Around the dining table

When I was growing up, every summer, my family would travel to our ancestral home in south India, to spend a month with our grandparents and other members of our huge, extended family. The house was a sprawling bungalow, built in the traditional nalukettu style with spacious rooms built around an open courtyard, set amid lush greenery.

School books were gleefully forgotten about, as we savoured precious moments of pure, uninterrupted joy. Watching the rain as we munched on crisp banana chips, running around the house with cousins or simply enjoying a dip in the little pond by the house, we were content with the simple pleasures of life. We children kept busy, competing with each other, on who could eat the most number of freshly plucked mangoes at one time or who could climb the highest on one of the numerous trees surrounding the house.

Those days life seemed to revolve around food. I would peek out from behind the sheets, somewhere at the break of dawn, only to see my grandmother already bending over the kitchen fire. This was one part of the house, which would be bustling with activity throughout the day. As we played, we were able to get a fair idea of what was being cooked, from the comforting smells and sounds emanating from the noisy kitchen. That familiar sound of someone cutting fish on a wooden board, the rhythm of coconut and spices being ground on the good old mortar and pestle or the lovely smell of homemade butter being melted in a pan. My grandmother and her able team of daughters and daughters-in-law would tirelessly create wholesome, delicious meals that were welcomed and relished by the huge family.

Wealth of experience

Meal times were really special, those days. They were lengthy affairs with free flowing conversation making a perfect accompaniment for the fish in coconut gravy, the yummy cutlets or the to - die - for green mango curry. While everyone took second or third helpings, there would be a detailed dissection of every incident that happened that day, advice would be doled out in plenty or plans would be chalked out for an upcoming occasion. Sometimes, the elders would regale us with stories about their childhood. At times, even differences of opinion or tensions in relationships of the elders have surfaced during meal times, only to be sorted out after a lengthy discussion on the problem.

When I look back, I realise that what we as children gained when we sat around the table at meal times, was a wealth of experience to draw upon later on in life. We learnt to make every day a celebration. As we sat enjoying those wonderful family meals together, we were unaware of the strong, bonds that were being forged.

Now, years later, many of us children are married and raising families of our own. My grandparents are no longer with us, but what they have left behind is the priceless legacy of a big, closely-knit family which continues to meet on all important occasions, and continues to share joys or sort out differences over a family meal.

Fyna Ashwath is a writer based in Dubai.