Please, sir, may I have one more teaspoon of…?

The muhurtam was over. The knot had been tied, but rituals were still going on. It was one o’clock already, and I was driven by a sense of urgency.

‘Let’s grab a bite to eat and leave at least by 2,’ I said to Shanthi.

‘A bite!’ exclaimed the member of the host family who was accompanying us to the dining hall. He looked offended. I had a knack for annoying authority figures, and it was playing out now.

‘I mean, a meal,’ I said correcting myself.

‘It’s a wedding feast,’ the patriarch said authoritatively with an overemphasis on the last word. His long lean face had fallen into an expression of grim disappointment.  

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir,’ I lied, ‘I know it’s going to be a veritable banquet, and I do look forward to it.’ This helped. Lies often do. He seemed to like the expression “banquet.” The grimness slightly disappeared from his face, and he was trying to smile now.

Never one to lose an opportunity to lecture, he said, ‘You’ll find the feast an interesting combination of the best of Telugu and Tamil brahmin delicacies.’ He then went into elaborate details on the subject, ignoring the look of disapproval on Shanthi’s face and my agonized looks at my watch. ‘You both must do justice to it,’ he concluded before ushering us into the dining hall and taking leave of us.

It was a large hall with a high ceiling and ornate walls, reminding one of a concert hall in Mysore Palace. Four hundred people could comfortably sit and eat in the place, maintaining physical distancing of the kind Covid-19 protocol would demand, but there were hardly two hundred guests.  A dozen or so paricharaks were in attendance. They were bare from the waist up, perhaps to show off their yagnopaveetham and convince the guests that they were indeed brahmins.  I settled in front of a large banana leaf, determined to keep my promise of doing justice to the wedding feast.

Discipline was the watchword in the dining hall. Once all the guests were seated, the paricharaks came marching one behind the other, each person carrying a dish, and started serving. I was so fascinated watching this parade of paricharaks without, of course, a drum in the front that I didn’t look at my leaf-plate for some time. When my gaze finally fell on the leaf, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

 

The leaf was spotted with tiny dots of some ten food items – a teaspoon each of Andhra pappu, Tamil paruppu, Andhra-Tamil potato curry, Tamil koottu, Andhra pulihora (not Tamil puliyodarai), and so on. ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said aloud, and looked at the table in front of me. The plates were just like mine with a bemused expression on the faces of the people behind them. What was happening? I craned forward to view the serving style of the paricharaks.

 

‘Don’t trouble yourself; they’re using teaspoons,’ said Shanthi suppressing her laughter.

 

‘What spoons?’

 

‘Tea…tea… teaspoons. Their serving spoons are teaspoons.’

 

‘You mean, the kind of spoons used for measuring cough syrup?’

 

‘Yes, and for adding sugar to your tea.’

 

‘But why should they use that spoon?’

 

She stared at me for a moment. Then she said with a straight face, ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio…’

 

Realization slowly dawned on my weary mind. ‘Thrift, indeed!’ I said reflectively, having been chastened by Hamlet’s words.

 

Rice had not been served yet, but Shanthi’s plate was empty and well-polished. ‘How did you gobble up so many items so soon?’ I asked her.

 

‘Simple. I gathered all the items together, and they made one small handful. I needed just a single effort to swallow it.’

 

It seemed a sensible approach, and I decided to adopt it. I gathered all the items together and stared at the multi-coloured ball of food in front of me. I wondered what Appambhotlu of Amaravathi Kathalu would have done in a situation of this kind. Would the bhojana chakravarthi have proved equal to this situation? Not at all. He only knew what to do with plenty; he wouldn’t know how to eat this.  By the time I came back from this reflection with my hand and mouth at work on the food ball in front of me, my plate had looked greener and well-polished. And I was hungry. Appetite, as Hamlet ruefully reflected, grows upon what it feeds. Would there be a second helping of each item with a larger spoon? Or, was I required to beg like Oliver: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

 

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Shanthi as though reading my thoughts. ‘There will be another serving. Otherwise, what will you eat the rice with?’

 

She was right. The paricharaks were by no means Fagin & Co. They might be thrifty, but they were not hard-hearted. They might use a teaspoon, but they would serve you again – and perhaps again! And they wouldn’t shout, ‘What!’ like Fagin. They were now serving rice for which, mercifully, they used a bigger spoon, and it was followed by a teaspoonful of each dish they had served earlier.

 

A brown round object of the size of a grape with an overburnt side fell on my leaf now. ‘What’s this?’ I asked Shanthi, holding the tiny hot ball in my hand.

 

‘You have been in Andhra for about four decades now. Don’t you know what it is? It’s poornalu.’

 

‘Oh, poornalu?  But why that –lu ending for a noun in the singular? There’s only one poornam, so use the singular form. Grammar apart, why in God’s name is it so tiny? I have never seen poornalu of this size in Andhra.’

 

‘That’s the point,’ she said with her voice dropping to a low whisper. ‘This is not Andhra. We are in Telangana, and this is the Telangana variety. Perhaps the poornalu standards are different here.’

 

I broke the tiny poornam into halves, and asked one of the paricharaks to pour some ghee into it. He generously poured – spilled rather – a quarter teaspoon of ghee, and the combination was heavenly. The perugu that followed added to the dining experience.

 

‘What are you waiting for? You’ve finished eating,’ said Shanthi shaking my shoulders. I got up with a start.

 

We re-entered the marriage hall to say goodbye to the hosts. The host’s family and their relatives were on stage now posing for photographs with the bride and the bridegroom. Encrusted with chunky gold jewellery, almost every one of them was a veritable jeweller’s shop. There was a gold girdle round every woman’s waist. ‘This place is quite unlike the dining hall,’ I whispered to Shanthi. ‘It is a land of plenty.’

 

The patriarch was nowhere in sight now, but a younger member of the family spoke to us. ‘How did you find the wedding feast?’ he asked me. ‘It was healthy…wholesome…I mean, balanced,’ I stammered.’  And added, ‘Just the kind of diet that should be prescribed on weight loss programmes.’