A recipe for E's avial, by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Written by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Illustrations by Hana Iqbal
ONE
Throughout your twenties, because you radiated a certain kind of underslept, high-octane workaholism, you were showered with gift certificates for massages. What you didn’t understand was why you thanked the givers — your boss, your friend, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your boss’s boss — and let the gift certificates expire, one by one. You are a hugger, tactile and friendly; you like being touched. But when it comes time to call the spa and book the appointment, you reliably falter; you don’t have the time to wonder why.
TWO
Your mother’s recipe for avial is also her mother’s recipe. Use coconut oil, not olive, your mother says on the phone, after giving you her instructions for this most quintessentially Keralite of dishes.
Your mother’s mother, who you’re named for, died two years before you were born. Your earliest memories of your mother are of her grieving hers. Of the two of you lying curled into each other in the hot Calcutta afternoons. Your mother, crying out for her dead mother in her sleep.
The avial recipe is characteristically inexact and impressionistic, as are all your mother’s recipes, ensuring you will never be able to perfectly reproduce the taste of what you grew up eating. You will need to interpret and make do, to add numbers to cooking times, to quantify into an intelligibility; like your mother before you, you will need to make your peace with a certain kind of approximation as both claiming and loss.
Okay Ma, you say, massaging your neck, which is stiff as petrified wood. Thanks.
THREE
E’s Avial, Inherited from T, Interpreted and Translated Twice Over: 4 servings as main, 8 servings as side
Ingredients:
2 drumsticks, or moringa
Handful of achinga beans
2 medium carrots
1 green plantain
3 small Indian brinjal
½ of a long cucumber
2 sliced medium onion
A little water
Half a teaspoon each of chilli powder and turmeric
¾-1 cup of grated coconut
3 green chillies slit
½ shallot
2 pinches of whole cumin seeds, or jeera
2-3 tbsp of coconut oil
2 pinches of sugar
4 tablespoons of Indian dahi
Steps:
• Cut vegetables into long finger-length pieces and arrange them in the order of how much cooking time they’ll need: drumsticks/moringa (12 min), achinga beans (9 min), then carrots (8 min), plantain (7 min), then Indian brinjal (6 min), cucumber (5 min).
• Begin to steam the above in a sauté pan, along with the sliced onion. Here, to steam means to put in a very hot pan, and periodically add small amounts of water that evaporate under the lid.
• At the 6 minute mark of steaming, add water, salt to taste, and sprinkle (6-8 pinches each) chilli powder and turmeric.
• Then grind coconut, green chillies, shallot, and cumin seeds (jeera) in mixie or food processor.
• Add this mixture to the steaming vegetables, at about the same time you add the cucumber, around 8 minutes in, with some water to moisten. Stir.
• When vegetables are tender but not mushy, add coconut oil and sugar.
• Mix in 4 tbsp of Indian dahi just before serving (only to the amount you’re serving; less if your serving size is smaller). Do not heat after adding yogurt.
FOUR
You grew up barely eating at restaurants. In Muscat, Oman, there were biannual expeditions to the KFC and Chinese Garden. But primarily, your mother cooked extraordinary regional Indian, Italian, and Betty Crocker-style American dishes with the furious and exacting intelligence of a person kept from their true great dreams, and given a home kitchen for a canvas instead.
Chinese Garden, which specialized in hakka style, was your childhood favorite; your family could order chop suey with the fattest, crispiest noodles and chili-glazed kingfish spiced to the taste of the Malayali palate. You could watch the koi —gorgeously, furiously alive — sailing back and forth in Chinese Garden’s meager pond before the food arrived.
When the table was cleared by someone uniformed and paid to do so, you could look up and see relief slacken your mother’s face, right before another emotion — unreadable to you — shadowed it.
FIVE
Your mother is one of life’s originals, the small god of your family, with a girlish laugh and a terrible volcanic core. Your mother cooked, eyes alive with urgency, and you knew not to disturb her. Your mother sighed, her eyes a little watery, and said, I wish I could call her. Your mother cleaned, vacuuming the entire flat and washing the bathroom every day. You did some things, and then your mother flew into a rage, your mother tipped over into hurt, and the world would stop. Your mother made sure you ate fresh, healthy food three meals a day. Your mother would, nearly every day, unstopper the bottle of coconut oil and beckon you close. Your mother would massage the sweetly-scented translucent unguent into your small body, into the dark glossy cap of your hair, before she bathed you.
You were such a good little girl, she says sometimes now with an air of quiet loss, you were so pure, so clean.
Can you interpret the life you’ve never led? The life that makes yours possible? Can you imagine a koi’s red-orange thoughts, bobbing day after day in a too-small pebbly pond? Can you? Can you?
SIX
This year, you travel in Kerala for the first time without a parent and get sick as a dog. You go to the Ayurveda place and ask for an herbal steam, an oil massage. In the darkened shabby room, you lie near-naked as a round-faced twenty something woman with sweet eyes and skin the exact shade of yours strokes your body with warm coconut oil.
The massage does not press deep into tissue. It is an engagement with the skin, a warm and shallow kneading. An ache begins to pool behind your eyes and will not stop. No one besides your mother has ever touched you like this.
Because of the terrible and bespoke nature of devotion, with its custom-measured affordances of mercy and failure and blindness and need, it is also factual that no one has loved your mother like you.
It is strange that the memory of being so well and tenderly cared for, of being helpless in loving hands, can hurt. Your limbs are soft and slick with oil and you are unclothed and a little cold when grief drops on you like an anvil. You weep, unbidden, unceremoniously, in the darkened room. No one will ever love you like your mother.
Everything okay, the Ayurveda girl asks in Malayalam at the end, and you thickly say yes mol, instinctively calling her the word for daughter even though she is three years younger than you max. Outside the clinic, the sun an interrogation lamp, you wipe your face down.
Because of the terrible and bespoke nature of devotion, with its custom-measured affordances of mercy and failure and blindness and need, it is also factual that no one has loved your mother like you.
SEVEN
Back in the States, you call her. You tell her you made the avial, that it wasn’t as good as hers. You ask about church, what she’s reading, how she is. You talk to your mother about all the safe nothings, looking down at your dry and chapping hands. You call your mother because you love her, because she is alive to pick up, because some day one of those things will be true.
Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction, the Discover Prize, and the Aspen Literary Words Prize. It was also a New York Times Editor's Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Slate, and Buzzfeed. Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen.
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