For Soibam Haripriya, childhood foods are a reminder of her mother’s grief.
As a child, my father—Baba—would sometimes eat boiled water chestnut, in lieu of rice, the staple food. The poverty he lived in did not allow for two square meals of rice during the lean months. He recounts that on one occasion, not having eaten anything else for several meals, he even fainted after eating boiled water chestnut, a food available for foraging in the waters of the pat (Loktak Lake) during autumn before the paddy is ripe for harvest.
The thorny fruit was etched in my young mind as a symbol of the perils of poverty. For which, unfairly so, I carried a resentment against my paternal grandparents, particularly my grandfather. He had two wives, and their families cohabited in two adjacent houses. I attributed my father’s childhood poverty to his father’s marital situation, and none to the realities of agrarian lives and its hazards.
While growing up, heikrak (water chestnut), thangjing (fox nut or prickly water lily), kolamni (water spinach), thambal (lotus, including its seeds, roots, and tender leaves), ekai thabi (water mimosa), and kambong (wild rice)—aquatic food from the waters of the Loktak Lake area—formed a part of our diet even though my parents moved to Imphal early on. Baba’s family were cultivators and fisherfolk living near Loktak Lake where such water-based delicacies were widely available. When they visited from Oinam, the town in the Bishnupur district of Manipur—about 14 kilometres from Loktak Lake—where they lived, they brought these delicacies with them, a reminder of a life my father had left behind.
My siblings, parents, and I moved to Imphal after I, my parents’ last child, was born. My paternal grandparents’ frequent and extended visits meant that these aquatic vegetables were still part of our meals. I loved the crispiness of thambou (lotus roots) in the singju that Ema—my mother—made, and staining my teeth black with sun-dried kambong. These visits also brought other things—such as advice to Baba to get another wife since the present one (my mother) was unable to cook for him due to her ill health.
I loved the crispiness of thambou (lotus roots) in the singju that ema—my mother—made, and staining my teeth black with sun-dried kambong.
Ema had asthma, and the smell of cooking oil triggered severe allergies. So, much to the chagrin of my grandparents, I grew up in a household where it wasn’t unusual for my father to cook or to help in the cooking, if he happened to be home. Being a government doctor, he was usually off on long stints of transfers in the outskirts.
For Baba, his parents’ visits always brought back memories of food from his childhood. When I told my parents that I would like to eat the red rice I came across while playing at a neighbour’s house, Baba recounted an incident from his childhood when he ate a similar red-coloured rice which, when cold, was so hard that one could pelt someone with it. For Ema, these visits, like the thorny skin of thangjing, were prickly. Sullen, she would withdraw into herself while Baba would narrate stories of fishing, foraging, farming.
How should I choose to remember the memory of Baba reminiscing about food at a time when sometimes his aging memory fails him?
When the hailstones of spring decapitated the mango flowers,
some had budded into minuscule fruit.
The air was heady with a green smell.
Memories I cannot go back to,
suffused with the smell of childhood.
I have a notion of the smell
but no way to recreate it,
or find a way to inhale
though if that smell were to assail me again,
I would discern it from a hundred others.
Aromas wafted from my mother’s kitchen
before asthma wrecked her body.
She stopped cooking long ago.
My grandparents once visited my father
to rectify the situation—
the plight of a son married to a sickly woman.
‘Let her stay but get another’.
Father tells this to grown-up versions of us—
a story, a joke, the absurdity of it all!
But, who knows what she felt,
She, then, younger than I, now.
She who had seen co-wives fighting,
her two mothers-in-law in fumes of envy,
each chopping the flowering kundo*
the other had planted,
or the times they sought mysterious potions
vying for the affection of the husband.
Each morning, newlywed,
my mother had to wade through their acid tongues
aimed at each other.
Once, walking back listlessly from school,
I found her home—weeding a patch in the courtyard.
She looked up, smiled.
The happiness at her delight, her unexpected presence
only felt at that age.
My Parents’ Vegetable Garden
All through our younger days in Imphal, Baba and Ema could be seen after work in their vegetable garden in front of our house—tending, weeding, sowing. The land we stay on was reclaimed; it was made by filling a marshy swamp with earth. It was, and continues to be, a fertile patch yielding whatever my parents could plant when they were younger and had the strength to do so. The patches that were not filled remained as ponds where fish would swim. Ema, a clerk in the fisheries department, frequently bought fish seedlings from her office for our pond.
Our family ate differently when we were growing up—we ate better. We foraged in our own vegetable garden for things that grew on their own in the furrows, in between what was cultivated—monsaobi (lamb’s quarters), kengoi (Manipur Loosestrife), and peruk (Indian pennywort). We would use the leaves of these wild plants to make dishes like kangsoi, a vegetable dish comprising boiled, fermented fish and dried fish, and topped with chives. The leaves of the humble monsaobi soften to create the perfect texture with a tender bite when cooked in kangsoi. Meanwhile, kengoi adds a subtle tanginess to the dish. Kangsoi has a grammar of its own: no two vegetables can be paired together unless their tastes complement each other. Since the earth used to fill the land was from agricultural fields, many such plants grew on their own. Ema leaves the monsaobi in the garden till it dries up, to ensure that its seeds disperse and we have a fresh crop to forage in the subsequent season.
One day, when returning home from school, I saw Ema weeding a small patch next to the pond. She told me that she had made torbot kher (ash gourd kheer), an infrequent delicacy for our family, as my afternoon snack. During my teens and early adulthood (late 1990s), whatever Ema prepared was a delicacy for our family as her health rarely allowed her to cook. She cuts the ash gourd into elongated strips, boils them until they are just about cooked, then lightly fries them in ghee before adding milk and sugar. The exquisite aroma hung in the kitchen for hours.
Our family ate differently when we were growing up—we ate better. We foraged in our own vegetable garden for things that grew on their own in the furrows, in between what was cultivated—monsaobi (lamb’s quarters), kengoi (Manipur Loosestrife), and peruk (Indian pennywort).
Much later, in my social anthropology class at Delhi University in 2008, I learned that to cultivate is how humans create culture—agriculture. Having witnessed Ema harvest food and cook with it, it seemed to me that both cultivation and cooking were acts of creating culture. Both were laborious and painful tasks for my mother, who would continue to tend to the vegetable garden in spite of her illness. Working on the land was inseparable from the taste of the food we ate. The taste of these vegetables, plucked and cleaned just minutes before being cooked, retained the flavourful aroma of the earth.
Ema was equally invested in the aesthetics of the garden, the lilies in the ponds, the flower patch that she still continues to tend to. My paternal grandmother, who believed that transient things should serve a purpose, sees no beauty in the blue bush of kombirei (Manipuri iris) flowers that wither after a day and can’t be eaten.
Ema’s tender hands
Weary of
Creating flowers
One day
Grew barbwires
from her slender fingers
Our Unsophisticated Lekai
Our ‘leikai’ in Imphal, a clan-kin network loosely translated as ‘locality,’ was commonly referred to as ‘hongatlakpa,’ meaning those who have moved from elsewhere. The implication was that we had moved from somewhere less desirable (the countryside) to a swampy reclaimed land in the city that is perhaps no different from the place we left. Growing up in the 1990s, our poultry livestock—ducks and chickens that we never ate because they substantiated our meagre income—were regularly stolen in broad daylight by those from the neighbouring leikai.
Our family was constantly reminded that we were lawai. The closest approximation of lawai can be country bumpkin, someone from the periphery of sophistication. Lawai is the antithesis of Imphal—the city, the suave, the cool. In fact, visits to my maternal grandmother’s home in Keisampat, which was in Imphal proper, were laced with name-calling—“lawai dakter gi macha”—offspring of the lawai doctor. Our food, our ways of living, reflected that. That my parents worked on our patch of vegetable garden was seen as an inability to cut away from our lawai origins and looked at with disdain by those in the adjacent leikai.
Much later, in my social anthropology class at Delhi University in 2008, I learned that to cultivate is how humans create culture—agriculture. Having witnessed ema harvest food and cook with it, it seemed to me that both cultivation and cooking were acts of creating culture.
Now we foreground our lawai origins despite never having lived outside Imphal. Just like the home-knitted sweaters Baba infamously wore—which, in those days, signaled the lack of purchasing power, garnering humiliation—became ‘cool’ and desirable over time, similarly, we too began flaunting the genealogies we otherwise hid in our childhood. Today, we proudly display our food and the fact that we eat what we grow. But not back then, when we lied that we bought food and sweaters from shops to convince others of our ability to buy.
During Curfews, it is our Home Garden that Fed Us
But, what does the ability to buy mean during curfews, when accessibility to purchasing food is restricted? Our growing-up years between the late 1980s and the early 1990s were dotted with gridlocks and combing operations every few months or so. During curfews, many people from the neighbourhood would avoid the roads and reach my home through small bylanes, asking us to sell the products of our vegetable garden. Unlike many others, we didn’t have to depend solely on dal and other dry rations.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, my friends from Manipur and I would joke that we are used to such state-imposed measures—worse with internet bans, checkpoints, and the looming threat of violence—and might have a thing or two to teach those who haven’t lived through restrictions. We know what to stock up—the dry goods, oil, pulses, rice, ngari (fermented fish), salt, potato, dried red chilies, and LPG gas cylinders (procured from the black market for thrice the original cost).
Eating food cooked in oil, and dal, is common during curfews and bandhs; they last long, unlike vegetables that perish easily, and dried or fermented fish, which aren’t easy to source. Many of the everyday preparations—kangsoi, eromba (boiled mashed vegetables with ngari and boiled red chillies), morok amekpa (a chutney-like dish made of mashed chilies and fermented fish or soybeans), chamfut (boiled vegetables)—were made at my house during curfews from our garden’s bounty. They were prepared by Ema and Baba—their labour in tending our garden and cooking its food steadfast against multiple violences.
Ema stopped cooking completely about a decade ago, though she still supervises the vegetable and flower garden. The food that I grew up with is, therefore, a distant memory for me, even with ingredients still growing in the garden and the pond, ready to be plucked. I never learned to cook the way Ema did. Though I always call her for recipes and suggestions on weekends, during my slightly more elaborate cooking.
My tongue remembers what my hands cannot recreate.
The rhythm of life,
the boredom of it.
Like curfewed days and days,
the tragi-comic window of curfew-relaxation.
In the market, we barter
living and living.
My paternal grandmother in exasperation
uproots mother’s flower garden.
‘You cannot eat them!’
Mother seethes wordlessly.
Overnight barren,
the following morning
every furrow has a seed,
a promise of fruitfulness.
I understand her need for flowers
to embellish this gaping
graveyard.
Soibam Haripriya is a poet, translator, and Assistant Professor of Sociology and a member of the Ethnography Lab at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Texas, Austin. Her key areas of interest include gender, violence, Northeast India, and poetry and/in ethnography. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent (2021), A Map Called Home (2018), and Centrepiece (2017), among others. Her translations have appeared in Crafting the Word (2019).
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