really cool. “It’s supposedly one of the best movies of all time. I’m waiting to read the book. It’s a classic by Chuck Palahniuk, mom.”

So we sat down, he and I, to watch a cynical, smoke-filled movie about a young man and his misadventures with a strange misanthrope who builds bombs from soaps. Along the way, we discovered what young men who are unhappy do to fend off insomnia: sit in on testicular cancer support groups, commiserate with members of AA or like groups and seek raw satisfaction in listening to a terminal cancer patient tell her group that she’s looking for sex. “Fight Club” gave us more than we bargained for: many sentences which start with the letter ‘F’, candid references to and images of condoms and vibrators, casual romps with colorful vocalizations, and, of course, nocturnal trips to a liposuction clinic during which one of those fat-filled plastic bags snags on a barbed wire, leaking amber-colored liquid (which could pass off for thin pumpkin soup). Need I say more?

Anyway, less than half way through the movie, I yanked the plug. Then I left the brand new unread copy of my son’s book out for the vultures by purposefully striding over to the garage and dumping it next to all the things I’d set out for Goodwill. The video, I snapped to my son, was going to be returned “first thing tomorrow morning”.

“From now on,” I spat out, “I’m screening ALL your books too.”

Then my son began asking for a logical explanation about why I felt this movie wasn’t right for him. How was he in any way less mature than his 18-year-old sister (who I would have permitted to watch this movie)? “What makes you think that I can’t handle it as well as, say, any 18-year-old? I’m just about as mature as any adult out there, I think, mom,” he says to me, wondering aloud about why, at the same time, he’s tearing up over this silly incident.

All I did then was put this big, stubbly bear on my lap and tell him that sometimes parents simply want their kids to be kids and movies like this disillusion kids and may be that’s why I did it, not because I didn’t trust him with the material. The book by Chuck Palahniuk isn’t in the garage any more. Some time in the night it made its way back to the gargantuan bookshelf in the big bear’s room. I paid $13.95 for it. And my son won’t rest until he gets every cent’s worth out of every book - even if it’s going to be ten years from now when his mother may have no say at all in this matter. Or anything else, for that matter.