There is a moment in Climbing the Mango Trees that perfectly captures the tensions underlying Madhur Jaffrey’s near-idyllic childhood In India. Shibbudada, her charismatic and capricious uncle, arranges a treat for Jaffrey and her siblings: a visit from the khomcha wallah—the hot-and-savory-chaat- or snack-seller—at Saturday tea. The children are beside themselves with delight. “This was akin to telling a Western child that he could have a whole candy shop for an entire afternoon,” she explains.
The khomcha wallah did not prepare sweets, however. His specialty was dahi baras: irresistible fried split pea patties which he drizzled with yogurt and showered with salt and spices: black pepper-cumin-dried mango for mild tastes, yellow and red blends with various chilies for hot. The piece de resistance, it seems, was sweet-and-sour tamarind chutney: “A wooden spoon would disappear into the depths of a brown sauce as thick as melted chocolate. It would emerge only to drop a dark, satiny swirl over our dahi baras. As we ate them, the dahi baras would melt in our mouths with the minimum of resistance, the hot spices would bring tears to our eyes, the yogurt would cool us down, and the tamarind would perk up our taste buds as nothing else would. This to us was heaven.”
Just as we are vicariously enjoying these delicacies, Jaffrey reminds us that the khomcha wallah’s visit was a divisive weapon in an ugly, long-running family drama: As his father’s favorite son, Shibbudada kept the whole clan on its toes by mercurially shifting his favors from one member to another, always ignoring his own children, the products of a loveless arranged marriage to a homely woman. “We would watch our three cousins, jumping around in general glee with the rest of us, but every now and then they would throw a quick glance at their father, their large dark eyes begging for another kind of crumb. Perhaps a hug, a touch of the hand. They never got it…”
Climbing the Mango Trees is filled with wondrous, sometimes painful recollections of growing up in a large, prosperous Delhi family. The book covers the first 19 years of Jaffrey’s life, up to the point when she leaves India for drama school in London. Eventually she would become an actress, notably starring in Merchant Ivory films such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Heat and Dust (1982), but she really hit her stride when she began to write about the foods of her beloved India. Jaffrey’s 13 cookbooks include An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1975), Taste of the Far East (1993), voted Best International Cookbook and Book of the Year by the James Beard Foundation, and most recently, From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail (2003).
Not bad for a girl who didn’t know how to cook when she left home and who had failed a domestic sciences exam when unexpectedly asked to prepare a dish using Indian spices. Born in 1933, Jaffrey, whose first name means “sweet as honey,” spent her childhood shuttling between two family residences, one belonging to her parents in the Delhi suburb of Kanpur and the other in a riverside compound with sprawling gardens ruled over by her autocratic grandfather. Although the family was happiest in their Kanpur home—which featured a salmon-hued dining room decorated with gold plaster rosettes—it is quite clear that many of her most joyous moments were spent in the company of her extended family.
The title of the book is drawn from an early episode, undoubtedly a pivotal one for a food-writer-to-be: One hot day, while the grownups napped “in rooms cooled with wetted, sweet-smelling vetiver curtains,” Jaffrey and her cousins climbed up into the branches of mango trees, “armed with a ground mixture of salt, pepper, red chilies, and roasted cumin. The older children, on the higher branches, peeled and sliced the mangoes with penknives and passed the slices down to the smaller fry on the lower branches. We would dip the slices into our spice mixture and eat, our tingling mouths telling us we had ceased to be babies.”
Jaffrey’s taste-memory is prodigious. She can conjure up the flavor of the “snack of wealth,” describing it as “a heavenly froth, tasting a bit of ,,, bamboo, a bit of terracotta, a bit sweet and a bit nutty...” as easily as she can the spicy potatoes, “earthy, gingery, and hot,” served at her grandfather’s funeral feast. Thirty-two of her family recipes may be found at the end of the book, including a version of the khomcha-wallah’s split pea fritters, and a sublime duck curry with coriander and cardamom.
Her culinary memories make for delicious reading, but I found myself even more eagerly following the tumultuous saga of this family whose fortunes rose in the 17th century when they became scribes to Muslim rulers of India. Moments of sheer bliss—summer holidays in Simla, for instance, when the whole family picnicked in the cool foothills of the Himalayas, eating juicy mangos chilled in icy streams—are interspersed with her struggles at school and her dawning awareness of the deep pools of bitterness within the family.
Jaffrey is a good writer and she keeps her story going with a novelist’s flair. The portraits of her parents are vividly drawn. There is her rather sophisticated, well-educated father, an Anglophile condemned in life to run ghee and candy factories, who was happiest when designing elaborate illuminations for Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Her mother, from a poor Delhi family, had not gone to high school, but excelled in all domestic arts, teaching her daughters to maintain perfect skin by washing their faces in fresh raw cows’ milk and cooking exquisite curries. A section devoted to her Kashmiri shawls and her canny negotiations with the shawl-wallahs who purveyed them, will incite lust in the heart of anyone who loves textiles.
If there is a villain of the story, it is the spellbinding uncle Shibbudada, whose power games created so much misery and whose misguided attentions to her sister Kamal resulted in a tragic medical misdiagnosis. Yet during the riots that convulsed Delhi during Partition, this same uncle sallied forth day after day in his two-tone Chevy, in order to ferry Muslim friends to planes and trains headed for Pakistan. Far from being a memoir that settles scores, Climbing the Mango Trees is in the end a candid tale of a big, mostly loving family, troubles and all.
As the story deepens, Jaffrey herself emerges, slowly changing from a timid, undisciplined girl caught up the swirl of a large family into a young woman who blossoms when she discovers that she can write and act. Now, one imagines, she is a rather formidable person. Pity the young Hollywood actress who casually addressed her as M, a pet name permitted only to intimates. “I had to let her know, as gently as possible, that only those who had known me for at least forty years or were members of my family could address me that way,” Jaffrey says. Gently? I would not like to have been on the receiving end of that reprimand.
Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is available through www.amazon.com.