Question

Story: "Rice"

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1967. Her family moved to the United States, where she attended Barnard College and received multiple graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from Boston University. She is the author of three books, including Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and The Namesake (2003), as well as many short stories. Lahiri has won several literary awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction often explores Indian and Indian-American life and culture — as does this personal essay, which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Background on rice Along with corn and wheat, rice remains one of the most important crops in the world, especially in Asia, where it has been cultivated for thousands of years. Rice accounts for between 35 percent and 85 percent of the calories consumed by billions of people living in India, China, and other Asian countries. Indeed, the ancient Indian word for rice (“dhanya”) means “sustainer of the human race.” But rice can be symbolic as well: we throw rice at weddings because it suggests fertility and prosperity. For Lahiri, the significance of rice is personal rather than universal. She describes her father’s pulao dish as both an expression of his idiosyncratic personality and a symbol that binds her family together. My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost. In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj — the Bengali word for “estimate” — accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will. But there is another rice that my father is more famous for. This is not the white rice, boiled like pasta and then drained in a colander, that most Bengalis eat for dinner. This other rice is pulao, a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at festive occasions. I have often watched him make it. It involves sautéing grains of basmati in butter, along with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves, and cardamom pods. In go halved cashews and raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not 1 2 3 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 172 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 173 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM lahiri /Rice 173 black). Ginger, pulverized into a paste, is incorporated, along with salt and sugar, nutmeg and mace, saffron threads if they’re available, ground turmeric if not. A certain amount of water is added, and the rice simmers until most of the water evaporates. Then it is spread out in a baking tray. (My father prefers disposable aluminum ones, which he recycled long before recycling laws were passed.) More water is flicked on top with his fingers, in the ritual and cryptic manner of Catholic priests. Then the tray, covered with foil, goes into the oven, until the rice is cooked through and not a single grain sticks to another. Despite having a superficial knowledge of the ingredients and the technique, I have no idea how to make my father’s pulao, nor would I ever dare attempt it. The recipe is his own, and has never been recorded. There has never been an unsuccessful batch, yet no batch is ever identical to any other. It is a dish that has become an extension of himself, that he has perfected, and to which he has earned the copyright. A dish that will die with him when he dies. In 1968, when I was seven months old, my father made pulao for the first time. We lived in London, in Finsbury Park, where my parents shared the kitchen, up a steep set of stairs in the attic of the house, with another Bengali couple. The occasion was my annaprasan, a rite of passage in which Bengali children are given solid food for the first time; it is known colloquially as a bhath, which happens to be the Bengali word for “cooked rice.” In the oven of a stove no more than twenty inches wide, my father baked pulao for about thirty-five people. Since then, he has made pulao for the annaprasans of his friends’ children, for birthday parties and anniversaries, for bridal and baby showers, for wedding receptions, and for my sister’s Ph.D. party. For a few decades, after we moved to the United States, his pulao fed crowds of up to four hundred people, at events organized by Prabasi, a Bengali cultural institution in New England, and he found himself at institutional venues — schools and churches and community centers — working with industrial ovens and stoves. This has never unnerved him. He could probably rig up a system to make pulao out of a hot-dog cart, were someone to ask. There are times when certain ingredients are missing, when he must use almonds instead of cashews, when the raisins in a friend’s cupboard are the wrong color. He makes it anyway, with exacting standards but a sanguine hand. When my son and daughter were infants, and we celebrated their annaprasans, we hired a caterer, but my father made the pulao, preparing it at home in Rhode Island and transporting it in the trunk of his car to Brooklyn. The occasion, both times, was held at the Society for Ethical Culture, in Park Slope. In 2002, for my son’s first taste of rice, my father warmed the trays on the premises, in the giant oven in the basement. But by 2005, when it was my daughter’s turn, the representative on duty would not permit my father to use the oven, telling him that he was not a licensed cook. My father transferred the pulao from his aluminum 4 5 6 7 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 174 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 175 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM trays into glass baking dishes, and microwaved, batch by batch, rice that fed almost a hundred people. When I asked my father to describe that experience, he expressed no frustration. “It was fine,” he said. “It was a big microwave.”

Comprehension

1. How does Lahiri describe her father? What is his most important character trait?

2. According to Lahiri, what is special about pulao? Why is it served just on festive occasions?

3. What is an annaprasan? Why is this occasion so important to Bengalis?

4. Why, according to Lahiri, would she never try to make pulao?

5. What does Lahiri mean when she says that pulao is a dish for which her father “has earned the copyright” (4)?

Purpose and Audience

1. How much does Lahiri assume her readers know about Bengali culture? How can you tell?

2. Is this essay simply about rice — more specifically pulao — or is it also about something else? Explain.

3. Does this essay have an explicitly stated or an implied thesis? What dominant impression do you think Lahiri wants to convey?

Style and Structure

1. Why does Lahiri begin her essay by describing her father?

2. This essay is divided into three parts: the first describes Lahiri’s father; the second describes the making of pulao; and the third describes the occasions on which her father cooked pulao. How does Lahiri signal the shift from one part of the essay to another? What other strategies could she have used?

3. Why does Lahiri go into so much detail about her father’s pulao recipe?

4. What does pulao mean to Lahiri? Does it have the same meaning for her father? Explain.

5. Why does Lahiri end her essay with a quotation? Is this an effective closing strategy? What other strategies could she have used? 174 Description 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 174 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM 08_KIR_67684_CH7_151_210.indd 175 Achorn International 11/04/2011 03:45PM Lahiri /Rice 175

Vocabulary Projects

1. Define each of the following words as it is used in this selection. methodical (1) colander (3) deliberate (2) sanguine (6) oracle (2) 2. Throughout her essay, Lahiri uses several Bengali words. What might she have gained or lost if she had used English equivalents?

Journal Entry

What food do you associate with a specific member of your family? Why do you think this food has the association it does?

Answer 1

Comprehension

1. Jhumpa Lahiri describes her father as being a methodical man with an idiosyncratic personality. His most important character trait is his organised nature as he is very good with estimates and is very patterned and routined in his life.
2. According to Lahiri, pulao is a special dish because it needs the knowledge of perfect estimate of rice and it is a masterpiece of her father. It is mainly served in festive occasions as it has a sophisticated touch to it along with a Persian origin.
3. Annaprasan is an occasion of the Bengalis which is also known as bhath or cooked rice. This occasion is important for the Bengalis as in this occasion the Bengali children are given solid food for the first time after birth.
4. Though Lahiri knows a bit about the ingredients and the way in which pulao is to be made yet she says that she won't try to make it because she feels that she doesn't know the exact way in which it is to be made like her father. She feels that the pulao is a legacy of her father and she wants it pass with her father one day.

NOTE: We are supposed to answer only four subparts incase of multiple subparts and thus, answering the first four subparts of the lot. Incase you need answers to all subparts please do post them individually.