Rice dumplings, Words of Wisdom, Chay, and Advice to new mothers.

Tuesday 31st October
I’m afraid that Hallowe’en isn’t celebrated here, and as gynaecology is less easy to write delicately about than obstetrics, instead I’m going to tell you all about the food. As most of you know, India’s reputation is both very good – chicken tikka masala is Britain’s favourite food - and very bad – everyone who comes here gets the shits. Although Tamil Nadu, where Vellore is, has slightly different food to what the British palette is used to – which is more Northern / Bengali cuisine – it’s been much more good than bad. I must at this point congratulate Padman, who’s also on the graduate medical course with me, for being the only one of us to get the runs. His family are from Jaffna in Northern Sri Lanka and so he’s Tamil and basically a native, so he must have thought he’d be pretty safe, particularly when he was coming here with Tom Pollak, who’s not only pale-skinned, but also managed to get typhoid while in India over the summer. Alas not – Pad had the runs for the whole of his first week. As he himself put it: bit embarrassing when the gora’s absolutely fine. Given that he also arranged for the two to go to Mangalore when they wanted to go to Bangalore, a mere eight hours away by train, it’s also possible Padman is lying about his heritage.
However, tempting fate, the four of us in Vellore have been fine. Breakfast has been the biggest culture shock, perhaps because you’re that little bit more vulnerable at that time of day. For most of the first week we tackled either idly or poori masala. Idly are steamed rice dumplings served with a little pot of very liquid vegetable curry which we’ve affectionately dubbed ‘pond water’ because of the close resemblance of the two. Happily it tastes fine, although picking up rice dumplings at 7am with your fingers, dipping them in curry, and then getting them to your mouth without dripping pond water down your shirt takes some getting used to. Poori masala is a thicker vegetable curry with some quite oily, thin, savoury wholemeal pancakes. That these two dishes feature on the breakfast menu tells you several important things about Tamil food:
(1) It’s vegetarian.
(2) Its major components are fat and starch in various forms and invariably fried.
(3) Cutlery is not routine (as toilet paper isn’t either, it’s important not to use your left hand to eat with).
(4) Every meal, from breakfast on, is curry.
We eat breakfast without exception in the YWCA canteen at the hospital. For those of you who’re confused by this, I should explain that CMC, standing as it does for Christian Medical College, is quite a religious place, although only occasionally overtly so. Although there are morning prayers on the days there are ward rounds, no one has yet sat us down for Earnest Conversations, nor asked if we Believe or are Going To Hell. On the upside, the college is studded with plaques bearing bible quotations, and many are also written on the top of ward whiteboards; although “If God is with us, who can be against us?” may not be to everyone’s tastes (and as Ben pointed out, the obvious answer is “Satan”), it’s a lot better than “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!!!”. Some are a little bizarre – the bins have the biblical-sounding “wealth through waste” and “health is wealth”, which leads to the baffling conclusion that waste is health – one for those who believe in the constitutional power of a glass of urine, perhaps. Best of all is the incinerator tower, which bears the legend “God’s presence will go with you in spirit”. There are also lots of great pictures of the missionary doctors who set the place up, chief amongst whom is Ida S Scudder. Her family have, as one plaque not unreasonably trumpets, dedicated 1,047 years of life to CMC Vellore. The library in which I’m typing is named for Gertrude Dodd, a plumpish lady whose photo, which hangs over the door, makes her look sallow and sunken-eyed but somehow also matronly, sort of like a vegan zombie. While praying over the incision you’ve just closed, as a lovely doctor from the Labour Room does, is perhaps taking things too far, it’s actually a very tolerant and cohesive place. Granted, I was unsure what to make of one nurse with a <bindi being called Sister Sebastian Ignatius, but even if she isn’t Hindu, a lot of the patients are that or Muslim and get treated identically to the Christian ones. The main advantage of the place’s religious leanings, however, is unquestionably the canteen, which while serves excellent food cheaply – and of course, being a good Christian establishment, beef biriyani makes the menu most days.
Breakfast, however, was a battle at first, particularly for Charlotte, who reached curry saturation point earlier than the rest of us, and Toyin, who had to battle with the coffee not giving her the necessary fix because of its contamination. All of us have had problems on this front due to the unusual nature of tea and coffee in Southern India. Tea is not Darjeeling, nor Assam, nor Ceylon – instead it’s some unidentifiable black stuff boiled in what looks like a metal sock and immersed in hot milk. To this mix is added (unpredictably) cardamom and (predictably) about an equal weight of sugar. Despite the skin which invariably forms on it as it cools, it’s fine – but I was hoping for real tea, and instead I’m getting something closer to a boiled cardamom milkshake. Toyin and Charlotte have now persuaded the canteen, which is a small-scale model in production-line efficiency, to make them black coffee specially in the mornings, and our favourite chef indulges the gora by bringing it over. We’ve also regressed from idly and poori masala to “egg fry” and toast, although Ben and I occasionally brave the porridge (equal parts hot milk and sugar, with either semolina- or spaghetti-like stuff in) or the pongal (like kedgeree without the fish and with the curry).
After that, though, there’s pretty much nothing but curry, with the main difference between lunch and dinner the availability of biriyani at lunch. This is a healthy portion of spiced rice with bits of meat in (chicken as well as beef, and allegedly mutton, although they never have it when I order it despite there being plenty of goats around), and a yoghurt-and-chopped-onion raitha. In addition, lunch offers the mysterious “chicken cass roll” – see if you can guess what that is before I tell you. The other options with rice are a “veg meal”, which is four or five little pots of pond water, rice, and a poppadum, or something western-sounding on rotation (“lemon chicken rice” one day, “tomato chicken rice” the next) which is curry variant. All the little pots, including the “chicken fry” and “beef fry” which are delicious, focus on the fried fat part of the diet – they are swimming in oil. When starch isn’t supplied by rice, it comes as some sort of bread – not naan, but rather chapathi (doughy fried flatbread), parotta (moister, thicker dough in spirals), or uthappam (thick dough often with red onions or something fried into it). These all come with a pot of vegetarian fat of some description.
This leads neatly on to pudding, which covers the other staple of the Tamil Nadu diet – sugar. Their attitude to pudding is, to quote Ben, “pretty much spot on. If you’re gonna have pudding, make it very sweet and have a little bit of it, d’you know what I mean?” Some of them are similar to the porridge only with nuts in, some (gobi) are a dough ball in a little pot of syrup, some (“pine apple cream”) are basically milk, sugar, and fruit juice, some (“pineapple upside down”, “caramel custard”) are english puddings. I love them, particularly as they make the tea taste less sweet.
That leaves only snacks, which you can perhaps guess about: samosas (vegetable or chicken wrapped in butter, albeit in the form of filo pastry), egg puffs (eggs and filo pastry), strange things which can all too easily be bought as doughnuts but which are actually tasteless deep-fried suet with bits of spice in and are the only bad thing I’ve eaten so far. Sweet snacks are cakes (sponge with sugar icing), genuine doughnuts, biscuits (quite like shortbread), or a sort of fudge made from ghee (clarified butter), sugar, and occasionally nuts and topped with more sugar. You can also get fruit, thank god – but a pineapple costs 35 rupees (~40p) where ghee fudge costs 5 rupees (~12p), so small wonder everyone here’s diabetic. I’d give myself at least another couple of months.
As Ben discovered recently, however, you can get gora food in the canteen. He had noticed the excitement of the chefs as they served his chicken cass roll up – half a roast chicken, and some cold potato and carrot slop. It took Toyin to point out as he and I wondered where the roll was that it was chicken casserole. I’ll leave you with a final example of how deep the differences run. All over the world, you try to persuade new mothers to breastfeed, as it’s better for the baby every which way. This runs into problems in the developed world, where mothers may be on medication which makes it unsafe, or just feel they’ve better things to do with their time, or they may not produce enough milk. In the developing world, corporations like Nestlé prey on very high infant mortality rates by aggressively and utterly dishonestly marketing bottle formula as “safer”. This means not only that the baby’s immune system does not get the benefit of breast milk, but that formula is often made with contaminated water; this directly causes about 1.5 million infant deaths per year according to UNICEF figures. If you can do without that kitkat… In India, the problem is rather different – the mother-in-law often believes baby will be stronger if they’re fed on diluted cow’s milk (the same problem exists in the UK where mothers who don’t know better or who struggle to breastfeed dilute milk in the same way). One way of addressing this is by dazzling mum with science – so there are charts back home showing the main components of breast milk versus cow’s milk, and so illustrating the “Breast is Best” message. One of these was in the neonatal ward (sweetly called “Nursery” here), and alongside “Human” and “Cow” was “Buffalo”.
It is less good than cow, in case you were considering it. Bye for now.