A book of Malayalee women's stories reveals more than family recipes

MALAYALEE heritage in Malaysia has, over generations, quietly folded itself into the larger Malaysian story. We've assimilated, adapted and, inevitably, changed. Yet some things stubbornly remain, and very often, they survive on the tongue.

A taste. A smell. A dish placed on the table that takes you somewhere before you quite understand why.

Reading Anitha Devi Pillai's What the Tongue Remembers, a collection of 11 stories about Malayalee women in Singapore, I kept thinking about my own mother's kitchen.

Pillai writes of women carrying secrets, making choices, enduring heartbreak and living with the silences that families sometimes keep for generations. Woven through their stories are recipes and dishes familiar to many Malayalee homes: pazham pori (banana fritters), unniappam, mambazha pulissery (mango yoghurt curry) and puttu with kadala (black chickpea) curry.

But these aren't simply dishes inserted between stories. Food becomes another way of remembering. And that was what caught me.

As I read, I began wondering about the stories behind my own mother's cooking. What memories sit inside her fish curry, with slices of mango from the tree growing in front of our house floating among the spices? What part of her own past survives in the puttu she makes, eaten with curry, which in turn has become part of my memories of home?

Perhaps this is what Anitha's title understands so beautifully. Sometimes the tongue remembers what the mind has long stopped thinking about.

PLOT TWISTS AND (UN)HAPPY ENDINGS

[[nid:1552681]]

There are few straightforward lives in Anitha's world.

In The Blessing, the birth of a child isn't quite what it seems when Ambiga Iyer and Mareena Kurian find themselves in the same ward at Kandang Kerbau Hospital in Singapore. What begins as a story about motherhood gradually reveals something more complicated beneath it.

An Unusual Arrangement takes us much further back. Chellama is married at the tender age of 12 to 21-year-old Krishnan, who later leaves for Singapore in search of a better life. Eventually, Chellama and her children make their own journey to Singapore to join him during World War 2. What follows is a story shaped by migration, marriage and the choices women make within circumstances they didn't necessarily choose for themselves.

In Paper Mountains, mental illness casts its shadow over the relationship between a mother and daughter. For the daughter, there's another unsettling question to confront: is this something she, too, might carry with her into her own future?

Then there's Expiration Date, built around an intriguing premise in which marriages without children come with an actual expiry date. After 10 years, the marriage licence lapses and the couple must divorce. For Vashy and Lilly, the law forces them towards an unusual arrangement and raises the question of what, exactly, holds a marriage together.

Anitha clearly enjoys a plot twist, and there are plenty of them. Secrets surface, relationships shift and what appears to be one kind of story can suddenly become another.

At times, however, the plotting can become rather dense. There were stories I had to go back and read again, either to work out a relationship or to understand exactly how a revelation fitted into everything that had come before.

With so many turns packed into some of the narratives, the twists occasionally compete with the quieter emotional moments that are, for me, among the book's strengths.

Still, there's something compelling about these complicated women and their complicated lives. And running through all that drama is food, providing a kind of emotional anchor.

A recipe can appear almost deceptively simple beside a story filled with heartbreak, secrets and difficult choices. Yet perhaps that's the point. Life gets messy but the recipe remains.

MEMORIES AND STORIES

[[nid:1552680]]

Reading these stories from Singapore also raises another question familiar to Malayalees in Malaysia. After generations away from Kerala, what exactly are we remembering?

Our food has travelled with us, but it hasn't remained untouched. Life in Malaysia, much like Singapore, has changed our recipes and introduced different ingredients, influences and tastes. Our palates have changed too. What my mother cooks may not taste exactly like what her mother cooked, just as what I remember as Malayalee food may be quite different from the food served in a Kerala home today.

But perhaps authenticity isn't really the point.

Recipes migrate because people migrate. They change because families change. A dish absorbs the place in which it is cooked, the ingredients available, the preferences of husbands and children and the improvisations of the woman standing over the stove.

And somewhere along the way, those adapted recipes become authentic to us.

That is what makes the food in What the Tongue Remembers so evocative. Anitha isn't merely serving up pazham pori, unniappam or mambazha pulissery. Through them, she gives us glimpses into the women who made, ate and remembered them.

And somewhere between her stories and recipes, I found myself thinking less about her kitchen and more about mine. About that mango tree outside the house… about my mother's fish curry… about puttu and curry on the table.

And, most of all, about the stories I may never have thought to ask her.