Things Guests Will Misremember but Expect Anyway
Jenny returned from her stay with Lalita Mallamma glowing like she’d been spiritually fed and slightly over-fed. She greeted Amma with a hug and a hunger.
“What shall I cook for lunch?” Amma asked the next morning.
“Orange tambli!” Jenny replied, full of confidence and culinary nostalgia.
Amma froze. “Orange… tambli?”
The only orange tambli she remembered was a one-time experiment with grated orange peel—bitter, zesty, and politely ignored by her in-laws. Still, if Jenny asked for it, she would deliver.
By lunchtime, the tambli was served—coconut, cumin, buttermilk, and grated orange zest, all tempered with mustard seeds. It shimmered faintly like ambition in a clay pot. Jenny sipped. Her smile was brave. Her eyebrows were not.
“It’s… nice. But not what Mallamma made.”
Amma stared at the bowl, then at Jenny, and finally at the landline. She dialed Mallamma.
“Orange tambli?” Mallamma laughed. “Ayyo, no! Jenny meant shunti tambli—with ginger, curd, and one roasted red chilli! She said it was orange, so I didn’t correct her.”
Jenny blushed. “It was orange in colour! And delicious. I didn’t know it had ginger. Or no tamarind?”
Amma smiled. “The dish knew. That’s enough.”
That afternoon, as the kitchen cooled and lunch gave way to memory, Tanya wandered in with a stack of Ayurvedic notebooks and a small sprig of brahmi. She was home from her internship at the community wellness farm and had taken to quoting ancient treatises with teenage conviction.
“You know, tambli isn’t just food,” she said, poking at the leftover bowl. “It’s pitta-balancing. Ginger warms the digestion, but the curd cools the body. It’s a dialogue between heat and healing.”
Amma nodded, half-listening. Tanya had turned every meal into a diagnosis lately.
Enter Bhavagangamma, Amma’s neighbour and occasional sparring partner in philosophy. She walked in uninvited, as always, with a bag of lemons and an opinion.
“What’s all this about orange tambli?” she asked. “You people are inventing colour palettes now?”
“No, no,” Amma said, “Jenny just misremembered it. She meant shunti tambli.”
Bhavagangamma sat down, arms folded. “In our time, nobody asked for tambli by colour. You asked by symptom. Cold? Make brahmi tambli. Stomach upset? Use doddapatre. Ginger tambli is for sluggish digestion and stubborn children.”
“I wasn’t stubborn!” Jenny protested.
“You were,” Bhavagangamma said gently. “But now you are cured. Thanks to Mallamma.”
The conversation was interrupted by Aunt Paddu’s arrival—late, dramatic, carrying a small dictionary and a bowl of homemade pickle.
“You know,” Paddu declared, “tambuli might come from tāmbūla—betel leaf. A post-meal ritual. It was always the closer. The punctuation of lunch.”
Bhavagangamma snorted. “So now it’s grammar too?”
Paddu beamed. “Language is always hungry.”
Soon, Aunt Selvi arrived, drawn by the noise and the promise of leftover rice. She took one bite of the tambli and closed her eyes like she was entering prayer.
“This isn’t just food,” she murmured. “It’s metaphor. Tambli is emotional immunity. Ancestral wisdom you can pour over rice. It doesn’t shout. It remembers. That’s what makes it sacred.”
Amma poured her a second serving. “That’s what makes it invisible too. Tambli is everywhere. So it disappears.”
Bhavagangamma rolled her eyes. “You Brahmins treat tambli like it’s a mantra. One chilli, two cumin seeds, no garlic—chant, grind, serve. We serve it with fish fry and raw mango pickle. What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” Amma said, smiling. “Just different dialects of the same language.”
Jenny looked around the table, now crowded with women and stories. “So tambli… changes based on who’s making it?”
“Of course,” Tanya said. “That’s how it survives. It adapts to land, season, mood, caste, and even confusion.”
“Especially confusion,” Bhavagangamma said, jabbing her spoon at Jenny.
By evening, the story had turned into performance. Each woman adding her fragment—her spice—to the legacy. And Jenny, now slightly humbled and entirely full, understood what made tambli unforgettable. Not its ingredients. Not even its taste. But its ability to hold contradictions: raw yet refined, medicinal yet mundane, Brahmin yet borderless.
And as Amma scrubbed the grinding stone and packed the curd back into the fridge, she muttered, almost to herself,
“They say fast food is modern. But tambli—tambli is the true resistance. It doesn’t plate well. It doesn’t impress on Instagram. But it endures. That’s enough.”
Jenny looked up. “Should I write it down?”
Amma smiled. “Don’t bother. The body already has. By the way,” she added as addendum, “your athe has made plum tambli and brocholi tambli in states… your cousins are on strike.
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