YADAHALLI, India — It is a monsoon morning, which means torrential rain, breaking a dry spell that has persisted since a brutally hot summer. My family is worried that the shamiyana, a colorful cotton tent used for outdoor events, may not keep out the rain. They should be worried. They’re expecting about 3,500 guests for lunch in the shamiyana, from mid-morning to late afternoon. If the rainwater leaks through, this long-planned event will be ruined. “We should have used a waterproof tarpaulin,” my uncle announces.
The occasion is the housewarming of my family’s new residence after they were forced to leave our 300-year-old ancestral home here in South India. Yadahalli village flooded from the backwaters of a dam — The Upper Krishna Project — meant to help drought-ridden areas, and is now empty. My parents moved two miles away to higher ground.
When Indian families celebrate, they open their doors to include everyone, especially in rural areas, where entire villages are invited and several thousand guests are served a meal. The 3,500 people on today’s guest list is not a small number, of course, but it’s modest compared with the feasts I have attended. As a child, I went to a wedding where 25,000 people were served lunch.
With that large number comes mountains of supplies. A local caterer, Sangappa Gangappa Atani, whose team is cooking, had sent a grocery list last week, and yesterday morning the deliveries started: 660 pounds of wheat flour, 220 pounds of jaggery, an unrefined sugar, 100 pounds of potatoes, and 260 pounds of onions. By the end of the day, there were also several hundred pounds of produce, lentils, and spices, which arrived in a trailer attached to a tractor.
At 5 a.m. today, Atani’s five cooks and several dozen helpers began cooking in 500-liter-capacity cauldrons in a makeshift kitchen. Sixteen women were sitting cross-legged on wooden stools just 2 inches off the ground making chapatis, a flatbread cooked in concave cast-iron pans. I can’t take my eyes off these cooks because it’s fascinating to watch the speed with which they roll out the dough and make two or three flatbreads a minute. When I make chapatis back home in Massachusetts, it takes me at least three minutes to make a single round, and it doesn’t taste as good.
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Another cluster of women are cutting vegetables and grinding spices. There are several cooking sources: wood fires in pits dug into the ground, over which the men set gigantic cauldrons and stir the food using 4-foot steel ladles. It isn’t easy and some guests cheer the cook.
The elaborate menu includes three kinds of flatbread, one with wheat and two with millets, a spicy peanut chutney, lime pickle, broad bean curry made with vegetables and the Indian cheese paneer, yogurt, lentil soup, and the rice dish pulao. For dessert there’s something called Broken Wheat Pudding, made with cracked wheat and jaggery, and boondi laddu, which are small sweet balls of gram flour (also called chickpea flour), cashews, and raisins.
Atani, 40, lives in a nearby village and has been in business for 20 years. He took over from his father and caters 15 to 20 events a month. He has a simple system: The host pays for all the groceries and Atani bills for labor.
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I ask Shiddu Hanchinal, who I grew up with, and who is managing the event, how much the feast costs. He tells me the groceries are 165,000 rupees (about $2,000); labor is 45,000 rupees (about $550). With the price for renting the tent, chairs, and tables, the total is rupees 300,000 (about $3,500). The math works out to cost 100 rupees per person (about $1.25).
Luckily, it doesn’t rain on the party.
People start arriving mid-morning. The entire village has taken the afternoon off. Schoolchildren file in with their teachers excited to be anywhere but school. They head to the dessert table first, before piling their plates with the flatbreads and curries.
I don’t know most of the guests since I’ve lived away for more than 20 years. An aunt suggests I serve the food, which is an Indian tradition to show the guests that I’m honored they have come with their families. I have forgotten this beautiful custom.
Village feasts were a part of my childhood here. You threw an event for births, deaths, naming ceremonies, birthdays, engagements, and marriages. Twenty years ago at my wedding reception in this village, 12,000 people came to lunch.
At that event, I was delighted that several Yadahalli families who couldn’t afford weddings chose that day to celebrate the marriages of their sons and daughters. They came to our wedding with their guests. It is a tradition in these parts for families to piggy-back on a planned feast whose day you know about. My grandmother was trying to convince a young woman we knew who was engaged to get married on the day of my wedding reception so her family could save some money. The young woman was refusing but, somehow, my grandmother prevailed and there she was, in her wedding finery, newly married, with her family and guests.
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Two days before their village feast, my parents had a housewarming ceremony for just family and friends, about 700 people. The priest blessed the house and a lunch followed.
The menu was even more impressive than the village feast with several curries, two kinds of rice, four different flatbreads, pickles, salads, pappadum, and two desserts, one of which was a halwa, a pudding made with lentils, jaggery, cashews, and raisins. An aunt of mine, an amazing cook, had made the second dessert — flaky pastry that you dunk in kheer, milk reduced with sugar and spiced with saffron and cardamom. This dessert is exclusive to this part of the world and, knowing I would not get a chance to eat it again for a long time, I had several helpings. Making the dessert is so time-consuming that most cooks don’t bother. This meal was more expensive, 350 rupees per person (about $4.25).
For the smaller reception, my 15-year-old daughter, Anya, made garlands of mango leaves, considered auspicious in India, and marigolds to decorate the front door and the windows of the new house. Some guests had driven six hours to join the celebration. I met relatives I hadn’t seen since I left home. There were moments when I was overcome with emotion, greeting aunts and uncles who had aged so much that I could only see glimpses of the people they once were.
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Anya and my son, Surya, 17, are sitting under a tamarind tree with their friends, kids from the village with whom they spend summers. I have to coax them to come inside the house to meet the extended family. They touch the feet of the elders (there are many), a respectful hello. Even though I raised my children in the United States, I taught them these precious customs.
All the guests leave by dusk. My local aunts and uncles who organized the housewarming are happy at how everything went, how much they liked the food and that almost all of the invitees came.
”What a great opportunity you had to meet family and friends you haven’t seen since your wedding,” an aunt tells me.
I am separated from my family by a few thousand miles. I’m humbled to see so many people who are part of my family, my heritage, my childhood. As a child, if I went to a big event like the one we just had, I found it tedious (not unlike my own children sitting under the tree with their friends). Now, I cherish them.
Sena Desai Gopal is the author of “The 86th Village.” She can be reached at sena_desai@yahoo.com.
