Eating by the Rules

"I can't come to south India," my friend joked over the phone from Mumbai. "They eat with their hands."

I laughed. Eating etiquette is the only thing I cannot handle in Bangalore, this most westernized of eastern cities.

Bring on the cows obstructing the street with their dung and balding skin. Bring on the fleets of rickshaws and cargo trucks swerving to hit you. You can even bring on the locals asking if I'm Nepali and thus if I work on the street. But bring me rice and ask me to eat it by hand -- well, one must draw the line.

"What we choose to eat or refuse to eat, and how we eat it defines us as much as our culture and language," reads the foreword to a Keralan cookbook here. "Cuisine creates a community; it also keeps communities apart."

In south India, I will always remain apart.

I respect the method. It is as precise as it is inimitable, and it goes something like this: First, fill a metal plate with roughly three bowls of coarse white rice. Pour vegetable broth, watery yogurt or a combination of the two alongside. Begin the post-cooking process. Knead the mixture with the tips of your fingers until no grain lies unfondled. Collect inch-wide ball with your fingertips. As fingers rise to mouth, delicately insert the ball with one finger.

This, not dance or tabla, is India's true art.

But you can respect something without feeling compelled to do it, like ascending Everest or investment banking. I watch only, fascinated by each fingerful's dripless journey from plate to tongue. When spoonless cafeterias threaten, I unearth a utensil deposited in my bag after a forgotten yogurt on the run. (Here, yogurt is "curd," pronounced without the earthy American r.) Even the neighborhood joint by my house, where I devour "rice bath" standing beside the same skinny men who drive my rickshaws, provides spoons. No forks or knives, of course -- one doesn't need those unless a non-veg, the freak term applied to anyone who touches meat and sometimes egg.

But rules in India are like clean space, made to be trashed. Today, famished at one of the government schools I work at, I accepted a plate from a teacher and sat across from her. My fingers hadn't touched faucet or soap for six hours. But the rice was so inviting, soft and cooked with enough water to stick. The chickpeas sang of the Middle East, with masala. And then there was the kitchen-fresh curd, some of which was lost in drops on my chin.

The teacher looked at me, then rescued a spoon from a bowl of pickles. "Here," she said. "Eat."

April Yee helps Bangalore's government-school teachers use technology with the American India Foundation's Digital Equalizer initiative. She blogs at AprilEats.com.

Posted by April Yee