Ragi Mudde and a Love Potion

My life in Kolar was a journey into the unexpected, far from the familiar touchstones of the culture I left behind. Everything was new and exotic. To my new neighbors, who rarely traveled to the next village, I´m sure that I must have seemed as incongruous to them as they would have been in my home town in Connecticut, and I often sensed the gaze of peering eyes while I worked, brushed my teeth or ate my meals. 

When I was standing in line at the post office or in a crowd, it happened that I felt a light touch, as someone innocently stroked the sun-bleached hair on my forearm, fascinated by its texture.

Even the most mundane event in my day could be a source of entertainment and a diversion in the otherwise hermetic routine of the people around me, but eventually the novelty of my presence diminished, and along with it, the gang of curious children that in the beginning of my stay were captivated by my every move.  

We ate food with exotic names like sambar and idli, masala dosai and chapatti, everything spiced so that it singed our tongues, stung going down, smoldered in our stomachs, glowed in our bowels and burned when it came out.

It didn't take long before I was acclimatized to the point where I stopped using cutlery and began eating with my right hand. I learned to take a shock of rice with my fingers, turn it this way and that to soak up some curry, and careful not to wet my palm, gathered the mixture into a ball, and flicked it into my mouth. I began to drink like a native too, tilting my head back and letting a stream of liquid trickle down my throat, never touching the rim of the cup or glass with my lips. 

As far as washing went, you couldn’t call what we did a bath or a shower. Mani heated water by lighting a small fire under a clay cauldron and I washed off the grime after my day in the workshop by pouring water over myself with a tin mug, one body part at a time.

In this kaleidoscope of social constraints and taboos one of the key challenges would prove to be bridging the gap between two cultures. In order to function well it was necessary to adapt, but at the same time it was important to differentiate your behavior to the point that when East met West you wouldn’t get stranded between the two.

The volunteers in our group were placed in pairs and the cottage where my fellow volunteer Mike and I lived was located at the end of a dusty lane in the New Extension of Kolar and had a view of the barren, stony, peaks surrounding the town. On one side was the Government Silk Farm and an adjacent grove of mulberry trees, the preferred diet of the worms that produced some of the finest silk in India.

Across from it was the narrow gauge railroad station where an undersized steam locomotive puffed out clouds of black smoke through a polished brass stack on its daily run to Bangalore. However, calling the train trip a run was a bit of hyperbole, unless you compared it to the lumbering pace of a bullock cart, because it took eight hours for the train to make the fifty mile loop that ground through the villages and towns of the district.

Our house had no running water or plumbing and the unglazed windows were barred to keep out anything that was larger or less agile than a monkey. Troops of monkeys roamed the village and when they had gotten in and raised havoc, we decided to let a local carpenter make screens, not only keeping out monkeys and vermin but also eliminating the need to sleep under a mosquito net. We had a rudimentary kitchen with a concrete floor and unadorned white-washed walls. We used the small central room as an office and dining area and furnished it with a sturdy wooden table, a desk and cabinet. 

Considering that we also had two small bedrooms, an outhouse and a well, a few electrical outlets and a bare bulb hanging in every room, we lived in a Peace Corps Volunteer's luxury suite. 

In a society where the majority of people struggled from one meal to the next, it didn’t take long before we realized that we would need to get help with the chores of cooking and managing our household. There was no refrigeration, and instead of supermarkets with shoppers pushing overfull carts through the aisles of industrialized food, there were sacks of rice, flour and spices and colorful sheets with vegetables and fruit spread out on the bare earth. 

Preparing a meal required visiting the market stalls every day, then cutting, chopping, dicing and paring them while squatting on the Kolar District Karnataka was bounded by the states of Andra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Like many of the people who lived in the border districts, Mani was a polyglot who spoke not only the local dialect of Kannada and had picked up Basic English, but also Urdu, and the languages of the neighboring states. He made the daily rounds to the market and then cooked tasty curries from its abundance of vegetables. He negotiated with the tradesmen and hawkers that turned up at our gate, took our laundry to the dhobi, and when he thought I was beginning to look scruffy, would tactfully suggest that the barber come and give me a haircut and shave. 

As time passed, Mani’s wife helped with the household chores and the presence of their seven children would give us a feeling of family, and me having grown up in small rooms with seven brothers and sisters, a feeling of home. 

Lisa, Mani’s oldest daughter or sometimes Mrs. Mani, swept the concrete path in front of our door with a shaft-less straw broom, and with a paste made from rice flour and water drew intricate symmetrical designs that were said to bring luck and prevent evil spirits from crossing the threshold. 

On Friday afternoons we held a simple puja. Mrs. Mani blessed our cow, hung a garland of jasmine around its horns and marked its forehead with bright colored cum-cum. She burned incense and made an offering of coconut to our House Gods Hanuman and Ganesh, and after the ritual, we ate a sweet.

Mani was a Christian, I would guess with a few years of education in one of the schools run by English missionaries in a nearby mining town in the Kolar Gold Fields. However being a nominal Christian didn’t prevent him from believing in the Hindu deities. In the crowded spiritual landscape of India, God had many vestiges and Mani seemed content when we hung prints of Ganesh and Hanuman and Mrs. Mani blessed them during those Friday afternoon ceremonies.

When I needed to prove to myself that I was truly acclimatized, I asked Mrs. Mani to serve ragi mudde, firm round balls, the size of a clenched fist made from the traditional millet that gave good yields from the dry and unproductive Kolar soil. It was a nutritious staple in the rural villages, but for my unappreciative and untrained palate, ragi mudde had the gluey consistency of the oatmeal that was left standing too long in the bottom of the pot after my childhood breakfasts. 

As if I hadn’t already done enough strange things, Mrs. Mani made them and shook her head in mock protest. I chewed and chewed and no matter how much sambar I soaked them in they still tasted like lumps of coagulated wallpaper paste, and to her satisfaction, I gave up after four or five days and went back to rice and chapatti. 

When I visited the Mani's many years later, Mrs. Mani plucked a chicken and made my favorite curry. With a wink and a smile, she whispered something through her betel nut stained teeth to her daughters. I made out the words Francis and ragi mudde and heard them giggling.

It was 1970, a time of growing political and social awareness which didn’t leave me unaffected and I didn’t want to see myself as a “colonial oppressor” or regard Mani as my servant. But my egalitarianism required reciprocity and Mani was comfortable with our relationship as it was, and felt that his role excluded friendship. 

Mike and I never fully succeeded in getting him to stop calling us sir. When he did at last, he always put a Mr. before our names as a formal expression of respect. If I came upon him suddenly, he would stand at attention rigid and alert, and if he was smoking, he would cup his cigarette in his hand behind his back. I’d say, “it’s okay Mani, relax” but it never helped.

Mrs. Mani was cleaning rice in the dim light of the kitchen, spreading it around on a tin plate with nimble fingers and picking out the small stones that would jar your skull and could break a tooth if they escaped her experienced eye. I heard a hushed conversation as I was passing the door. 

Mani stepped out, blocking my path in the narrow passage. He cleared his throat. His forehead was set in a deep crease and his customary diffidence and deferential smile were replaced by a stern resolve. Not wasting any words in the manner of an older brother guiding an erring sibling, he warned:

“You must be very careful of the woman who comes to the house in the night, she is very bad”. He continued “You should never let her go into the kitchen, and never take any food that she offers you.” 

Mani wasn’t giving me an opportunity to protest and I was a little taken aback. The woman he referred to was for me, a brief glint of star shine that illuminated the unelectrified Kolar night. But if I believed that these meetings were discreet, I was alone in thinking so. While I thought the eyes of the village had closed and our encounters went unnoticed, I didn’t realize that the village never slept, and in its tightly woven tapestry of moral codes our meetings were unacceptable.

Mani’s seriousness told me that it wasn’t time for a quip, or a cavalier retort on the order of

“Bad? That’s what I like about her.” 

Instead I just repeated,

“Never let her go into the kitchen? Why?” 

Mani was obviously embarrassed. He explained as best he could that “this woman” could secretly enlist a conjurer to cast a spell that would put me in her power or she could make a love potion from a flake of her menstrual blood, place it in my food, and bewitch me. 

I was gliding on my airstream of youthful unawareness and hadn’t yet acquired the ability or experience to look at the world from the point of view of others. At the time I couldn’t see that Mani was shielding me from what he and Mrs. Mani deemed an inappropriate and dangerous situation and at the same time were protecting themselves from the hum of gossip caused by my assignations. I didn't realize that Mani’s income and status were interconnected with my well-being, and that my behavior reflected directly on him.