As the Pandemic rages on and I continue to live, like many of you, with the uncertainty of not knowing when I will next get to eat even a simple prawn curry made by my mother with masala prepared by my father, I take immense comfort in taste-based memorialising
An Ethiopian meal, delivered at my hotel room in the Austrian city of Graz, was the closest I had come to being fed something familiar that could sate my cravings for home food without my having to cook it. Representation pic
I arrived in my hotel room in Graz shortly before 7pm yesterday. It was neither too large nor too small. Just about right, with a comfortable bed, a half-inspiring view (80 per cent of it looked onto the architecturally uncompelling structure with a broad enough sliver opening out into the old city). It’s my third time here. I like that I am located so close to the heart of town, with the river Mur a two-minute stroll away. As I walked from the train station towards Lendplatz, where the hotel lies, I registered surprise at the sight of people walking mask-less in the streets. I was adamantly wearing the black FFP 2 mask I had had on since I caught the train from Bozen, crossing the border on foot at the Brenner, then catching the final connection at Innsbruck. Did Austrians think they were living in a post-Pandemic world? My partner had reminded me that the numbers were surging here once again, so I had to be careful at all moments. What was my purpose of travel? I accepted an invitation to ‘see’ an exhibition at a Graz-based gallery.
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South Tyrol has been in some form of lockdown since the first week of November. By February, the number of infections in Tramin had risen exponentially. Until a week after Easter we weren’t allowed to leave our municipality. As drastic as it all seemed, we knew that if we weren’t disciplined about our social interactions, there would be no relief from being a red or orange zone. After a lot of thinking and strategising, I decided, since the borders were now open, to make the journey. I was curious to see what Spring in Graz looked like, since I had only ever known the city in Autumn.
According to the habits my body has formed since I arrived in Tramin in June last year, it was already dinner time when I checked in. The person from the gallery who organised my trip told me that while restaurants were shut, I could use a delivery service to order in at the hotel and it would be sent up to my room. Having lived in a small town all these months where we only ever order in pizza twice a month, this felt like a lavish opportunity. When I loaded the website of the delivery service, I was awestruck by the choices. There was Indian food on offer, which I remain sceptical of trying for fear every dish is over-creamed to suit European palettes, there was Sri Lankan, Nepali, Thai, Japanese, Austrian, generic African, and then emerged the clear winner, Ethiopian. Ever since I had first sampled this cuisine in a quarter in Paris, taken there as I was by Karthika Nair, the brilliant poet, I’ve had a love-love relationship with it. Whenever I’m in Europe and begin to feel most profoundly a craving for our Goan Catholic west coast fare, I try to find the nearest Ethiopian restaurant to fix my urges. Because everything usually comes set over the soft, sour, porous, fluffy injera, which remind me of the podi my mother sometimes made for us, it is wisest to use your fingers, and I enjoy being led into using my fingers, which remains, for me, one of the most natural ways of eating because that is what I have known all my life. Even though I’ve lived here for a year and had spent time in Europe previously, I still eat awkwardly with cutlery, even though I know most of the food here is optimised for eating with a knife and fork.
Last evening I blind ordered a preparation of chicken, and when I received the biodegradable box, was elated to find so many elements sitting in corners; slices of boiled beetroot, potato bhaji made with onions, a stir-fry of carrot and beans, and spinach that came really close to how my father makes it, and a giant boiled egg, all of it sitting on injera. It was the closest I had come to being fed something familiar that could sate my cravings for home food without my having to cook it.
As the Pandemic rages on and I continue to live, like many of you, with the uncertainty of not knowing when I will next get to eat even a simple prawn curry made by my mother with masala prepared by my father, I take immense comfort in these instances of taste-based memorializing. If anything, over the last year I’ve learned to derive pleasure from such wildly ephemeral acts; these butterfly moments of here-today-gone-tomorrow which remind us that we are, elementally speaking, composed of matter.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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