Summary of RICE by Jhumpa Lahiri

RICE

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1967. Later her family moved to the United States, where she attended Barnard College and received multiple graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from Boston University. 

 

Lahiri has won several literary awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction often explores Indian and Indian-American life and culture — as does this personal essay, which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine. 

 

Along with corn and wheat, rice remains one of the most important crops in the world, especially in Asia, where it has been cultivated for thousands of years. Rice accounts for between 35 percent and 85 percent of the calories consumed by billions of people living in India, China, and other Asian countries. 

 

The ancient Indian word for rice (“dhanya”) means “sustainer of the human race.” Rice can be symbolic as well: we throw rice at weddings because it suggests fertility and prosperity. For Lahiri, the significance of rice is personal rather than universal. She describes her father’s pulao dish as both an expression of his idiosyncratic (distinctive/unique) personality and a symbol that binds her family together. She describes her father behaviour and his everyday routine from morning to night. Lahiri shows her admiration when she explains all about her dad and his way of making Pulao. Lahiri explains the way her dad makes the pulao in every detail.

 

TEXTUAL SUMMARY

 

Jhumpa’s father is seventy-eight years old, and is a disciplined man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job: cataloguing books for a university library. He has got a regular time schedule. Everyday in the morning he starts his day  with two glasses of water and walking for an hour, and flosses his teeth before to bed. 

In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. He knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or even a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj — the Bengali word for “estimate” — accurately gauging quantities. 

 

She describes how her father is more famous for making pulao - a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at festive occasions. Lahiri often watches him making it. It involves sautéing (frying) grains of basmati in butter, along with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves, and cardamom pods. In go halved cashews and raisins. A certain amount of water is added, and the rice simmers until most of the water evaporates. Then it is spread out in a baking tray. 

 

Despite having a superficial knowledge of the ingredients and the technique,, Lahiri has no idea how to make her father’s pulao, nor would she ever dare attempt it. She further explains that the recipe is her dad's own, and has never been recorded. It is a dish that has become an extension of himself, that he has perfected, and to which he has earned the copyright. A dish that will die with him when he dies. 

 

In 1968, when Jhumpa was seven months old, to celebrate her annaprasan, a rite of passage in which Bengali children are given solid food for the first time; which is also colloquially known as a bhath, which happens to be the Bengali word for “cooked rice” her father made pulao for the first time. They used to live in London then, in Finsbury Park, where her parents shared the kitchen, up a steep set of stairs in the attic of the house, with another Bengali couple. Her father baked pulao for about thirty-five people. Since then, he has made pulao for the annaprasans of his friends’ children, for birthday parties and anniversaries, for bridal and baby showers, for wedding receptions, and for her sister’s Ph.D. party. For a few decades, after they moved to the United States, his pulao fed crowds of up to four hundred people at different events and occasions.

 

Lahiri describes the difference when her son and daughter were infants, and they celebrated their first annaprasans with the same pulao her father makes. She hired a caterer, but her father made the pulao, preparing it at home in Rhode Island and transporting it in the trunk of his car to Brooklyn. In 2002, for her son’s first taste of rice, her father warmed the trays on the premises, in the giant oven in the basement. But by 2005, when it was her daughter’s turn, the representative on duty did not permit her father to use the oven, telling him that he was not a licensed cook. Her father transferred the pulao from his aluminium trays into glass baking dishes, and microwaved, batch by batch, rice that fed almost a hundred people. When she asked her father to describe that experience, he expressed without frustration, “It was fine.”

 

Lahiri has such an admiration to her father’s way of always keeping a positive attitude. She learned how to respect and admire her father’s decisions and the passion he had towards making his favourite dish.