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A scant two weeks had passed since we moved into our temporary apartment in Toronto and we had yet to meet our neighbors across the narrow hall. But as I stood in the entryway one evening with my two daughters, waiting for my wife, Malathi, to return from her daily jog, I noticed that the neighbors had left a message on their door, presumably for us. Below their number plate was a round, powder-blue air freshener. Harmless enough, until I looked further down and read two words inscribed in red ink on a strip of paper: "Curry stinks."
Apparently the smell of our Indian cooking had drifted from our poorly ventilated kitchen into their air space, triggering this response. At first, I found it amusing because, just a few days before, Malathi and I were riding the elevator up to our 16th floor apartment when the aroma of a curry dish enveloped us like a fog, prompting Malathi to inhale deeply and say, "Mmmm, that smells so good."
As natives of India, we aren't apologetic about our love for curry. Over the years, we've relished curry at a variety of restaurants, not just Indian, but also Caribbean, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese and Thai. We cook it at least twice a week, usually chicken or fish curry, spreading it over white rice or scooping it with chapatis, the leftovers tasting even better the next day. And if I try to wash the pot without scraping out the brown sauce at the bottom, Malathi protests: "Hey, that's the best part!"
Nevertheless, when she saw the neighbors' note, she wondered aloud if she should knock on their door and apologize. "I feel bad for them. I mean, we like our curries, but they don't like the smell."
Her eagerness to appease them surprised me, for I was entertaining other ideas, such as running a tube directly from a pot of bubbling curry into the gap under their door. Or inviting them for dinner and serving a curry so spicy, they'd soon be making a mad dash for the fire hose.
It's not that I had no sympathy whatsoever for them. The smell of curry can be overpowering, hanging thickly in the air, soaking into your clothes, clinging to your skin. The cavewoman who concocted the first curry, mixing chili with ginger, garlic, mustard, turmeric and other ingredients, must have wanted to not only feed her family, but also keep the wild animals away.
Even so, the word "stinks" seemed a little harsh, especially when describing something that's such an integral part of our culture. I've spent most of my life outside India, exposed to other cultures, separated from my own, yet my mother's cooking fostered a connection to my homeland that will last as long as my taste buds do. Curry isn't just another item on the menu -- it's part of my identity.
Indians abroad have long had to defend their food from its detractors, who find it too spicy, too smelly or both. Try eating curry in an office and brows will furrow, noses will scrunch, as though someone left the bathroom door open. Meanwhile, the smell of microwaved popcorn or fried chicken flows around freely, welcomed in every cubicle, like a snippet of gossip about the boss's secretary.
In some parts of the world, the racial slur "curry-muncher" is hurled by people who somehow believe that they're insulting us. Let me just say this: I'm a proud curry-muncher, a card-carrying member of the curry club. I savor my curry, in much the same way as some people savor milkshakes. To this day, it remains a mystery to me why no one has developed a curryshake. And what about curry ice cream?
But my affinity for curry hasn't kept me from appreciating other foods, though I'm not quite as adventurous as Malathi, who will eat just about anything that appears on her plate and doesn't bark. We've enjoyed everything from poutine to pizza, sushi to souvlaki, injera to nshima. Exposed to other cultures, we've learnt to be more open-minded, more accepting. If our rice is wrapped in seaweed, we don't call it strange. And if we're unaccustomed to a smell, we don't say it stinks.
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