The Gourd of Small Things

An ode to the bottle gourd and the mercies it bestows on us in summers

Two decades and some change back, during this very season, there was another summer morning.

One when I was getting ready for college and grumbling at my austere parents, who insisted I endure two, sometimes three, bus rides in the scorching Pune Sun. Meanwhile, health freak Daddy Roy was practicing his morning yoga alongside a yoga guru turned FMCG magnate demonstrating kapalbhati—skull breathing—on TV.

Between contorted poses, peculiar breathing techniques, a devious and condescending toothy grin, and comical twitches of his eyes, the guru extolled the virtues of lauki, or bottle gourd. Lagenaria Siceraria for those of you who (pretend to) know latin names.

“Juice your laukis and drink it!” he preached to his flock. “Imbibe its divine essence! It’s not just a vegetable—it’s the ambrosia of heaven—the elixir of life!”

According to the guru, lauki juice could cure blood sugar imbalances, immunity issues, indigestion, black money stashed abroad, corruption, currency inflation and all ailments that plagued the lesser mortals waylaid by Western modernity.

While my father embraced the kapalbhati lessons, he remained dismissive of the gourd-man’s religious and political fervour.

“Why drink lau (the Bengali word for bottle gourd) juice when you can cook it with kucho chingri (shrimps)?” he shrugged. “The nutritional value remains unchanged, but with the shrimps in them, the taste is so much better. No?” he asked Mamma Roy.

Of course, both Mamma and I knew the question was a request for dinner in disguise. As I left the shelter of home, Mamma Roy’s oft-repeated mock protests reminding Dad this was a home and not a hotel, and she was a wife, not a cook, blurred into the heat haze outside.

Sure enough, dinner that night commenced with lau-chingri—a delectable concoction of bottle gourd and shrimp in a light, green-white, soupy jhol.

Daddy Roy and I haven’t agreed on much in life. But I nodded then, as I do now, to his glowing reviews of the lau-chingri and its delightfully understated deliciousness being a perfect fit for summer.

Delicious as lau-chingri is, it’s a simple dish to make. But it’s only delicious when kept simple.

First, you dice the peeled gourd up in less than bite-sized chunks. Set it to parboil in an open vessel—or use a pressure cooker if you don’t know your veggies well and didn’t choose a callow one when buying.

Then, take a little mustard oil in a kadhai and raise it to medium-high heat. Sauté less than a handful of salt and turmeric-laced shrimp—necessarily the cheapest and smallest ones you found at the fishmonger’s that morning and never those large ones that cost you a week’s salary for a kilo. Turn them around in the oil till the moment you are in doubt whether the shrimps have caught their own colour from the frying or are still yellow from the turmeric stain. That very moment, take them out and set them aside.

Add the spice mix to the same oil.

Spices meaning nothing more than a heaped tablespoon of ginger and fennel paste with some slit green chillies and maybe some nigella before it to flavour the oil. Sauté the spices half-heartedly for less than a minute. Then, add the parboiled gourd and the water they were boiled in and turn the flame high. Add salt and, of course, a dash of sugar because who on earth would want their gourd to be salty in summer?

Stare at the mix while tapping your fingernails impatiently like the ticking and tocking of a clock. And the moment you can tell yourself, “Yes, yes…things have come to a boil,” throw in the shrimps and some coriander you’ve irreverently torn with your hands and haven’t even bothered to look for a knife, scissor or chopping board.

After another three-odd minutes of full flame boil, and a loud and clear self-declaration stating “I couldn’t care to cook this anymore,” and it’s done!

The secret to a good lau-chingri is to cook it like you don’t care to know the recipe. The day you try to do it properly is the day you ruin it.

In fact, the key to cooking good lauki is to always keep it low-key. Puns unintended but relished.

There is another variant of lau-chingri where you don’t keep it soupy and instead dry it up in a skillet. You add dry spice mixes like garam masala and red chilly powder, sometimes onion and garlic too.

Thanks to the proliferation of Bengali speciality restaurants outside Bengal; and their virulent counterparts called ‘Bengali inspired’ which cater to non-resident Bengalis with nostalgia based on non-reliable memories of their culinary heritage, this variant has almost become the default nowadays.

But this heavy-handed approach is an outright abomination and a blasphemy against the gourd that demands an evolved palate capable of appreciating deep nuance hidden in apparent insipidness.

If you are going to negate the very characteristic of being understated, and merely bottle this gourd up into the same garam masala, onion-garlic uniformity declared as ‘Indian’, you're not really showing the diner any lau, are you?

This subcontinent we call home isn’t a place for one culture, one recipe book, or one gourd. If the straitjacket of garam masala and onion-garlic master gravy is all you seek, why even select this gourd from the entire pantheon of gourds?

Take the bitter gourd with its domineering bitterness. Take the pumpkin, which is all about the sweetness. Or its ‘disco’ variant if mass is all you want to add to your mixed vegetables where the spices and overcooking obliterate the vegetables altogether. Or a ridge gourd or sponge gourd or pointed gourd and submit yourself and your spice rack to the strong fleshy statements of these vegetables that dictate what you can or can not do with them and what not.

Lest I mislead the reader into believing that I’m a zealot for this one gourd and worship merely the one aforementioned Bengali avatar of it, I’ll add to important disclaimers.

One, I mean no disrespect to the other gourds or the spices people offer to these gourds. What I disagree with is the culinary paths they take to make these gourds in their choice images.

I’m just a fundamentalist when it comes to all gourds. I like them closest to their purest primal forms.

I celebrate the bitterness of bitter gourd and heap scorn on those who salt it and osmotically drain the very defining essence of it. If you can’t take the bitterness, why go down that vine? I love the snake gourd to remain soft and fleshy, the sponge gourd to be ever so slightly meshy, and the ridge gourds to be callow. I don’t even see why anyone should eat a pumpkin that isn’t outright sweet.

I dismiss such gauche tendencies, saying: “Let them eat potatoes!”

Two, neither am I unaware of nor refuse to celebrate the many avatars of the lauki gourd that inhabit these lands; nor am I treating the shrimp-infused variant from Bengal as the seed of my zealotry.

For in fact, I love and often still make the vegan version of lau-chingri which my Vaishnavite Dida, Mamma Roy’s mother, made. Everything remains the same, except you replace the shrimps with little pellets of fried lentil-fennel paste. If you’re too lazy to make a fresh lentil paste, use the dried shop-bought ones they call boris.

Besides, lauki recipes, for me, are welcome well beyond the Bengal realm as long as they respect the lauki’s lightness of being. Lauki raita, for example.

The first time I ate lauki ka raita was at lunch at our neighbors—the Sharmas.

My height, then, was under three feet and my fussiness about food was high enough to drive my mother up against a mile high wall. We lived in Baroda. It was the season when bougainvillaeas and hot summer winds ran unbounded across the city and a time when it wasn’t still widely called Vadodara.

Though called Aunty and Uncle by me, the two senior Sharmas were old enough to be my grandparents. And they behaved every bit that way.

Telling my barely twenty-something mother to go take a much-deserved nap, the Sharmas assured her they’d find a way to trick me into eating from the big silver plate they shared every meal of their marital lives, sitting on their sprawling bed.

“Babu likes ice cream, you know?” Aunty said to Uncle in her sweet voice, referring to me in the third person as if I wasn’t sitting two feet from them, busy with a jigsaw puzzle.

“But I thought he doesn’t like sweet, no?” Uncle replied to his petite wife in the baritone that befitted his muscular six-and-a-half-foot stature.

“Yes, that’s why I’ve made sour raw mango ice cream for him!”

“Sour ice cream? Raw mangoes?” I fell for the bait.

“Yes! Open the fridge and see. It’s in a glass bowl.”

Sure enough, there was a glass bowl, thrice the size of my hands, sitting with some cream and bits of greenish-white raw mango pieces.

“This is a mango?” I asked when chewing the first teaspoon full of said ice cream and encountering a piece of lauki in it. “But it’s not ‘talk’ like mangoes are”.

I didn’t know the Hindi word khatta then. Some Odia, some English, and a lot of Gujarati and Bengali are all I could speak.

The Sharmas, who knew some Bengali, laughed and told me this was a special variant of mangoes called ‘ice mangoes’ that aren’t very ‘talk’—meaning sour in Bengali. And I promptly lapsed comfortably back into my well-documented gullibility and polished off not only the raita but almost half a paratha and some slow-cooked brinjal that Aunty fed me from their plate.

Even now, four decades after the busting of the ice mango myth, I still love a small bowl of lauki raita every now and then. And I see how the mildly spiced beaten curd is all you really taste when you eat it. The lauki just sits humbly and simply, having done nothing other than drinking in the refrigerator’s icy winds and generously giving all of that life-saving coolth in our parched summer mouths every time we choose to crunch one between our teeth.

Lauki raita embodies what pro-Liberation fighter and radio artiste Bidit Lal Das wrote, and Runa Laila turned into a blockbuster, in the Bengali song Sadher Lau.

When he says “The Wanderer made the lau of love” he’s saying how the gourd is so subtle in its existence that it becomes a metaphor in the hands of the maker. The maker then casts in his chosen image as and when he likes. It can be sustenance from nose to tail; but it also becomes a fellow pilgrim by becoming a dugdugi (kettle drum).

A curious coincidence demands mention here. Bidit Lal Das had another name: Potol Babu. Potol being the Bengali name for the much loved fellow cucurbit—aka the pointed gourd.

Of course, there’s a risk with extreme metaphorization and fictionalization of the lauki. It can lead to horrendous derivatives like lauki ki kheer.

The first time I ate it was at this five star hotel who I will not name and shame for fear of legal repercussions. Much as I love lauki, a defamation suit by them and I’ll find myself in penury eating boiled lauki for the rest of my life.

I need hardly explain how it tasted and even less so why it incurred such righteous anger in me. Condensed milk, sugar, the pistachio, even the damned silver foil—I tasted everything except the lauki. The gourd had been cooked to such a fictional existence that it could well have been snozzcumbers brought in from BFG’s larder.

Speaking of lesser gourds or recipes thereof, my homeland Maharashtra is home to a lot of them. Latur, Osmanabad, Sangli, Satara, Jalgaon, Palghar, Dhule—every one of our heat laden districts where I've eaten dudhi bhopla in, has competed to over spice, overcook, and underwhelm me with their recipes.

We are so dismissive of this vegetable that we didn’t even bother giving it its own name. We call it dudhi bhopla, which simply means ‘milky pumpkin’.

Clearly, we’re smart enough to know that the two vegetables come from the Cucurbitaceae family and are closely related. But we just don’t care enough to name it.

In most Marathi families, the unwritten but well acknowledged rule is, the day you can’t buy a bhopla, which we love and have many recipes, just get that darned milky fleshed, insipid variant and get done with your meal.

Thankfully, since time immemorial, my city Pune has been under the influence of Kannadigas and their idli-dosa-sambhar-upma selling ‘Shetty’ hotels have been our mainstay when it comes to snacks. Hardly second to pohe and the much later entrant from the Bombay Province called vada pao.

And my gratitude to the Kannadigas who colonized our breakfast tables comes in a big part from the sambhar they make. It’s a bit sweet, the way I like it—or possibly have evolved to like. But more so because it has lauki!

There in the tumble of every possible spice ever traded by the Thanjavur-Maratha Kingdom, the palate loaded with tamarind, lemon, chillies, and whatnot; that mixed lentil soup, where drumsticks are the sole and absolute ruling solid; there, every once in a while, a chunk of bottle gourd is to be found. Sunk at the bottom of the bowl, barely visible, and of course, content to be that way.

If you ever reach the level of lauki-love like I harbour, you’ll know how to eat (or is it drink?) that sambhar and eat the lauki. Dip your dosa, idli, vada, or whatever in the sambhar. Slurp and swallow the mix of carbs-meets-complex-carbs and burp the spice overdose all you like. But don’t touch the lauki.

Not until the Puneri cashier-manager Kaka or Kaku (uncle or aunty respectively) has thrown you a death stare for occupying the table for three minutes longer than you should have, and sends his waiter and foot-soldier your way. And in the split second between the waiter saying “order more or get out”, and without waiting for an answer taking your plates away, reach out with the fork with spikes bent from cheapness and overuse, spike the juicy blob you’ve left, and pop it in your mouth.

As small as this ritual may appear to the non-believer, it is only when you do this that you truly become one with the gourd of small things.