Eggs.
Not just any eggs, but telor balado. A dish of hard-boiled eggs served in chilli paste. Served with chicken satay and peanut sauce, a pork dish we called babi kong, a salad of fresh greens and perhaps cucumbers and onions in a sweet-ish vinegar relish.
But always the eggs.
That’s how I remember lunch at home when I was growing up.
Sure, there were other things. There were cold cuts from Steak House in their distinctive blue-grey paper wrappers. There was an anonymous khichdi when my mother was feeling out of sorts, and proper daal subzi if my dad was present. Rajma chawal, naturally, kadhi on the weekends, paranthas when the weather cooled. But if there were people over, if Ma was feeling homesick, if I was back from school, there’d be the telor balado.
They weren’t to everyone’s taste. In the 1970s and ’80s, even into the 1990s, not many north Indians got fish or shrimp paste. The tang of the distant sea wasn’t entirely welcome, and you had to gauge your clientele’s reception before you offered up the precious, hoarded ikan teri, or dried anchovies. Some polite people gagged it down. The others turned up their noses. Literally. But for me, it’s the smell of my childhood.
Rich, pungent, occasionally sick-making—but always home.
Telor balado is the smell of wherever my mother was. Mostly, it was in Delhi, in the home I grew up in. But it’s also the home I remember only in flashes, the home my maternal grandparents lived in. In Menteng in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.
Jakarta is where my mother is buried. But it isn’t where she’s from.
Was Jakarta ever home for me? It must have been. I remember it well enough. I was there long enough as a preschooler to actually be enrolled in a preschool, if only for a few months. I went back for my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, a celebration that has stayed with me, even though I wasn’t yet ten.
I remember the house, the street it was on. The ice-cream man who came by in the afternoon. I remember eating noodle soup in an informal restaurant that has, I believe, since closed. We ate on a veranda you had to climb up a wooden staircase to get to. The noodles came in china bowls and there was a local version of grape Fanta to wash it down with. I’m not sure restaurants like that exist in Jakarta any more, except as tourist traps and for the local fetishists of nostalgia. Noodles now come pre-packaged from China and Japan. The usual visitor desirous of a noodle soup gets his fix in a mall, sharing formica tables in a food court with other victims of anodyne global branding, eyes glazed with consumerism and MSG.
The food in Jakarta is still breathtaking, however. If you make the effort to find them, the spaces available to eat in are just gorgeous. In India, the ruinous cost of real estate hampers restaurateurs from putting their ideas to work in authentically beautiful spaces. In Jakarta, either land isn’t as dear, or the owners aren’t as greedy. Now you find new restaurants in old bungalows and in gardens set about with wooden pavilions. These cater to a different clientele than my old noodle spot. Expat bankers, local yuppies, well-heeled families—they all inhale the haute Indonesian food on offer, the beautifully presented gurami, the ‘new’ take on ‘authentic’ Peranakan cuisine, the whatever it is of the moment, along with the carefully curated art, furniture and other memory sponges that such places come preloaded with.
In the malls, there are also fancy restaurants. Like anywhere else, there will be dim sum and prosecco with your pasta and ‘handcrafted’ sushi. Out on the streets is a cornucopia of flavour and texture, catering to the working man and woman who also demand their share of tasties. Mixed drinks made of nameless ingredients, roasted meats that will make you dream of Delhi kebabiyas, fish and rice and noodles served in a hundred different ways topped with carbon monoxide, and the other goodies a true Asian metropolis offers.
In 1998, as Indonesia’s economy crumbled and people’s livelihoods imploded, these streets ran with anger. I was there. My grandmother had just died. With the devaluation, the little money I had was suddenly a lot of money. I took off after the funeral to learn more about my mother’s homeland. I went to Sulawesi, making my way to its northern tip, to Manado. The food there is famously spicy. I gagged on plates of fish so rich with chillies that I forgot to breathe. Delicious, but in a dirty, taxing way. Luckily the water was close at hand and translucent and there isn’t a chilli in the world hot enough to compete with the cooling power of a swim in the deep blue sea. Close to Manado is the famous reef of Bunaken, where I dove off the edge and swam with some fishermen hunting game. Barracuda, I was told, after a nudge in the water secured my attention towards the still, shimmering silver spear a few feet to my side. And other hunting fish, prized for their meat.
Manado is predominantly Christian and so consumes quantities of pork, which is haraam in the more Muslim parts of the country. Up in the hills are the spice plantations that the Dutch planted here, and the churches that converted the bellicose Minahasa confederacy of headhunting animists to Bible-thumping Christianity. There are Dutch-inspired cakes and pastries in the villages, next to mats on which spices dry, right on the road itself. These hills are where my grandfather was born and grew up.
These hills are where my mother said she was from.
‘Jakarta,’ she’d said dismissively as I left on my own little journey. ‘This isn’t where we’re from.’
Having said which, she headed off home to India.
Home? She’d moved to India when she was a teenager, married a man she met in college, followed him to the tea gardens in the shadow of the Himalayas, without waiting to consider whether she liked the food, the spices in it, its texture.
She liked the music, she admitted. She always had. Not the women, though: Chinese opera, she’d say, her nose wrinkling. But the men had lovely warm voices, singing tunes she’d hum to herself as she worked on a quilt, poured coffee, listened to me. Music was part of her patrimony as well. Her own father played any string instrument by ear, according to her. I think I remember him playing a guitar and singing me a song. But it may be a trick of memory, a function of the rememberings of other people that have been transmitted to me and have become mine. As I walked, cycled and drove around the hills of Minahasa, I saw young boys and old men playing their guitars and women singing along softly. In the air was the smell of cloves and other spices that colonialism brought to these hills.
My mother spent her youth among hills like these perhaps, in the Indian Dooars, among bushes imported from China almost two hundred years ago to seed another colonial trade. Did she know the tastes she was supposedly acquiring—the chillies in every dish, the kaju in the barfi, the chikoo in the fruit bowl—had only become Indian because of the arrival of the Europeans and their pit-stops in lands they had misrepresented to themselves as ‘India’?
The Americas. The West Indies. The Dutch East Indies.
These hills were where she said she was from. But she never went there. The longest she ever stayed in Indonesia, the country whose passport she carried at the time of her death, was in Jakarta. The city she dismissed.
So where did the telor balado come from?
Tea—and opium—underpinned the British colonial economy in India. Similarly, spice brought the Dutch to Indonesia. My grandfather’s family prospered in the Dutch colonial dispensation. An expensive education prepared him for further studies in Holland, where he met my grandmother.
My mother was born in Amsterdam and grew up speaking Dutch, the language she always said she dreamt in. She lived there through the German occupation during World War II. My Dutch grandmother never ate rabbit after that particular experience. She’d merely say she’d had her fill. My mother would later learn that the ‘rabbit’ she’d been fed as a treat when she was a little girl in wartime Europe was actually cat.
In Manado, there’s a tradition of eating ‘bush’ meat. Dogs are consumed on certain occasions. Whenever my Indian family would bring this up, my mother would just laugh. Why turn up your nose at a dog at a feast, she could have said, when I’ve eaten a cat because I had to?
The avarice and ambitions of competing nationalisms brought her family to that strait. But she remembered other tastes from her Dutch childhood as well, things we grew to love. The pickled herrings my sisters still crave, the poffertjes (Dutch pancakes) she introduced me to when we visited Amsterdam, the spread she lovingly made for me from melted chocolate and condensed milk. How did they ever afford condensed milk during the war? Or was that a memory her own mother carried from a time of relative plenty before the world went insane?
My grandmother put that time behind her before her cousins could. While they were picking up the pieces in the ravaged decades that followed the war in a shattered Europe, my oma was the pampered wife of an Indonesian diplomat, travelling the world to represent a newly sovereign state. Perhaps it was on those postings with her parents that my mother learnt the secret of chocolate. In Westchester County in New York, my Ma learnt to make American pancakes instead of poffertjes, the very ones she would feed me as a treat on Sunday mornings, piled high with syrup or honey on top. A Delhi morning doesn’t have to be about paranthas. But I love those too.
While still a boy, I would ask my mother, post a feast: where is home?
Wherever you are, she’d always say.
But I knew better, of course. I was a young Punjabi kid in Delhi. We’d got the world figured out. I’d quiz her about how she claimed to be Manadonese even though she’d never been there. I’d ask her why she didn’t claim to be Dutch though she looked pretty European. I couldn’t understand then the fierce pride she took in that distant country her father, my grandfather, had fought for, that he so desperately wanted to be free. I’m Indonesian, she’d say simply. And oma, I’d point out? She has an Indonesian passport too, my mother would reply. As if it was the easiest thing in the world to imagine: a European woman not only marrying an Asian man, but taking on his nationality as well. To marry a man’s country—now that’s love.
Of course, it happens all the time. But in reverse. Asians marry Westerners and their passports, we’re told. Colonialism left its imbalances, and ordinary people are still seeking to correct them in any way they can. Let some brown children be educated at the expense of those surpluses the tea and spice and opium trades left behind.
And now we drink more tea than the British. In Amsterdam, telor balado is presumably as ubiquitous as tikka masala across the North Sea.
But it wasn’t when my mother left, as Holland was still trying to pick itself up after the war.
My mother spent less than a year in Jakarta between graduating from high school in the US and starting college in India. That was the sum total of her time in Indonesia without me. In that period, she apparently put together a fund of memories, including culinary ones, that would fuel her nostalgia for home when she was sick of us, our food, the land we lived in.
It wasn’t Manado, the ‘motherland’ she’d never seen. It wasn’t Amsterdam, the city of her birth, or the village she was shipped off to in the Dutch countryside when the wartime city couldn’t feed a child any more. It was Jakarta, a city she dismissed.
Of course, Jakarta was just the medium, the place it happened. My mother was Indonesian. My grandparents really cared about that, so she did too. In the same way that my father really cared I grow up a Sikh. So she made that happen as well.
I don’t know where all the recipes came from. My grandmother had a well-known antipathy towards the stove. Perhaps the food came from books. Or friends, or her sister, once she was married and settled in Indonesia. Perhaps she’d actually been eating this food in Amsterdam, in the homes of her mother’s friends, as the number of women who’d married Asian students mounted in the years before the war. Her memory was malleable at the best of times.
Towards the end of her life, my mother began to miss her home more. What home, Ma, I’d ask. By then her mind was unravelling, and she’d struggle to voice her thought. I’d remind her of her old formula. Wherever we were, wherever I was, that was home. And I, we, were with her.
Sometimes her mind would be stilled and she’d smile and be quiet. At other times, she’d shake her head angrily and say no, that’s not what she meant. She wanted to be with her family, with the sights and sounds she knew around her.
But what were these sights and sounds? Which family did she mean? She’d lived nowhere else but India since she was twenty years old.
Jakarta is where my mother is buried. A little bit of her, in the same grave plot as her parents. The rest I scattered into the Sutlej, there to make its way to the deep blue sea.
I love Jakarta. Now, with all I know, I can say that it is, in a little way, where I’m from as well. Because I understand now that my mother didn’t miss Jakarta, or Amsterdam, or being in high school in the US in the early 1950s.
When she moved to India, she was little more than a girl. She was, to a degree, swallowed by India, by us, the family she married into and produced. Perhaps she didn’t ever articulate it to herself as such. It isn’t so strange, after all. It happens to us all: those of us who grow up and leave younger selves behind and have lives with other people.
To know that happiness, you sacrifice something as well. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t, occasionally, rebel against being so owned. It doesn’t mean you don’t miss what you leave behind. That other self, those other people, the bits a smell, a sound, a taste bring back to you. Perhaps you don’t even do it just for yourself. For your family, a special other—you do it for them as well. You remember, and you recast that world you inhabited. And then, if they care, your family, your special other—they inhabit it with you. For the duration of that song, that smell, that taste on your tongue.
When I see telor balado, I hear the rustle of a long-haired dog’s fur against the silk of my mother’s sari. I hear her voice whisper in my ear as I bend to kiss her. I can tell the seasons by where we’re sitting in the house. I remember family lunches and meals alone with my Ma as she spoke to me about what happened that day in school. I remember the burgeoning of my own imagination as I sought to understand where it was my mother was from, because all I knew was that she wasn’t like everyone else around me.
I don’t know if she did it for me. But I know that my curiosity about the world was ignited by my curiosity about hers. My mother missed her older selves enough to try and capture them in the flavours and smells and textures she claimed she grew up with. That they made her happy is enough for me, and when I eat telor balado, she is with me.
I love telor balado. That’s how I remember lunch at home when I was growing up.