From 2018, my wife and I have visited Switzerland every year except 2020, the Covid year. This is because my son lives there, working as an economist. Each year, within a couple of days of arriving, my wife reviews the kitchen for stocks of Indian ingredients. Then on Day-3 we go shopping for whatever might be missing and what we have not carted over from India. In Lausanne, where my son lives, there are quite a few shops owned by Sri Lankan Tamils. One or two of them now recognise us, especially my wife. They chat as my wife hunts for the masalas and other things. It’s like not having left India at all. Even the smells are like the ones back home.
On this year’s visit we met, for the first time, a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant who looked South Asian. Despite my wife’s strong disapproval, I asked him where he was from. He said Sri Lanka. This was surprising because people from our subcontinent doing similar jobs tend to be from Bangladesh. I asked him where in Sri Lanka and he replied Jaffna. When I started speaking to him in Tamil, his face lit up. We had a long chat and the upshot of it was that he craved Tamil food. He became very distracted at my mentioning vatha kozhumbu, which is a spicy sauce made from tamarind. You can eat it with almost anything.
A couple of weeks later, I went to see a professor of economic history who had taught our class 55 years ago. Inevitably, our conversation quickly turned from the exchange rate controversy of the 1930s to Tamil condiments, a case of going from the ridiculous to the sublime. The thing he craved for most, he said, was vepalaikatti, another powder, but this time from the region that borders Tamil Nadu and Kerala. At the mention of mavadu, a typical Tamil mango pickle, he became very animated. I promised to bring him a hamper on my next visit.
I have had similar experiences with other Indians who don’t live in their home states. I remember a long flight on Air India on which there was a steward from Maharashtra. He was domiciled in Punjab. After takeoff, at around midnight I drank a lot of whisky and woke up very thirsty a few hours later. So I went to the back of the aircraft for water and found this steward sitting by himself. We started talking and it turned out that he really missed something called agri masala. I had never heard of it. He said it was very chilli hot and went very well with fish. Punjab, he said, had no idea of fine dining. And then he took out a small ziplock bag from his pocket and gave it to me. “Try, sir,” he said. I did, with the bland breakfast they served on the flight. It pretty much woke up the eggs in the omelette.
But when it comes to food nostalgia nothing can beat the Korean who came to our house for lunch 40 years ago. My wife recently retired as a professor of Korean language and studies. In the 1980s she used to keep a stock of Korean seaweed and the original traditional kimchi, not the toned-down thing they serve you now. She served both to the Korean with, guess what, Maggi noodles. I am not exaggerating but the guy broke down in tears. He had missed both so intensely. She took pity on him and gifted the whole lot of seaweed and kimchi to him. Thank god! The smell of traditional kimchi can be, well, quite overwhelming.