Hand-to-mouth resistance

I have had to re-negotiate my relationship to the inherited gesture of eating with my fingers, besides re-navigating the realms of my kitchen pantry and re-orienting my culinary proclivities. Representation Pic/iStock

Besides the Auntie scandal, one of the highlights of the Mamdani campaign for me was the western revulsion to pictures of New York City's mayor eating rice with his bare fingers. It's hard to understand the fuss, especially if you've grown up tasting the microbiomes on your caregiver's fingers as they ushered customised morsels into your mouth. Eventually, we learned how to do it ourselves - to form globules of rice with trails of dal or curry, incorporating into each one a portion of meat or fish or egg, and a bit of vegetable. It was unsurprising to witness the racist tenor of the western media's response to the circulated image of Zohran Mamdani eating rice without cutlery… the invocations of ‘savage-mindedness' or low hygiene standards. Maybe this resonated with me, because ever since I moved to South Tyrol five years ago, I have had to re-negotiate my relationship to this inherited gesture of eating with my fingers, besides re-navigating the realms of my kitchen pantry and re-orienting my culinary proclivities. It goes without saying that this whole affair is compounded because I am married to someone who is white and whose family is South Tyrolean. There are many immigrants of South Asian descent who live in the same town as us, but most of those households are not mixed, like ours.

In January 2019, when my partner visited me in India and we evolved an expansive travel itinerary that spanned Delhi, Khajuraho, Ajanta, Ellora, Aurangabad, Mumbai, and Goa, I steadily recognised that I would have to learn a new language in order to access the parts of him that are inherently more articulate in German. He speaks English fluently, but when I'd hear him converse in both in his native tongues (Standard German and Dialect), he seemed different, like his brain was being activated in a whole other way. I sought intimacy with those elements of his personhood. I wonder if he felt the same way when, at some point in our travel, possibly in Khajuraho, I unthinkingly began eating with my fingers. I asked him if he had ever tried it. He told me that growing up, he was conditioned to believe fingers needed to be clean, and my gesture felt like the opposite of his set of inherited gestures. But some minutes into the conversation, he went and washed his hands and returned and asked me to show him how it's done. I showed him my technique of taking in bits of rice and mixing it with whatever else was on my plate, pressing in certain ingredients to maximise flavour. He mimicked what I did, even though I could see him struggling through this lesson in decolonisation.

Over the course of the three weeks during which we were together 24/7, I watched in awe as he got better and better at eating with his fingers. It wasn't just that he was beginning to excel at it; I was amazed because his desire to master this move didn't stem from wanting to impress me. He genuinely ‘understood' how eating Indian food with one's fingers simply made sense. The flavours cohered. He was learning to get the different elements on his plate to talk to each other. He was learning how hygiene was a crucial part of the exercise - you always washed your hands well before and after. Eating became a radically immersive act.

When we moved here, the cook in me got fascinated by the lure of mastering both Italian and South Tyrolean cuisine. I'm still wading through the incredible nuances of each, overwhelmed by their uniqueness. In the beginning, I would excitedly invite friends over for dinner and cook an ‘Indian' meal. But then, I would feel crushed when I'd watch them use their forks. I knew in my gut that they weren't experiencing the flavour the way it was conceived. How do you eat a prawn curry rice without partitioning the prawn, pressing its flesh into the rice, which is steadily soaking in the coconut-infused curry? No, you cannot eat the beetroot thoran on its own; the edginess of the smoky tadka likes having a counterpoint. My heart sank once when I'd made tisreo (clams) perfectly the way my mother makes them, and I watched my in-laws trudge through it with a fork.

If you're not licking the insides of each shell, you're missing out on the delicious bits of raw coconut. I cannot even narrate the horror of watching friends eat the shelled prawns I fried with their forks and knives. If you're not sucking on the shells, you're denying yourself the pleasure of that delectable symphony of powdered masalas that have danced with the ginger-garlic paste and the acetic component - vinegar or lime. Once, my partner cajoled his friends into eating the seafood meal I'd made with their hands, but watching their obvious discomfort was worse than seeing them disqualify my culinary interventions through their use of cutlery. Between taming the spice levels for their European tongues to revamping the textures of my meals to make them more palatable to their distrust of their fingers, I felt like I was making too many compromises. I save my best cooking now for my partner - the only person I know here who truly commits to the process of eating it right. It's too traumatic to watch a white person eat my version of a Bombay Frankie with a fork and knife.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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