I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

April 22, 2010
Udaipur, India

Udaipur is, like much of Rajasthan, a land of riches. The home to the famed Mewar empire, it has no fewer than four visible palaces, with the gigantic City Palace complex serving as part museum, part fort, part luxury hotel and part home to the living Maharaja (a cool looking cat who I really wanted to meet, but to no such avail. We got busted when we sneaked onto the grounds as non-guests and were asked to leave). The city's most romantic and notable landmark is the famed Lake Palace, once also a home to royalty, now a Taj hotel likely housing visiting royalty and other people who can afford its starting price of 800 bucks a night. It sits in the center of the man made (king made, actually) Lake Pichola and even though the lake is low in this pre-monsoon season, it is still scenic. Parts of Octopussy were filmed there, and I was disappointed to learn that following the Mumbai bombings in 2008, non-guests are no longer allowed to visit. I had big plans to go to dinner there impersonating a Bond girl. There's another palace, Jag Mandir (that I think still functions) to the south of the Lake Palace where Shah Jahan once hid out from his father before he built the Taj Mahal. High on a hill of the western shore sits the Monsoon Palace, the best place in town to catch the sun dip behind the mountains for the night. Down below is the recently built Oberoi hotel (though not a real palace, but with the same floor plan and some palatial name), more expensive than the Lake Palace and with each suite boasting its own swimming pool. We had dinner there one night and it was pretty special. Having to make reservations in advance to be allowed on the premises, we were announced and escorted basically everywhere we went, including the bathroom. There was a man hiding in the servant's closet in the ladies' room, who was there cleaning up after me before I was finished (in yet another fine example of India's extreme sexism, they don't even hire women to clean the women's rooms. But more on that later.) Dinner was excellent as expected, and while I felt a bit weird sipping 15 dollar cocktails while there were people on the street who did not earn 15 dollars in a month, it was nice to experience India's famed hotel hospitality. Hyatt should take a cue from these folks. When it comes to real luxury, Indians know best, despite my unwanted bathroom attendant.

And that's basically how we passed our time in Udaipur, palace hopping as it were. After we were palaced and shopped and massaged out, we had one last day to kill before the overnight train back to Delhi. What better way to spend it than to learn how to cook some of the wonderful food we'd been eating for the past three weeks? Stacy found a woman named Shashi who ran a cooking school from her home, and we booked a class with her. What we would take away would be more than recepies.

Shashi's cooking school turned out to be only a few paces from our hotel, but it was worlds away from the opulence and riches we'd been touring in Rajasthan. As soon as we climbed the steep stone steps, I knew this was going to be unlike any cooking class I'd ever taken. Most classes I've attended have had 5 or 6 students and a fully equipped kitchen where each student had his own burner, all ingredients prepped for you by a line cook, etc. Most were actually restaurants that offered classes during off hours. This was something entirely different. There were no prep cooks. There were no prep tables. There were no burners for us. There was only Shashi's modest two room home in which we'd be cooking for the next five hours.

The stairs led straight into the small, windowless living room, which housed a double bed, two chairs, a TV and a coffee table. Next to the living room was the kitchen which consisted of two burners attached to a gas tank, a stone counter top and shelves which held spices and dishes. There was a small outdoor “terrace” adjacent to the kitchen, where Shashi's illegal turtle pets lived and where some water (in a bucket) and extra grain was kept. The supplies for the class, including mostly vegetables, were sitting on the bed, still in their plastic bags from the market that morning. I noted that in addition to there not being a bathroom (Shashi and her two sons used the toilet one level up, which also belonged to the rooftop restaurant. Where they bathed, I don't know.), there was no running water and no refrigerator.

She invited us to sit down and immediately began to tell us her story. Her face was honest and sweet, and there was a sparkle in her eyes that said “nothing gets past me,” yet those eyes were also tired and worn, with premature wrinkles around them. She was once, (and still was as far as I was concerned, though no longer by Indian standards) a very beautiful woman. She wanted us to guess her age, and we tried to avoid that because I knew she looked older than she was and did not want to offend. Turns out she was 41, and I might have guessed closer to 50.

Shashi comes from the Brahmin, or priest caste. It is the highest caste in India, and a wealthy one. Their rules for food, family and faith are extremely strict. The Brahmins do not eat meat, fish or even eggs, only vegetables, legumes and paneer (cheese) or curd (yogurt). She was married young (we guessed 15) to an older man by way of arranged marriage. Her husband was allowed to see her photograph prior to their wedding date, but she did not see her groom until the day they were married. She moved into the house of her husband's family, as is custom in India, and bore two sons. She preformed her duties, in joining her sister in laws in preparing the daily meals for the entire family. (She jokingly called them beasts when recalling how sometimes she would have to hand make over 100 chapatis per meal. We rolled out and cooked 10 or so and I thought that was excessive.) When her sons were still young (I think she said 6 or 8?) her husband was murdered by his friend over a financial grapple. Neighbors and friends who she might have counted on to right the wrong kept their mouths shut. The murderer bribed the police and spent only one year in prison.

As Brahmin customs are strong in life, they are equally harsh in death. Shashi fasted for over 40 days following her husband's death. She was only allowed some chai (tea brewed in milk) and a bit of bread in the morning, then she would sit in the corner of a room and weep for the rest of the day. Following that initial mourning period, she was not allowed to leave the house for an entire year. According to the rules of her caste, she will never be allowed to remarry. To attempt to do so would leave her outcast by society. Even in 2010, tradition of this sort just is not broken. It would be a disgrace.

Now, one would think that being of a high caste, she would be looked after following her husband's murder. One would think she would be given money, or taken in, along with her sons, by a relative. One would be wrong. Her parents were both dead, so she could not go back to them. Her one brother was not to be called on either, because if he helped her, it would not only cause tension with his wife, but would also cause jealousy amongst her five sisters (who, incidentally, were all married and had men to provide for them). They would expect something from the brother as well. Her husband's family, with whom she lived, stopped talking to Shashi and her sons following his death. They still shared a house, but all communication and finances were cut off, down to the most minute detail. If she cooked bread, used a bucket of water, fed her sons a glass of milk, she was charged by her in-laws for not only the food, but the gas to light the fire, the oil to cook the food, the usage of their pots and pans until she could buy her own. She was crippled with grief, without a means to provide for her children and well on the road to becoming destitute. May I point out again that she is a Brahmin.

One of her sons, who dropped out of school for the time being to try and earn some money, got a lowly job at a hotel. He helped his mother by convincing a few of the guests at the hotel to let her wash their laundry, and this is how Shashi started to get her life on track. One of the tourists whose laundry she did stopped by to pick it up while Shashi was cooking. He smelled the food, must have tasted some (her cooking is superb), heard her story, and suggested she start a cooking school.

This was less than three years ago. Up to that point, Shashi spoke not a word of English. She was in her late '30s. Her boys were approaching university age. She had to find the money to get them an education. Shashi's Cooking Classes were born. With the help of tourists and her sons, Shashi has learned English, translated her menu from Hindi to English, German, French and Italian, has gotten herself mentioned in the 2009 Lonely Planet India book, and is now making (from what I can figure) a pretty decent living. A woman once dependent on her husband is now an entrepreneur, not from desire for something of her own (women's lib ain't exactly a big movement in India), but from an urgent need to feed her children. A lesser woman would have ended up a beggar on the street. A man in her position would have received all the help of his family and friends, been pitied and praised as a widower and quickly found another wife to cook and care for his sons. Abandoned by everyone she knew and left to her own devices, it was sink or swim. Thankfully for Shashi (and for us, that food we cooked was outstanding!), she is a quick study in high seas.

During our five hour class (note: our class was 500 rupees and lasted 5 hours. Most cooking school classes cost double that and lasted half the time.) we learned how to make everything from chai to paneer to pakhoras to naan to the masala base for any kind of curry to the single best thing I tasted in India: sweet coconut pharatha (a fried bread in which the dough, sugar and coconut are folded with layers of ghee, same concept as a croissant). We made chutneys with well water, about which I was nervous eating, but the mango chutney was one of the best things I've ever tasted and Shashi assured me I would not get sick. I did not get sick; I just craved more. We washed the vegetables in basins of water brought in by her sons. We cooked as the boys came home from their jobs/school and watched TV with the neighbors who dropped by to say hello and also watch TV – at one point there were 5 people sitting on the bed around the television as we fried bread in the kitchen. Stacy mentioned that it was like a sitcom, and it was. The random cast of characters that revolve around the building – the cooking school, Shashi's family, the restaurant upstairs, and the jewelry cart dude from across the street, along with 2 foreigners, always with Shashi's wit, humor and cunning at the forefront, would make a great storyline. (Maybe that's my new job; I certainly have the time to write a pilot).

The hours we spent at Shashi's made for a remarkable, enlightening and memorable experience. Not only was this one of the top three meals I've had in India (the other two being leftovers cooked by Sam and Laura's housekeeper in Calcutta, and the Bengali restaurant they took us to), it was one of the only experiences I had involving real family life. Shashi's story, while tragic, has a somewhat happy ending. She should be featured in Bust Magazine (and if any of my editor friends want to help me turn this blog into a submittable article, I'll take you up on it). What struck me most, though, was that Shashi stands out from the millions of women who do not have a happy ending. If your husband dies in India and you are of a lower caste, you are thrown out and will live your remaining days on the street as a beggar. You might sell your children to slavery or prostitution. You might, if you're in a small and remote village, commit sati (the act of a woman throwing herself on top of her husband's funeral pyre, to die with him. It's illegal in India, but still does happen in some rural villages). You will always be thought of as a lesser being than a man, regardless of caste or status. Interesting that practices from the middle ages are still commonplace in a country that in other ways, is far beyond my own. India elected its first and only female prime minister, Indira Ghandi, for four terms. She served as the leader of a billion people for fifteen years before her murder. Keran Bedhi was India's top cop before her retirement and is now a social activist for prison reformation and child welfare. This woman single handedly turned around India's largest and toughest prison full of murderers, rapists, child molesters by forcing the incarcerated to do yoga every morning and treating them with a slight bit of dignity. The prison currently has very few incidents of internal violence. Ruchira Gupta, the founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, was just honored by the Bill Clinton foundation in 2009 for her work to end sex trafficking of women and children in India and beyond. Here's a woman who was sold into prostitution at a young age, chained and raped every day for a month before she was forced to work as a prostitute for many years, and has gone on to buy her freedom from her brothel madame, found an award winning NGO, make several documentary films on the subject, and continue outreach arcoss the globe.

It is no secret that India is a giant paradox, full of unfathomable injustices. This particular situation struck a chord, considering all I really have to complain about is that my paychecks are (well, were) less than a man would receive for the same job. And I live in a country where if I scream about it loud enough, someone might even listen. Hopefully Shashi's business continues to thrive and lends some inspiration to other Indian women who desperately need it.