by P.R.Viswanathan
[box]A dad who loves food visits his daughter in Singapore, only to find his health-conscious offspring cooking and serving food in a way he least expected, much to his dismay. Here’s a humourous account of his experience in P.R.Viswanathan’s words.[/box]The inimitable P. G. Wodehouse has so often said – in much better language: just when life appears perfect, we make the mistake of becoming complacent, hardly realizing that at this very moment, fate is busy planning to throw a spanner in the works.
Singapore! The name itself has an indescribable feel to it – Indian enough to own and foreign enough to attract. It conjures up so many images – the shining and gleaming city of high-rises seen in Bollywood’s “Krish”, the well-governed city-state of the philosopher-statesman Lee Kuan Yew and in the past, a city made familiar in numerous Tamil movies and by the fortunes some of my relatives made here in the fifties and sixties.
Going further down memory lane – sometime in the late thirties – an uncle had blown up his all, downing many a glass of beer on the waterfront that my father had to send him passage money from Bombay. And who can forget that this city is the setting for some of those fascinating stories of Somerset Maugham and P. G. Wodehouse?
It was our first visit to Singapore and my wife and I were greatly excited. We had our daughter living there. We did not have to bother finding hotels and above all, worrying about getting the right, vegetarian food. These were the pleasant thoughts on my mind as the plane landed ever so smoothly at Changi. The morning after (now, does that sound ominous?), I woke up rather late to a bleak, rainy day. Nothing like the good old brew to cheer one up! I was grateful to my daughter when she handed me the steaming cup. I decided not to do my usual gulp and slurp routine but prolong the enjoyment. But when the liquid hit the taste buds, I recoiled. What it tasted like, I cannot say, but it was not coffee. Daughter must have picked up all this from the contortions in my face for she interrupted her conversation with her mother to tell me: “I know Daddy. That is how I felt the first time. It is decaffeinated coffee. Very good from health point of view! You will get used to it.” Without waiting for my response, she resumed her conversation with Mother.
The skies had magically cleared (a routine occurrence in Singapore) and my first copy of The Straits Times in hand, I now looked forward to breakfast, my best meal of the day. Give me a hearty breakfast and I assure you, I won’t be finicky about lunch and dinner; make them light, I always say. But try saying that to either of my daughters! They think I eat hearty lunches and dinners; it is just that my breakfast is extra-hearty. Be that as it may, when breakfast did arrive, I greedily dug a spoon into the generous bowl of Quaker Oats (my brand in Bombay too) the wife had placed before me. Again that assault on the taste buds.
“Did you forget to put sugar?” I asked.
“What are you saying?” questioned the wife in response, “I have put three spoons.”
“Oh! Alright!” I agreed unhappily and went to work on the insipid stuff.
Enlightenment dawned when I went to the kitchen to return my plate and bowl. Daughter was making oats for herself. She was pouring out of an hourglass shaped bottle, which had “Milk” written on it but I could see through the liquid.
“Oh God! What are you pouring into your oats? In Bombay, we berate the poor bhaiyya (milkman) for giving us such stuff and here you pay good money to buy it.”
“Daddy!” she began but by then my eyes fell on some brown powder, which too went into the bowl and I cried: “Hey! What the hell is that?”
“Daddy!” she resumed, this time with the gentle annoyance one assumes when explaining things to a dim-witted child. “This is fat free milk and this is raw sugar.”
Oh! Now everything was explained – the watery taste and the low sugar. Later on, I estimated that about 5 spoons of raw sugar would be required to do the work of a single spoon of regular white sugar.
Back to The Straits Times and visions of lunch! After an hour, which I thought was a decent interval, I emerged from my room with a cheery hi and asked my daughter: “So, what is for lunch?” and she answered: “All your favourites! I am making onion sambar and raw banana curry.” “Wow. Good girl,” I answered with a lot of warmth.
Of late, after my retirement, I have been taking an interest in the kitchen. So, I entered and started washing a glass here, wiping a plate there – generally making myself useful and treading the fine line between involvement and interference. Then I made my usual offer to shred and grate the coconut.
“That’s ok dad! We don’t use coconut! Did I tell you that I too have High Cholesterol like you?”
I think I took it very well; resigning myself to sambar without coconut, I made anxious enquiries about her cholesterol levels and suggested to her that yoga is a better bet than knocking off coconut altogether. It might traumatize her ruggedly cultivated Palakkad Tamil constitution. That my own cholesterol was under control with yoga!
She had finished cutting the raw bananas into little pieces of just the right size and placed the lot in a frying pan. Then she called out to me: “Dad, can you hand me that?” pointing to what looked like a can of deodorant. The can did have an atomizer and I saw her spray it, not on herself, but on the raw bananas; realization dawned on me. That was all the frying we were going to get. What a pass we had come to – from the days when Mom would liberally lace her curries with coconut oil through the wife’s modest doses of refined oil to this pathetic spray, which evaporated as soon as it touched the pan.
Such was my lunch. I ate even more sparsely than at breakfast. That is the trick behind all these dieting programmes, I suppose. When you drain foodstuffs of calories, besides the direct impact of low calories, it all tastes so awful one tends to eat less. There is a double whammy for you.
By now, it was clear that my trip to Singapore was not going to be all beer and skittles. Did I say beer? At sundown, the thoughts naturally turned to sundowners and I made what I thought was a mature suggestion suo moto:
“I guess I will just have some beer. I don’t want anything strong.”
“Daddy, I don’t think beer is any good for you.”
“What do you mean? It is low cholesterol”, I argued. She seemed momentarily foxed but quickly recovered and changed track:
“It is not just cholesterol,Dad. Just look at your paunch.”
“Paunch! What do mean? I don’t have a paunch.” And then – imagine, to what depths a man can sink for a glass of froth – I argued:
“That wee bit of a projection you call paunch is more the result of a sunken chest and weak lower limbs. I don’t have a paunch really.”
Quite useless! Have you ever had the experience of a perfectly normal being suddenly going deaf just when you think you are saying something important? My daughter continued her animated conversation with her mother as if I had not spoken. But I am not one to give up easily. I too decided to change track from self-deprecation to self-pity:
“From morning, I have been having all counterfeit stuff. Sugar is not sweet, coffee is caffeine-free, milk is fat-free or lactose-free and what not! At the end of the day, you will have a food-free father”.
I thought I had stated the case rather well – well-chosen words and alliteration to boot – food free father. I looked around expectantly at the wife. No reaction! I should tell you that since we boarded the plane yesterday, the wife has adopted a markedly neutral attitude with a gentle tilt in favour of daughter. And as for the daughter, she rose from her chair, came close to me, pinched both my cheeks and said: “Daddy! You are so cute!”
Can you think of a more absurd response? Yes I can! My own! At these words, I simply melted, suspended all further argument and smiled. How can I convey to you, the life she puts into that one word “Daddy”?
There was a happier ending to the day after all. Son-in-law returned from office and the first thing he did was to go to his mini bar, pick up a bottle of Black Label and two glasses and walk towards me with a smile. The daughter started to say something, thought the better of it, possibly wanting to avoid anything that might affect the bonding between husband and father.
Sterling chap, this son-in-law of mine. And thank heavens, no one has thought of an alcohol-free whisky – yet.
Pic: ScottD_Arch – http://www.flickr.com/photos/archxs/
Emily Barney – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebarney/
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