The Virgin Widow and Poppadams

  

“It was my Yechumi Pati who invented the poppadam”, Amma pronounces, as she pops a perfect round wafer into a hot pan filled with oil. In a nanosecond the poppadam bloomed, pimply and yellow.

Yechumi Pati’s name was Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, though Pati’s life was one of deprivation and bereavement. Fondness makes Amma call her grandaunt Yechumi Pati.

Many Tamil families will tell a story about the `Yechumi pati’ who lived in their ancestral homes. She was the widow who worked herself to the bone in huge joint families in pre-Independent Tamil Nadu and who responded when addressed as Pati. She had been a constant figure in the history of most families, and her story of imposed austerity has fallen into our contemporary deaf ears with nothing more than momentary curiosity of a hazy past. If a cousin from America dropped by and she heard yet another Yechumi Pati tale, she would probably comment, “awesome” and move on.

Amma grew up motherless. Her mother died when she was two or so. She is often unsure. But Yechumi Pati had filled her in with all details. That Annapoorani, Amma’s mother, had eyes as large as that other Lakshmi, the family’s cow that stood calm, swishing its tail in the backyard of the house. It was Paramasivam, the cheeky milkman, plucking at Lakshmi’s teats, who pointed out the similarity between his favourite cow and the lady of the house. Pati had been the only witness to that outrageous comment about Annapoorani’s large eyes, coming from that lowly rascal!

“Your mother Annapoorani was beautiful and a good daughter-in-law, but she died a shade too soon. It was the bad delivery that did her in as she lost a lot of blood. It ran like the Tamarabarani out of her. Your father, who doted on her, was inconsolable with grief. It took him seven long months of mourning before he married your step mother”, Pati had recounted.

Amma always remembered that Yechumi Pati would end all her stories with a long and deep sigh saying, “It’s a hard life for us born as women!”

But what of Yechumi Pati herself? Amma said if only she had not been disfigured with her hair shorn, clothed in the ochre robes of the Hindu widow, Pati would have been a stunner.

Each time I yelped, pulling cold wax off my arms and legs, Amma would recall, “My Yechumi pati had arms and legs as smooth as alabaster.  And she didn’t do any of this waxing rubbish. She would leave before any of the household members woke up, by the crack of dawn, to the Tamarabarani river, and sit on the cold steps leading to the river and use a piece of turmeric to scrub herself before taking a dip in the chill waters ”. That was the only depilatory cum cosmetic Pati is known to have used.

Yechumi Pati was, Amma told me when she considered me adult enough to keep a secret, a `virgin widow’. That, those whispers signalled, made her plight more evocative. It was bad enough in those days if you were widowed, but her virgin status meant she had had no share of the fun times in life before bereavement struck.

Pati, Amma ponders, could have been betrothed when she was seven and was then probably married off by nine years of age. Pati had met her husband the first and last time on her wedding day. On that auspicious day, all aunts, uncles, and her parents had fussed over her and she had refused to have her wedding meals and preferred to nibble at the sweets placed before her. Her mother, she was surprised, did not scold her on that day or try and force-feed rasam and rice. The women had knowingly murmured, “Wedding day blues. Most brides lose their appetites”.

Wedding celebrations over, Pati had returned to her mother’s home. It was customary then Amma said, to send the child-wife to her husband’s home only after she attained puberty. She would be both underage to begin to have sex and would only be added trouble for the ma-in-law, already burdened with bringing up a truckload of children herself.

One day, Yechumi Pati, she could have been 12 years old, no one knows, was told she was widowed. Her husband had died of a severe case of jaundice. He had been treated at home with local herbal brews and prayers, but the 16-year old boy had succumbed. This time everyone visited Yechumi Pati at her mother’s, only to mourn.  When she attained puberty, the crimson from her bottom had made a little map on her ochre robes and told her that she was a woman.

After her mother died, Yechumi Pati was left alone. My grandfather was her favourite nephew and he had great affection for his Aunt Yechumi and brought her to his home to live with his huge family. She lived as discreetly as she could, taking on as much chores as possible at home, and was called Yechumi Pati by the children of the house. Yechumi Pati brought up her nephew’s children and theirs, cooked and washed and slept late at night on the stone floor in the kitchen, with her head resting on the door step that doubled as a makeshift pillow.

Apart from helping the women of the house with the kitchen work and bathing and chaperoning the children to school, Yechumi Pati had developed enviable culinary skills.  She was a master of invention too, but those were days before glossy cookbooks and sassy chefs and no one recorded the culinary invention of a widow lost in a large household in small town Tirunelveli. Daughters leaving the house to settle with their husbands outside of Tirunelveli would faithfully sit by her side and make little booklets of cookery tips and draw a list of the choicest of recipes from Pati to impress their husband’s families. The first granddaughter, who was married off to a groom settled abroad even promised to translate the recipes in English and publish a collection of Pati’s recipes as a cookbook.

“She did nothing about the cookbook. Ratnam was just a big talker”, Amma remarks, making a face.

 Yechumi Pati was in charge of making preserves and pickles and making wheat and ragi wafers and sago vadams, lentil appalams and other fritters. These were usually outside the ambit of daily meal making and demanded elaborate preparations and skill. At summertime, she would take position in a shed in the backyard that had a thatched roof and was open on three sides. There she would sit on the floor by the terracotta ovens, lit with crackling logs, and would stir huge portions of sago porridge. She would also roll out the dough made of black gram lentils and rice flour to make appalams. A thrifty woman, for whom everything seemed precious and not be wasted, she would collect the rinds and peels of vegetables used in cooking for the day and mash them to make a mixture with the boiling sago to make colourful vegetable vadams. She would then make several trips to the terrace in the dead of the afternoon, when the little children and the mothers and grandparents snoozed, to dry the appalams and fritters. There would be irritable exclamations made by some of the sleeping gang if she disturbed them by letting slip a spoon or a vessel clank on the ground on the way up while carrying the mass of goo upstairs.

Then when the sun baked the roof to blazing proportions, she would tiptoe and hop on the burning terrace floor to spread huge sheets of damp fabric, usually her old torn nine-yard saris. On them, she would lay the round appalams and sago vadams to dry across the entire length and breadth of the roof. Work done, she would let her sari slip from her shaven head, glistening in sweat, and fan herself for a while. She would sit on the doorway to the terrace holding a long twig, whose end was tied to a piece of black cloth, and wave and shoo the crows that swooped to peck at the drying food on the cloths and would slowly nod off. A couple of frisky grandchildren would stealthily go past and pick the chewy semi-baked wafers and nibble on them. Pati would stir from her catnap and warn them of stomach upsets and send them scurrying.

Relatives, leaving for home after staying for the summer holidays, were dutifully presented with an aluminium tin filled with freshly made appalams, placed in a vertical row and tied together with a piece of string and a fair portion of wafers and fritters. No one could board the train without these send-off presents from a smiling Yechumi Pati.

One late afternoon, Amma remembers, two days after the month of Adi began, the household gathered around the kitchen, because Yechumi Pati had drummed up a new fritter. It was thicker and smaller in size than the round appalam and it was made of black gram lentils and country potash. It billowed when fried in oil and tasted salty but left a slight sweet aftertaste.

Are they small appalams, the children wanted to know, crumbling it in their mouths. “No, it’s not an appalam but a poppadam”, Pati announced grandly, chuckling that the new name rhymed with appalam.

“Pati’s maternal family’s widows who hailed from Palaghat learnt the recipe and made the poppadam popular in other parts. We didn’t know of this patenting business in those days. Otherwise, Yechumi Pati would have become world famous today”, Amma insisted, landing another crisp yellow moon on my plate.

Fame could not brush Yechumi Pati, Amma say sadly, as she died soon after her culinary invention of the poppadam when she was in her late forties. Amma remembers that Pati had often complained of ‘wounds in her belly’.

Could it have been stomach cancer or an enlarged spleen Amma asks aloud today?

“Why Amma, your father was a doctor, didn’t she tell him about her ailment?” I ask.

“A virgin widow didn’t complain aloud”, Amma replies.