Celebrations of Thanks and Harvest

Matt and I celebrated our anniversary about a month ago, and because we couldn’t remember the exact date that we met, and because we had to work on what we thought was the actual special day, we decided instead to celebrate Anniversa-week.  This took the pressure off a bit, a good thing when you’re living in India.  Holidays are tough; they require creativity and dedication, or else they’ll likely float by half a world away and a day behind.

So when Thanksgiving rolled around, the holiday surprised me by stretching itself into a week of harvest celebrations.  It began with our own small American way of celebrating, with pumpkin pie and stuffing, and then six days later took on the form of Huthari, a local holiday in praise of the coming rice harvest.

We three Americans had a hard time explaining our coming holiday.  “It began back when the European colonists had just arrived on the shores of America.  They were starving, and the Native Americans took pity on them and shared their food with them.  They had a big feast, and Thanksgiving was born.”  One of us interjects – “And then the next day, the colonists forgot all about it and started killing the Native Americans.”

But it’s about family, we would say, and relaxing, cooking together, and sharing food.  We called it a harvest festival, and that got across, because India is a country of harvests and festivals, and soon enough the local Coorgs would be celebrating their own version of the same thing.

We were a bit wary of what our beloved holiday would look like in India.  We already knew there would be no turkey, even though our farm is home to two very ornery turkeys.  We would have to be creative to make pie happen, and without a random assortment of family, what use is Thanksgiving anyway?  Despite all of this, I couldn’t let the last Thursday in November pass without at least spending some time in the kitchen.

In an attempt to discourage a twinge of homesickness, I spent the day in the field.  I wasn’t doing just any kind of farm work, but focused on digging sweet potatoes out of the ground.  It’s not quite sweet potato season around here, and because the sweet potatoes were an afterthought last year, allowed to grow between a thick planting of mango ginger, they were long and skinny, and buried between a bountiful crop of ginger.  We got three baskets of mango ginger out that day, and about 20 scrawny sweet potatoes.  But the satisfaction of harvesting our own Thanksgiving meal overcame the quantity.

Later on, Matt helped pluck a plump pumpkin off an overhanging vine, and I used my mom’s recipe, with a bit of improvisation, to make a pie.  In the absence of evaporated milk, I stirred a thick chunk of jaggery (unrefined sugarcane juice) into a saucepan of warm milk.  The pie went into the toaster oven, and I prayed that the electric current wouldn’t switch off, which it did.  Still, after two hours of attempted baking, out emerged a beautiful representation of home.  Lauren whipped up some tasty sweet potatoes and stuffing, and we brought our version of Thanksgiving down to the dining area to share.  Along with Anurag, Sujata, and Maya, we ate with a mother-daughter pair from Holland, and a pair of Indian guests.  Matt toasted to Thanksgiving, and we all tucked in, ending our holiday around a roaring bonfire.

A few days later, Sujata started telling us about Huthari.  Linked to the lunar calendar, Huthari marks the beginning of the rice harvest in Coorg, and like most festivals in India, it involves all kinds of firecrackers and fireworks.  Because we don’t grow rice paddy here at Mojo, Sujata arranged for us to visit some friends of theirs who do.  Lauren, Matt, Maya, and I set off after dinner, walking the kilometer to Vimmaiah and Meenakshi’s in the startling moonlight.  When we arrived, two little girls greeted us with a show of sparklers, and we settled into a spread of snacks and sweets – milk halwa, pakora, and banana chips.

After some time, we were ushered into the family’s shrine room for a puja, and given our first-ever bindis – that little dot between the eyes.  As it often happens in a foreign country, we were swept into the ritual without knowing what exactly was going on.  Vimmaiah’s family left the shrine room in a small procession, and we followed along, all the way across the farm’s drying yard, over a small stream, and into the edge of the rice paddy.  With limited flashlights, random fireworks, and the full moon sending off light overhead, we picked our way to the paddy and into a kind of magic.  The Indians ahead of us started hollering, shouting boisterous “Polydeva”s to the gods of rice and harvest, and waving thin machetes over their heads.  By the light of a small oil flame, Vimmaiah then reached into the paddy, grasped a large handful of the dried-out rice crop, and cut it at its base.  After gathering an armload of the holy stuff, we all turned and walked back to the house.  The young men of the family continued to set of fireworks, and small explosions of light and sound burst around us and the cut rice.  The short ritual was over, the offering of rice was divided up, and we went home with ten stalks of rice wrapped in mango leaves to hang on all the doorways of our homes.  Though quite different from our own feast of thanks, Huthari closed our week of thanks-giving with a bang, and with a nice memento to hang over our door.