Look at it through a rose-tinted middle-class prism, and you might say that home food’s “cannot be replicated” nature and the sense of belonging that it bestows cannot be had for money. Not even in the world’s most expensive restaurants. For many of us, home food is “home”. It is every day. It is always available. One can take it for granted. One can even afford to be bored by it. But not if you happen to be desperately poor. For lack of access or infrequent access to everyday home food is perhaps what best defines the state of the world’s hungry people. Which is why the Kannada writer Veerabhadrappa’s story Huggi ( A Sweet Dish , translated by GS Amur) hits us so hard, making us rethink our closely-held notions of “home food” and its taken-for-grantedness.
The story opens with its child protagonist, the poor and perennially hungry Basava, wondering why his father’s face is dull, disappointed that the latter does not pat him and give him a five or ten paisa coin as he usually does. But this question is quickly forgotten when he walks into the kitchen, for what he sees there makes him happy. He finds his mother cleaning split Bengal gram in a mora and there is another mora with jaggery by her side. Basava asks her what she plans to cook today, as he picks up a piece of jaggery and puts it in his mouth. His three siblings are sitting around the mora , their mouths watering, but unlike Basava they do not dare touch the jaggery for fear of punishment. In response to his repeated questioning, Basava’s mother says that she plans to make huggi .
Huggi is akin to the chakkarai pongal or sweet pongal that is made in Tamil Nadu. It is jaggery-sweet, not sugar-sweet and that makes all the difference. To return to the story, Basava is beside himself with excitement and announces to all his friends that his mother is cooking huggi. But we begin to suspect that something is dreadfully amiss. For one thing, Basava’s parents seem obviously disturbed. Soon, his father tells him that they are all leaving the village, that Basava would have to live in the rich Gowda’s house. Basava is upset, but the thought of huggi makes him forget everything. Finally, the huggi is done, but even before Basava can savour it properly, his mother asks him to deliver a vessel at the Gowda’s place. Basava leaves, after asking her to save some huggi for him. To quote from the story, “If his mother had insisted that [Basava] should go before eating, he would not have known what to do. For two days he had had no food; leave alone the vessel, he couldn’t have carried even his own body.” Basava reaches the Gowda’s place and learns from the latter that he is now bonded to him in exchange for the debts his father has accumulated. Basava runs home to find that the door has been left wide open, that his favourite spotted dog is breathing heavily. Soon, the dog collapses and dies. Basava fails to see the traces of huggi sticking to the dog’s mouth. “Appa, the dog has died,” he shouts and enters the house. This is the terrible, heart-stopping point at which the story ends.
Basava’s intense longing for huggi and his joyous anticipation of it colours the entire story, but so do his parents’ despair and their foreknowledge of what is to come. Huggi may be a humble enough sweet dish, frequently made in middle-class homes all over Karnataka, but in this story it becomes a central player, something that Basava can only long for but never quite enjoy.
The author, a poet, fiction writer and professor at IIT-Madras, has written Bookmarking the Oasis and Table for Four .
