Garlic Musings

 

Garlic :

Some Personal Musings:

It was a casual morning at home yesterday. I had to do some cooking for the two of us at home and also for two friends. One was having surgery, another was returning from vacation. There was no more any peeled garlic sitting in the fridge. So I pulled out a few bulbs of garlic from the pantry and sat to peel them. And as I went on peeling my mind was beginning to see a load of lessons in that little vegetable. It became a fun filled activity. 

Before I get to what I was reading into this vegetable a little bit about my journey with garlic. It’s been a relationship of unconditional love. No love and hate. Just pure love. The scripture says garlic is tamasic. Dulls the mind. Notwithstanding, I could never say no to garlic. Any curry, especially with seafood, garlic is essential. Pasta, garlic any day makes it appealing. Same with pizza. Fried rice. Spicy chutney. Sol kadhi. Mexican food. Thai food. Biryani. Pav bhaji. Oh and batata wada, the famous dish from my hometown Khopoli. I can’t imagine a diet without garlic.

In California there is a town called Gilroy which boasts being the Garlic Capital in the country. You enter the city limits and you will understand why it is known by that name. The air is filled with the unmistakable smell of the garlic growing in the soil and harvested and processed in the factories in the area. In July each year the town holds a garlic festival. Besides garlic fries, garlic corn, garlic scampi and calamari are garlic pizza, this festival serves something many may not have heard of. Hold your breath: garlic ice cream! Now that’s one thing I wasn’t able to bring myself to enjoy. Give me garlic in anything else and I will gobble it down. Even simply roasted garlic with salt and chillies to eat with bhakri!! I can live on it for months. Anyways.

Until now garlic and me shared this endearing gastronomic partnership. 

But something new was waiting for me yesterday as I sat to replenish my usual stock of peeled garlic.

The job is one that requires a good amount of patience. I always knew that. Patience is not my forte. But for whatever reason, I love peeling garlic. So I started with opening up one whole bulb at a time. Then started working with individual flakes. It wasn’t a new job. I’ve done it periodically for years. Especially after setting up my own home. Yet, yesterday was probably the first time my attention was drawn to how many sheaths of peel sit between the outside till you reach a single bare flake! 

But that wasn’t all that came to my attention. I noticed how neatly each whole bulb was packaged on the outside. Looking at it one could not guess that this single appearing entity was actually holding within itself several individual entities in various sizes with slight differences in shape and weight. Yet each individual entity had the same fundamental essence within its core. 

And to reach that core, one had to patiently go about taking out one layer of sheath after another. There were thicker, drier layers on the outside. Underneath these were softer, thinner and more moist layers. Deeper I went, the layers were more tightly adhering to the flesh of the flake. The final layer needed good eyesight, more carefulness, skill and patience to separate it from the usable flake. And smaller, more delicate the flake was, it required more careful handling than the bigger ones.

And of course there was the part that needed to be discarded. One couldn’t get to the useful part without putting in effort and separating it from the remainder non essential parts. You couldn’t relish your food if any of this throwaway material came into the bite.

Indeed in that little vegetable I was seeing a miniature replica of the world and our lives. In each flake I was seeing a mirroring of individual human being. 

One flake is enough to give the taste of garlic but one cannot be enough for serving a wholesome meal. 

There are so many little things around us that serve as prototypes of the world. Yet we have a hard time seeing that single essence in our world. We can’t relate with everything around us. An adjacent flake is a stranger to us. We fight with it for space. We fight for more privileges. We fight for recognition. We are just plain silly!!