Monsoon has arrived and Bangalore is preening with its lush greenery and dramatic cloud-play. There are still no road-drowning downpours, just surprise showers now and then with tree-bending and billboard-flying winds.
In such weather, the discussion during the coffee break veered to rasam and I started telling everyone about the insta-reel drumstick rasam that I watched and which appeared so delish. One Tamil colleague ‘decoded’ it to another as 'murungai keerai' rasam, which translates to moringa leaves rasam. This led her to also mention ‘milagu rasam’ which is pepper rasam. And then I don’t remember what she said and suddenly I hear that’s how the ‘mulligatawny soup’ got its name! Extremely matter-of-factly.
Wait! What! I stop their chatter.
You didn’t know? She throws a critical sideways glance at me.
Ignoramus me, no! How would I know that the soup that I
always wanted to order at restaurants, which was the only one that I had never
tasted, which looked so sumptuous and appetising, was Indian! ‘Mulligatawny’ sounded
so exotically foreign, that I was afraid if I took the name, it might come out
differently. But imagine mispronouncing something
Indian! I can do it! There’s no snob value attached to it!! From now on, I can even
say MU-LINGA –T-WANY – emphasising each syllable! What the heck! My country, my
food, my pronunciation!
But nothing could change the fact that I did not know. The
colleague’s sideways glance not in the least. I started reading about it online.
They even have a recipe for mulligatawny soup from Charles Dickens dated 1868!
