In a long and distinguished career as a diplomatic wife, my mother’s secret weapon was her cook.
She had no idea when she set sail for the first time to Europe in 1949 that she would be setting a trend for future Indian diplomatic families to follow. My dad was amongst the first to set the template for what would become the Indian Foreign Service. They travelled on a cargo ship named “Port Said” that would take 40 days to sail from Bombay to Genoa. Accompanying her were her two small children, my sister and myself, enough baggage to last a siege of three years and a cook.
In those days travelling abroad was like going into exile. People sailed by ship across oceans. There was very little chance of returning home in between. Letters were exchanged by what was known as the diplomatic bag, sent via New Delhi. It was a life sentence.
Man for all seasons
Our cook was code-named the Count of Monte Cristo. He was a young man from the French enclave of Mahe, now known as Mayazhi in North Malabar. He was very personable with a thin pencil moustache and waves of oleaginous hair slicked down with coconut oil. When it became cold, the coconut oil would congeal in white slicks across his head and make him look like a distinguished elder statesman. From the very outset he let it be known that he was the actual representative of the Indian government and that we were his dependents.
This was true in a certain sense of the word. Once she had settled down my mother realised that her job description was to be a hotelier and hostess in a strange and alien land. The Count was her man for all seasons. Not only did the Count have to shop, cook and cater to the many distinguished Indian visitors who travelled on delegations to Paris, he had to adapt himself to procuring food items that might substitute for their original ingredients.
Being a South Indian, one of the necessities was to procure fresh coconut in sufficient quantities to make coconut milk. My mother and the Count hit upon using kilos of dry desiccated coconut flakes used in bakeries and squeezing the milk out from it to make the batter for appams. Of course,the Count also had to use the traditional stone mortar to grind the rice batter for idlis, the flat stone mortar to make the silky paste for fish curries and an even heavier steel pestle to knock the dry spices into powder. There were no mixies in those days. Our neighbours inevitably wondered what the Count was doing so early in the morning. He would tip his felt hat and mutter “Ce n’est rien madame!” (It’s nothing!) And move on mysteriously.
One of their major trials would be to get fresh parsley known as “Persil” as a substitute for cilantro, or kothmari. It was also the name of a cleaning agent, so most often the Count would turn up with packets of washing powder, which would send my mother into hysterics. Just as each time she asked for agneau or baby goat as it was known in French, the Count would arrive with oignons or loads of onions, the shop owners having misunderstood his language.
They must both have been relieved when the Count of Monte Cristo’s term ended and he returned to his home town. The last we heard of him was that he had started a restaurant named “ The Grand Paris Restaurant” or some such, so his talents were not wasted.
The second stint
The second time around, the years of exile in foreign places stretched to five-and-a-half years. This time my mother was clever enough to take a lady companion, whom we called a governess, to help her with the household and her now larger brood of three daughters, as well as a cook, a Malayali man given to depression. This in diplomatic language means a need to drink, or at least make use of the leftover spirits and wines that are an indispensable part of the good life of entertaining friends and enemies.
It may have also been because Ram, as he was known, was desperately seeking the young woman whom we called our governess. She was as fair as he was dark. She was also well-educated, having been to an excellent convent school and been trained in all the finer arts of painting, embroidery and an appreciation of literature. He was only partially literate.
She was also a devout Christian. Before deciding to come with us (to support a large and indigent brood of young sisters), she had wanted to be a nun. So wherever we were, my Mother’s first task was to find a suitable church for her to visit on Sundays.
Whereas Ram could only cook for us, under my mother’s tutelage, our Madonna of Malabar as she came to be known, became a most superb housekeeper. She could set a perfect table for a sitting dinner with the right cutlery, crystal, candles, flowers to match the season and beautifully hand-scripted place names to accord with the seating plan. Since by then my mother had learnt to extend her culinary repertoire to include the creation of exquisite canapés for cocktail parties and perfect puddings in the European style, her sous chef was the Madonna.
This obviously created even greater tensions between the cook and the housekeeper-governess, as to who should govern and be governed by. From the very first the Madonna, slept, ate and lived in the family’s part of the household and went on holidays with us. The cook lived alone. He could also frequent the town on his own, should he need to, during his free time. Then again, the social differences meant that he did not have the confidence to make any friends.
The Madonna was soon able to enter a social circle by virtue of the friends she made in church to be taken to their villas in cars that would be the envy of James Bond. Her only crime in my mother’s memory was to be caught using a vial of her personal perfume of the elixir of Jasmines from her cupboard. It led to their only showdown when my mother remarked: “Not exactly what I would expect a nun to be using!” and the Madonna broke down and wept. We did not know whose side to take. In time however, it all ended well. The Madonna became the headmistress of a well-known school for girls on her return to India and was a grand success. But she never married.
Karachi capers
By the latter part of his career, my dad could qualify for three "staff" members. So, during their stint at Karachi in Pakistan in the early 1960s, my mother had a contingent of two bearers, a Keralite, whom we named the Golliwog in those politically incorrect times, because he had a wonderful beaming smile and a seemingly untameable head of hair, the second a Tamilian whom we called Hedgehog because he was slow and shambling with hair growing low over his brow but very good-tempered as my mother would say, and a Goan cook whom we called by his real name Fernandez.
He was a legendary pastry chef. Since Golly could do the Indian food, Fernandez was allowed to tackle the European-style dishes. At Christmas, for instance, he would make piles of neatly stacked brandy snaps filled with fresh cream, Christmas pudding and cookies. But there was a criminal streak in him. He insisted on melting pig’s fat or lard to serve my mother’s unsuspecting Muslim guests – maybe in those enlightened times they did not mind. He used beef instead of mutton in his curries for her Hindu guests and threatened to leave if her bridge-playing buddies did not come to the table the moment he announced that the cheese soufflés had risen.
“When Fernandez ran around the kitchen after your mother with a kitchen knife I knew that it was time for us to leave Karachi,” remembers my Dad.
In today’s diplomatic world of instant publicity and creation of victims of class oppression, would it be my mother, or the cook who would be called to account?
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She had no idea when she set sail for the first time to Europe in 1949 that she would be setting a trend for future Indian diplomatic families to follow. My dad was amongst the first to set the template for what would become the Indian Foreign Service. They travelled on a cargo ship named “Port Said” that would take 40 days to sail from Bombay to Genoa. Accompanying her were her two small children, my sister and myself, enough baggage to last a siege of three years and a cook.
In those days travelling abroad was like going into exile. People sailed by ship across oceans. There was very little chance of returning home in between. Letters were exchanged by what was known as the diplomatic bag, sent via New Delhi. It was a life sentence.
Man for all seasons
Our cook was code-named the Count of Monte Cristo. He was a young man from the French enclave of Mahe, now known as Mayazhi in North Malabar. He was very personable with a thin pencil moustache and waves of oleaginous hair slicked down with coconut oil. When it became cold, the coconut oil would congeal in white slicks across his head and make him look like a distinguished elder statesman. From the very outset he let it be known that he was the actual representative of the Indian government and that we were his dependents.
This was true in a certain sense of the word. Once she had settled down my mother realised that her job description was to be a hotelier and hostess in a strange and alien land. The Count was her man for all seasons. Not only did the Count have to shop, cook and cater to the many distinguished Indian visitors who travelled on delegations to Paris, he had to adapt himself to procuring food items that might substitute for their original ingredients.
Being a South Indian, one of the necessities was to procure fresh coconut in sufficient quantities to make coconut milk. My mother and the Count hit upon using kilos of dry desiccated coconut flakes used in bakeries and squeezing the milk out from it to make the batter for appams. Of course,the Count also had to use the traditional stone mortar to grind the rice batter for idlis, the flat stone mortar to make the silky paste for fish curries and an even heavier steel pestle to knock the dry spices into powder. There were no mixies in those days. Our neighbours inevitably wondered what the Count was doing so early in the morning. He would tip his felt hat and mutter “Ce n’est rien madame!” (It’s nothing!) And move on mysteriously.
One of their major trials would be to get fresh parsley known as “Persil” as a substitute for cilantro, or kothmari. It was also the name of a cleaning agent, so most often the Count would turn up with packets of washing powder, which would send my mother into hysterics. Just as each time she asked for agneau or baby goat as it was known in French, the Count would arrive with oignons or loads of onions, the shop owners having misunderstood his language.
They must both have been relieved when the Count of Monte Cristo’s term ended and he returned to his home town. The last we heard of him was that he had started a restaurant named “ The Grand Paris Restaurant” or some such, so his talents were not wasted.
The second stint
The second time around, the years of exile in foreign places stretched to five-and-a-half years. This time my mother was clever enough to take a lady companion, whom we called a governess, to help her with the household and her now larger brood of three daughters, as well as a cook, a Malayali man given to depression. This in diplomatic language means a need to drink, or at least make use of the leftover spirits and wines that are an indispensable part of the good life of entertaining friends and enemies.
It may have also been because Ram, as he was known, was desperately seeking the young woman whom we called our governess. She was as fair as he was dark. She was also well-educated, having been to an excellent convent school and been trained in all the finer arts of painting, embroidery and an appreciation of literature. He was only partially literate.
She was also a devout Christian. Before deciding to come with us (to support a large and indigent brood of young sisters), she had wanted to be a nun. So wherever we were, my Mother’s first task was to find a suitable church for her to visit on Sundays.
Whereas Ram could only cook for us, under my mother’s tutelage, our Madonna of Malabar as she came to be known, became a most superb housekeeper. She could set a perfect table for a sitting dinner with the right cutlery, crystal, candles, flowers to match the season and beautifully hand-scripted place names to accord with the seating plan. Since by then my mother had learnt to extend her culinary repertoire to include the creation of exquisite canapés for cocktail parties and perfect puddings in the European style, her sous chef was the Madonna.
This obviously created even greater tensions between the cook and the housekeeper-governess, as to who should govern and be governed by. From the very first the Madonna, slept, ate and lived in the family’s part of the household and went on holidays with us. The cook lived alone. He could also frequent the town on his own, should he need to, during his free time. Then again, the social differences meant that he did not have the confidence to make any friends.
The Madonna was soon able to enter a social circle by virtue of the friends she made in church to be taken to their villas in cars that would be the envy of James Bond. Her only crime in my mother’s memory was to be caught using a vial of her personal perfume of the elixir of Jasmines from her cupboard. It led to their only showdown when my mother remarked: “Not exactly what I would expect a nun to be using!” and the Madonna broke down and wept. We did not know whose side to take. In time however, it all ended well. The Madonna became the headmistress of a well-known school for girls on her return to India and was a grand success. But she never married.
Karachi capers
By the latter part of his career, my dad could qualify for three "staff" members. So, during their stint at Karachi in Pakistan in the early 1960s, my mother had a contingent of two bearers, a Keralite, whom we named the Golliwog in those politically incorrect times, because he had a wonderful beaming smile and a seemingly untameable head of hair, the second a Tamilian whom we called Hedgehog because he was slow and shambling with hair growing low over his brow but very good-tempered as my mother would say, and a Goan cook whom we called by his real name Fernandez.
He was a legendary pastry chef. Since Golly could do the Indian food, Fernandez was allowed to tackle the European-style dishes. At Christmas, for instance, he would make piles of neatly stacked brandy snaps filled with fresh cream, Christmas pudding and cookies. But there was a criminal streak in him. He insisted on melting pig’s fat or lard to serve my mother’s unsuspecting Muslim guests – maybe in those enlightened times they did not mind. He used beef instead of mutton in his curries for her Hindu guests and threatened to leave if her bridge-playing buddies did not come to the table the moment he announced that the cheese soufflés had risen.
“When Fernandez ran around the kitchen after your mother with a kitchen knife I knew that it was time for us to leave Karachi,” remembers my Dad.
In today’s diplomatic world of instant publicity and creation of victims of class oppression, would it be my mother, or the cook who would be called to account?