26 dishes and the flavour of life

There is a way in which we are all part of each other’s stories and Anita Nair plays on this conceit in her slim hardback volume, Alphabet Soup For Lovers. It runs on parallel tracks telling us the stories of Komathi and Lena. Komathi is a cook on a tea plantation in the Annamalai hills who is working to pick up English letters. So the book is structured to be a sort of journal that moves forward in alphabetic order as she correlates each letter of the alphabet with a dish. Naturally, the dish is a gateway to a memory, and this allows Nair to work in both, Komathi’s story and a sympathetic narrator to Lena’s past and current life as Komathi watches her young mistress struggle with the pangs of infidelity. The second track is Lena’s story as she welcomes the burned-out south Indian cinema superstar Shoola Pani — to her homestay. What follows is an affair to remember even as Lena continues to live her day-to-day life out on the tea plantation with her unobjectionable yet indifferent husband. This is a delicately conceived book, and Nair is alert to the dynamics of not just the couple who are destined to become lovers, but also of the changing relationship between the two women who are more like mother and daughter than maid and mistress. Komathi has been watching over her charge since she was a young girl and has a robust, earthy disapproval of the wrapped-in-cotton wool marriage she sees Lena take on and settle into. Convenience and comfort must not trump love and passion Komathi is quick to recognise this truth, yet stays mum. She comforts her mistress as she suffers miscarriage and disappointment and waits for her to recognise her ill-fated marriage for what it is. “One day, just after their wedding, as I served lunch, I heard Lena and KK talk. ‘Do you think inji came from ginger or the other way around ’ KK, who has a library in his head, gave her a long reply about how the word came from Samskrutham. I wanted to clang their heads together. Was this what newlyweds should be discussing Couldn’t she sidle up to him and give him a knowing look Couldn’t he pinch her cheek and whisper something in her ear.” The simplicity of the writing is deliberate here; there is none of the passionate revelation that accompanies some of Nair’s other works, which won her the Sahitya Akademi award and other accolades. This is an easy read, almost lulling in the graceful complacency with which it treats the inevitability of the affair that blossoms between Lena and Shoola Pani against the beautiful backdrop of mountain walks. Each character struggles with his or her burden. Shoola Pani has staged his secret escape, hiding away from the stresses of celebrity life and keeping his manager and work commitments at bay in the sylvan paradise of the tea plantation. Lena is undergoing another kind of self-prescribed exile as well, hiding away her true passionate and emotional self to maintain the outward semblance of a successful marriage. Komathi is in some ways the most well developed character because we see her struggle in more areas than the others, and her commentary on the love triangle is always fun with a hint of the acerbic. “We women are so naïve, I think. We forget who we are when we let a man find a place within us. I am curious about the actor. It has been only three days since he came to stay, but he seems to have cast a spell over my Lena And KK, does he see the transformation in her He is a strange creature, that man, seeing only what he thinks he ought to see. But even he can’t be oblivious to the stars in her eyes. Or does he think filter kaapi put it there ” Eventually Komathi’s narrative dredges up her own romantic past — a lover named Raghavendra, and a bitter aftermath to the relationship. It turns out that Komathi’s history with this man has Lena entangled in it and on that revelation hinges what little suspense there is in the story — Will Komathi’s natural bitterness result in her abandoning or doing worse to Lena when she needs her help the most The novel ends with the same sense of possibilities that it begins with. Lena and Shoola Pani are changed people for what they have experienced, however their destiny is merely tracks in the sand and not conclusively revealed. Mixing food and romance can make for a heady experience and the 26 traditional dishes that lead each story, infuse everything with a sensory enchantment. All the same, Alphabet Soup for Lovers is one of Nair’s minor works; it doesn’t disturb the equanimity of the reader even while it asserts the primacy of love and passion over convention. Perhaps therein lies the message; whether through storm or sunshine, love will have its quiet say.

Karishma Attari is a Mumbai based book critic and author of I See You, a coming-of-age horror novel