Murungakka Sambhar

The comments on the last few posts cannot be ignored. Especially the ones by a number of vegetables. I didn’t comprehend a number of them, but the vegetables itself reminded me of my pet grouse.

Amma makes sambhar very often, once in a day usually. I am not much of a sambhar fan. I like rasam much more - it is lighter and is unlikely to contain any vegetable that one dislikes.

Appa says it is illegal to make sambhar without the vendakkai. While it tastes rather nice, I don’t like it. Vendakkai is the vegetable that allegedly improves one’s performance in any mathematics exam. It helps to process complex problems and get you the elusive, Centum in Maths. However, no amount of Vendakai consumption helped me or my friend Poongothai. So I concluded that, it didn’t work. And just so that, amma didn’t put too much pressure on me by saying, why after so much of vendakkais also your maths scores don’t improve, I chose to boycott the vegetable completely.

However, slightly more difficult to ignore was – murungakka. We had a tree and T Anna got glasses when he was six. So murungakka found its way into every meal of ours. It is the most annoying vegetable. The flavour, while being nice, completely overwhelms every other taste. A small bit can sometimes get stuck in your throat and make you feel that you might choke to death. It is a bit annoying to watch people eat a murungakka, there is something brutal about it. It is a bit of a social embarrassment.

However a big part of my dislike for murungakka was to do with the fact that the men always ate/ still eat before the women in my house. I am okay with that also. It is too small a thing to rebel and get self righteous about, I think. The not so pleasant part was to clear the plates after the men were done with the eating. I had to usually do it and I used to hate the days when it was murungakka on the menu. The violently chewed on remnants of the erstwhile good looking vegetable, which I needed to throw before washing the plates would gross me out. I must have cursed T Anna a million times at least; appa was a little more delicate.

Since then, I made a promise to myself that when I get married, I shall never cook the murungakka. At least T Anna and Appa are my blood and gothram, imagine doing this for some strange man?