Likewise, when I visited a famous colourist’s shop in London, I was overjoyed to see nearly a thousand shades of pigment powder with their containers neatly labelled. As a painter, I was only ever going to use about 30 of these colours. But it gave my soul huge succour to know where I could precisely find the other 970.
Then there was the long-term relationship, involving two young offspring and a kitchen that I had to be away from for a few months every year. In the spirit of the hardy and efficient Vermont woodsmen, I had also become an inveterate labeller – when in doubt, do a black marker shout! And I liked to be able to spot different bits of ammunition in the heat of cooking battle.
This meant that the other co-parent and chaotic master chef’s jars of 78 spices and 26 condiments all needed to be tagged: clean white paper labels on both lid and side, black or red Sharpie, the names all caps in my best pseudo-designer hand.
The problem was I’d be away for a few months while the kitchen (and the chaos) was still operational. I would return and roll up my sleeves, ready to cook for the kids and find someone had moved my rai into my kalaunji jar, my methi into my jeera jar, my ras-al-hanout into my dhania powder tin and so forth. My expressions of frustration and fury would be dismissed with ‘Oh, stop being so uptight. Surely by now, you can recognise rai, methi and jeera without labels?’
I was reminded of this recently, when I visited a dry food emporium in Ahmedabad. Being a Gujju, I’m hardwired to love the huge variety of ‘snakes’/farsan. Living away from Gujarat one has access to but a small selection of these, and any trip back to the parental hometown involves a shopping safari to bring back all kinds of goodies. Visiting Ahmedabad after 10 years, I had no idea just what had happened to the snack-farsan scene till I entered this small aircraft-hangar of a ‘shop’. As you walk in, you find yourself lost in ravines, crowded with shoppers, the canyons rise on both sides of the passage, tall cliffs of teetering plastic packets, tubs and soft pouches. As a Gujju kid, you learn the basic names of munchies right after you come off the breast milk: khakhra, ganthia, fafda, thepla, dhebra, sev, chevdo, muthiya, mathiya, bhajiya, papdi, dhokla, khaandvi, patra…. Each of these carries a specific salivatory meaning in your taste-memory, and I thought I knew exactly what I wanted. What I was ambushed by was an array that challenged language, memory and, indeed, probably all of philosophy.
Depending on how you looked at it, the clearly printed labelling wasn’t a problem, or the labelling was the chief problem. The first warning flicker of impending lunacy came when I saw the khakhra packets with labels: ‘Jalapeno Cheese Khakhra’ and ‘Schezwan Khakhra’. I managed to handle that one — and the other alien khakhra flavours, including ‘Barbeque’, ‘Italian Pizza’ and ‘Oreo-Chocos’. Take that, you purists who hate pineapple on pizza!
Walking through those aisles made movies like Inception look childish. By the end, approaching the payment counter you were ready to believe that everything could be everything else: mathiya-flavoured chevdo, chevdo-flavoured papdi, papdi-flavoured muthiya, piri-piri-flavoured kaju katri, kaju katri-favoured dhokla, all labelled and bar-coded.
Coming out, I imagined a work shed in snow-blanketed Vermont – an axe with a touch of a wrench mixed in, hammer-shaped nails, sandpaper flavoured wood-glue…
