Veranda Tales-Buttermilk for the masses

Storytelling has been an integral part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to stories during the hot summer evenings and nights with my cousins. Mothers and grandmothers would gather all of us children for story time. It was usually pitch dark except for a very faint light coming from the flickering candle. Power cuts were as frequent as the hot and humid summer days. We all spread out on a cool concrete floor or on bamboo mats on the veranda intently listening to fascinating stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, and peasants alike. Stories about love, life, families, and people entertained and taught us life skills. These stories transported us to distant worlds which were strange yet familiar. Often the same story told by two people sounded different as storytellers added new twists and turns adding their personal style and flair to the stories.

Storytelling wasn’t limited to summer evenings and bedtime. I was surrounded by adults that didn’t pass up an opportunity to share their wisdom using the art of storytelling. The rich and vibrant oral traditions include songs, poems, stories, and సామెతలు (Sametalu are proverbs in Telugu). Men and women sing songs as they work in the fields, grind grains and spices and other daily chores at their homes. Stories are often used to teach important life lessons, interpersonal skills, and survival skills. These stories and the time spent listening to them made our lives richer leaving an impression on me. This series is all about reliving those memories as I share these stories.

మంది ఎక్కువైతే మజ్జిగ పలుచన (Mandi yekkuva ayithe majjiga paluchana)

We at one time or the other were troubled by life’s hard questions such as how much to cook for a large party or how much food to take to a potluck. People lose sleep over figuring out if 5 cups of dal is enough to serve 20 people or how many cookies to make for a group of 6 kids. Harder yet is how much pizza should be ordered for 10 people? You get the drift. It is tough to balance the right amount to cook and not have leftovers for the rest of the year. People who end up with tons of turkey after Thanksgiving know all too well how hard it is to come up with recipes that could be made with the leftover turkey for weeks on end without family revolting.

In some ways it is a good problem if you have more food than less. Nobody wants to run out of rice and scramble to make more midway through dinner. People figured out solutions to these problems ions ago. A clever cook knows to add a bit too much pepper so people don’t take a second serving. Another one knows to add water when a buttermilk container looks half empty after serving half the people. All good hosts know to add water to milk when guests arrive at the door unannounced and there is no time to order extra milk from their milk vendor. It can be hard to understand why we run out of milk when we all know  milk comes from grocery stores and not from cows. I better stop giving away all the tricks I heard about stretching food before I scare away friends and family from visiting me ever.

This sameta’s meaning is “when there are a lot of people, buttermilk becomes watery”. When I lived in a hostel (dorm) during my college days, it was all too common to find watered down milk and మజ్జిగ (majjiga is buttermilk in Telugu) if we went to the mess hall towards the end of a meal time. It wasn’t just milk, dosa batter and coconut chutney kept getting thinner and thinner as it got closer to mess closing time. Same story with potato curry served with puri or sambar served with rice or idli. It didn’t take me long to change my schedule. I started waking up very early to be in the mess hall as soon as it opened to eat food when it was freshly made and at the right consistency. I would bring milk from the mess hall and add milk powder to make it tolerable. Drinking milk with milk powder got old soon enough, it didn't take long for me to start enjoying mess hall coffee and tea instead. We gathered around on the mess hall veranda with our hot tea in steel glasses in our hands to chat. Even the mess hall food, coffee and tea tasted good when you were in good company. అమ్మా (Amma is mother in Telugu) was rather unhappy about me taking to the vices of coffee and tea drinking at a tender age of 16. She thought the right age to drink coffee or tea was 21. I am very glad she wasn’t the warden of our hostel for sure.

We were lucky to be close to a small roadside stall that made fresh samosas and made to order omelets. The owner and his wife lived in this small roadside wooden stall which doubled as a restaurant during the day and sleeping area at night. Their family expanded to include a small baby boy during the time I lived at the hostel. These roadside stalls which serve coffee, tea, samosas and other items such as cigarettes, and pan are very common in India. This stall was very close to the main entrance of the hostel and was located conveniently on my way to and back from the bus stop up the hill. Our university ran buses from the engineering campus to the women’s hostel. It was convenient to get tea, and samosas or omelets on the way back from college. We hung out by the stall for a while continuing discussions that got started while waiting for the bus at the campus or on the bus ride back to the hostel. Our bus rides were rather noisy with our chatter. There were days we broke into singing songs at the top of our lungs. I am thankful that our bus drivers were very patient and understanding. If we wanted a special treat, we walked down to a Jalebi vendor’s place for fresh, piping hot, syrupy, and delicious jalebis.

The hostel location was awesome. It was just about a block from the beach in a prime location which would make any real estate agent salivate. We had to just walk down to the beach road and cross it to be on the beach which we did often. We would continue to Ramakrishna Beach aka RK Beach when we had more time or when we wanted to take pictures infront of Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) buses. Don’t ask me to explain our ways during those days. It was loads of fun. There was a small stall which sold awesome fried fish at the RK Beach. Our hostel’s second and third floor rooms and terrace offered great views of the beach. It was very peaceful to hang out or study. I still remember sitting on the terrace wall as moonlight softly illuminated the beach and surroundings. We could hear the ocean all day long and especially at night from our rooms. Even though it started out as a strange noise, the constant music of the ocean became a soothing sound to fall asleep to. I started missing it when I went home for the holidays. As time went by, I learned to tune into the rhythms of the ocean. I started to anticipate impending storms by how the ocean looks and smells. Fish came out to shore during stormy weather, some of them died on the shore, and the fishy smell wafted across the beach to the hostel. Visakhapatnam sees its share of cyclones and storms. Cyclones have been known to result in a large number of fish, crab, and other marine creatures dying due to changes in oxygen and salinity levels in the ocean before and after a storm.

Visakhapatnam is an ancient port city. It has a natural harbor with a hill called the Dolphin's Nose named for its shape protecting it. Visakhapatnam's history dates back to the 6th century BCE. It was ruled by the dynasties, Andhra Satavahanas, Vengi, Pallava, and Eastern Ganga. Visakhapatnam was an ancient Port city which had trade relations with the Middle East and Rome. Ships were anchored in open waters and were loaded with cargo transported from Visakhapatnam shore by means of small Masula boats. Visakhapatnam has a beautiful coastline with rocks jutting out of the ocean. Wading through the waves and walking towards a rock through the soft sand as it shifts away out from under your feet is an amazing experience on its own. It is an icing on the cake to sit comfortably on a rock watching the waves crashing all around you, getting drenched by the mist when a larger wave reaches up the sides of the rock to caress you. It is a peaceful and meditative experience to be gazing at the endless ocean, one can never forget.

As a person who is drawn to the ocean and large bodies of water, I cherish the time I spent in Visakhapatnam and a good part of my childhood spent very close to the coast. Our family's stories are inextricably linked to the ocean. అమ్మ (Amma is mother in Telugu) shared a story of her అమ్ముమ్మ (Ammumma is maternal grandmother in Telugu) and జేజేమ్మ (Jejamma is great grandmother in Telugu). They had lived in neighboring towns, Machilipatnam and Narasapuram. They walked along the coast to visit each other. On one of those trips, when her great grandmother was walking along the coast, a big wave took her in and another one brought her back out. She lived to tell the tale to her children and grandchildren and my mother passed it down to me to tell it to my children. I would love to trace their path one day.

Let’s now get to the deeper meaning this sameta conveys besides how to make buttermilk or potato curry stretch to feed a lot of people. It is about scarce resources that could sap people’s quality of life and make their lives difficult. I know somebody who has a dozen and a half kids. Can you imagine being able to provide for them and send them to college? There is no chance of stretching the available parenting time, and limited resources to accomplish the impossible of providing for all of them. The same goes for families, communities, and countries with very few resources and large populations to take care of. This sameta aptly describes the never ending problem of scaling resources to fulfill the very basic needs of many. It is time now to mull over the real problems of this world.