INDIA

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I’ve read a lot of books for this blog that I haven’t particularly enjoyed. So when I find one that really speaks to me, it’s an especially pleasant surprise. My selection for India, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, is just such a book. It has so many layers and covers such a vast array of people and their stories, that I can’t possibly do it justice in this short post. Here, however, is a brief description.

A baby is born to a family in New Delhi, and the parents are overjoyed that, after having had three girls, this new baby is finally a boy. Or so they think. They discover later that their baby actually has both male and female organs – a hermaphrodite. They name him Aftab and raise him as a boy, but he begins to identify as a girl. When he is fifteen years old, he changes his name to Anjum and moves into a house of hijras, people who have adopted “a gender role that is neither traditionally male nor traditionally female.” From this point on, the author uses feminine pronouns when writing about Anjum. The house she moves into is called Khwabgah – House of Dreams – and Anjum lives there happily for many years. She finds an abandoned three-year-old girl on the street and takes her in, giving her the name Zainab.

At the age of forty-six, Anjum, who is no longer happy at Khwabgah, moves out, leaving Zainab behind with the other hijras who dote on her. Having nowhere to go, Anjum moves to a cemetery. After a while, she begins to build a home on top of the graves, and other odds and ends of people begin to join her there – a blind imam, an untouchable determined to avenge his father’s death, other hijras. She names the house built on the graves of the dead the Jannat Guest House.

One day, Anjum and her entourage travel to a part of New Delhi called Jantar Mantar. It’s an observatory, but in the book, it also seems to act as a type of public square, where all sorts of people come to promote their causes. In the midst of all the activity, it is discovered that someone has abandoned a baby girl. Anjum tries to take the baby with her, but a man prevents her and a fight ensues. Anjum and the man are both arrested, and the baby disappears.

At this point, the story moves away from Anjum and focuses on the lives of four people, now close to middle-aged, who had known each other many years before in a college drama class. Musa, a Kashmiri separatist, Naga, a journalist, and Biplab, a member of India’s foreign service, had all been captivated by S. Tilottama, an architect. Their paths had not crossed very often in the years since college, but now their lives suddenly become intertwined. The catalyst for these reconnections is the insurgency in the state of Jammu and Kashmir that began in the late 1980s. The setting of the book moves from New Delhi to Kashmir, where the brutality of the Indian government against the Kashmiri people and the discrimination against the people of this majority Muslim state by the majority Hindu government are on full display.

Eventually, the story comes full circle, and a link is established between Anjum and her entourage and S. Tilottama and her admirers. By this time, there has been so much information imparted about living outside of gender expectations, religious bigotry, the horrors of the caste system, the plight of women and girls, and the corruption of government that the reader despairs of the book ending happily.

That’s exactly what it does, though, which brought a huge sigh of relief from me.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness contains scenes of utter despair, and moments of the purest joy. The author is a master of her craft, and this book is a stunning patchwork of gripping stories and fascinating characters.

COOK

A whole lot of meat dishes are eaten by the characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, even though one of the characters, Zainab, is a collector of animals in need of rescue. “None of her tenderness towards living creatures, however, got in the way of her voracious meat eating.” So most of the dishes mentioned in the book were not vegan or veganizable. One passage talks about a beloved dog named Biroo who has moved into the graveyard with Anjum and her friends, though – “a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived his purpose in a pharmaceuticals testing lab.” He receives shelter and loving care at the Jannat Guest House, where “[h]e drank everything Anjum drank, ate everything that she ate…” One of those things that Biroo and Anjum both eat is biryani, a heavily seasoned rice dish. On the International Vegetarian Union website, I found a recipe for Vegetable Biryani, which turned out really well. Not sure I would feed anything that spicy to a dog, though…

GIVE

I had no trouble finding potential programs to support in India – GlobalGiving’s website listed a whopping 743 projects. Trying to narrow down the field to choose just one was difficult. My first thought was to look for a project serving LGBTQIA people in India, in honor of Anjum, but none of the projects listed fit that description, and I wasn’t able to find one with an accessible fundraising platform on any other website. Next, I looked for a project supporting people in Kashmir, but again I came up empty. I finally decided to donate to a program providing food, funds, and support to people affected by the COVID-19 virus. According to the project description: “India's national lockdown, restricting transit and shuttering most businesses, has had a devastating impact on low-wage earners, roadside vendors, and struggling farmers, as jobs are eliminated, road traffic disappears, and market demand evaporates. This project will fund providing emergency food and supplies to 1200 people in Tamil Nadu who are at risk of starvation and cash grants to 100 farmers and individual enterprises for loan or rent payments.” More information about this program is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/tamil-nadu-coronavirus-relief/.

NEXT STOP: INDONESIA

ICELAND

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With words like “zany,” “bizarre,” and “quirky” dotting the reviews that appear on the back cover of the book I chose for Iceland, I knew I was in for some fun. Butterflies in November, by Auđur Ólafsdóttir, turned out to be a wild ride.

The protagonist, whose name we never know, is a thirty-three-year-old woman who has been dumped by both her husband and her lover after first accidentally running over a goose, all on the same day. Also on that day, she goes to see a fortune teller, not because she believes in such things, but because her friend Auđur had made the appointment and paid for it, but was then unable to go herself. The fortune teller has some interesting predictions for the narrator.

“’It’s all threes here,’ she says, ‘three men in your life over a distance of 300 kilometres, three dead animals, three minor accidents or mishaps, although you aren’t necessarily directly involved in them, animals will be maimed, but the men and women will survive. However, it is clear that three animals will die before you meet the man of your life.’” She also advises the narrator to buy a lottery ticket.

Even before she purchases the lottery ticket the fortune teller has advised her to buy, the narrator receives a call about another lottery ticket that she had bought from the Association of the Deaf: she has won “a ready-made mobile summer bungalow with an American kitchen, deck and grill, that was built by deaf builders and can be taken apart and transported to any part of the country.” She decides she should take a journey.

Before she can leave, however, Auđur comes to visit her. Auđur is a single mother with a four-year-old son, Tumi, who is deaf, can’t speak well, wears very thick-lensed glasses, and has a large head on a small body. He has never known his father, and the twins that the six-months-pregnant Auđur is carrying will probably never know their father either. Auđur slips in the snow and injures herself right outside the narrator’s apartment, necessitating a trip to the hospital, where she is told she will have to stay until after the twins are born. She tasks the narrator with the job of taking care of Tumi until then.

The narrator doesn’t have children, doesn’t know how to relate to children, and really doesn’t want to be the caretaker for Tumi for the next three months. But she can’t tell Auđur no, -- indeed, she never seems to be able to say no to anyone – so Tumi becomes her traveling companion. They stop to buy a lottery ticket – he picks the numbers – and they end up winning the grand prize. She has the mobile summer bungalow transported to the village where her grandparents used to live, and she and Tumi drive there, experiencing a variety of adventures on the way and after they arrive.

Essentially, Butterflies in November is the story of a woman’s self-discovery. At one point, she tells herself, “I could barely be happier because I am beginning to know who I am, I am beginning to be someone else, beginning to be me.” The book reminded me of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, another novel with a quirky protagonist trying to find herself. I’ll definitely be taking a look at the other books this author has written.

COOK

Butterflies in November has a whole section in the back of the book devoted to descriptions and recipes of the food the characters eat throughout the novel, most of which are decidedly not vegan. I decided to try making the ginger cookies that were served during the Winter Festival and which are apparently a staple of Christmas baking in Iceland. Although the translator calls them “ginger cookies” in the body of the novel, the food section in the back calls them “pepper cookies,” presumably because they contain a small amount of black pepper. I found a nonvegan recipe for Icelandic pepper cookies at Allrecipes.com, and veganized it by using vegan margarine and an egg replacer instead of butter and eggs. My batter turned out to be too soft to roll out, so I just dropped it by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. That means that while the cookies are very good, they aren’t very pretty. The taste of the pepper is masked by the copious amounts of cinnamon, cloves, and ginger called for in the recipe.

GIVE

When the fortune teller in Butterflies in November is making predictions about the animals that will die before the narrator finds the man of her life, she says, “I do, however, see a large marine mammal on dry land.” Toward the end of the book, a dead pregnant whale is found beached after a storm. It seemed only fitting, then, that the one project from Iceland listed on the GlobalGiving website was an Earthwatch Institute program studying killer whales and their prey. According to the project description, “Scientists have very little information about the population or feeding patterns of killer whales in Iceland. As top predators, they can change the populations of prey species, which in turn affects the rest of the food chain. Conversely, dependence on a particular prey species, whose populations may fluctuate over time, can impact the killer whales' survival. By collecting observational data and skin/blubber samples, scientists will be able to better understand and protect these killer whales.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/killer-whales-and-their-prey-in-iceland/.

NEXT STOP: INDIA

HUNGARY

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I finished reading Magda Szabó’s The Door a couple of days ago, but it’s been hard for me to figure out how to describe it. It’s a completely character-driven novel, with an old woman named Emerence at its center. When the narrator, who is a writer, and her husband, an academic, move into a new home, they need a housekeeper, and someone recommends Emerence to them.

It is clear from the beginning that, although the narrator is the employer, Emerence is calling the shots. She works for people other than the narrator, even doing work such as sweeping or shoveling snow for the whole neighborhood, so she comes to work when she wants to and does the work that she believes to be important. She doesn’t think that writing and academia involve really work – she values only physical labor – so she always appears to be looking down on the narrator.

Over the years, however, they build a fairly close relationship, marred at times by Emerence’s eccentricities and the narrator’s reaction to them. The narrator is always the one who has to back down from these quarrels, as she and her husband have reached the conclusion that they can’t do their work if Emerence isn’t there to handle the domestic chores.

One of Emerence’s peculiarities is that she refuses to let anyone into her home. This becomes a problem when she becomes very ill and everyone in the neighborhood begins to worry about her. She won’t let anyone in to help her, and the narrator is called upon to figure out what to do, since she is considered to be the person closest to Emerence. This all happens at a time when the narrator’s writing career takes a huge leap forward, requiring her to make television appearances and attend banquets and conferences. The way in which she deals with Emerence during this time will change the narrator’s life forever.

COOK

One of the quarrels that takes place between Emerence and the narrator in The Door is because the narrator asks Emerence to make plum soup for Lent. When the narrator returns from church, however, she finds that there “was no question of plums for lunch. Waiting for us were paprika chicken, cream of asparagus soup and crème caramel.” At first I thought about finding a vegan plum soup recipe, but instead found a vegan chicken paprikash recipe on the "Fool a Carnivore" website. The recipe calls for Quorn Meatless Vegan Pieces, which I didn’t have on hand, so I chopped Gardein Chick’n Strips into inch-long pieces instead. This dish was tasty enough, but not so good that I’d want to make it again.

GIVE

GlobalGiving had four Hungarian projects listed on their website, and the one that appealed to me the most was the one providing healthy school lunches to some low-income children attending a Waldorf school. According to the project description: “In Hungary poor children should receive free meals in school by law. However, for some of these children, nobody - neither the state nor the local municipalties - provide the costs of these meals.” The lunches for this project come from “a local social enterprise specialising in providing healthy food for schools and kindergartens.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/give-healthy-food-to-poor-children-in-hungary/.

NEXT STOP: ICELAND

HONDURAS

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Mysteries and thrillers are my favorite types of fiction, so I was happy to find a thriller written by a Honduran author for this blog post. Firefall, by J. H. Bográn, follows New York firefighter Sebastian Martin, who has been devastated by the loss of his wife and son in a horrific airplane accident, as he seeks to rebuild his life in Texas. His uncle helps him get a job there as an investigator for an insurance company.

Sebastian has some personal battles to fight throughout the book. The first one is alcoholism, as he drinks heavily to help him cope with the loneliness he feels following the deaths of his wife and son. The second one is the fear of flying he has acquired due to the manner of their deaths. Both of these battles will make his new job more difficult. For example, it isn’t long before he is asked to fly to Honduras to look into the circumstances surrounding a couple of insurance claims.

In Honduras, he teams up with another investigator the insurance company keeps on retainer there, Gustavo Fonseca, and one of their investigations puts them in the crosshairs of a brutal car theft ring. Sebastian and Gustavo will need every ounce of cunning and courage they possess to survive their encounter with these murderous thugs.

Firefall was fun and easy to read, but I wish there had been a few more good, salt-of-the-earth Honduran men and women to balance out all the car thieves and prostitutes that populated the pages. There were too many gratuitous scenes involving prostitutes that did nothing to further the book’s plot. Still, I wouldn’t mind reading more from this author.

COOK

Early in Firefall, Marcos, one of the car thieves, stops at a food shack to kill time while he waits to ambush a guard. So as not to appear conspicuous, he decides he’d better get some food and he orders “a baleada, Honduras’s best-known typical food, a flour tortilla folded in half and filled with refried beans, butter, and cheese. Variants included avocados, scrambled eggs and even sausages.”

I found a vegan baleada recipe on a blog called “Tofu Mom.” I made the tortillas from scratch, then filled them with canned refried beans, Daiya cheddar shreds, and avocado. Tasty!

GIVE

GlobalGiving lists several projects in Honduras, so I chose the type of project I can never pass up – one that brings books to rural communities. According to the Un Mundo Literacy Connections program description, “Poverty/illiteracy go hand in hand. With a 65% poverty rate, over 25% of Hondurans cannot read. In an Un Mundo survey, teachers reported that access to books was the biggest school need. In rural areas, books are rare. In the Cangrejal Valley, only three in five residents have a primary school education.”

Un Mundo’s solution is to build “a regional library with after-school tutoring, adult literacy classes, computer lab, story time, and teacher training. A mobile library that travels by ‘burro’ to isolated, rural areas will provide books and literacy classes to indigenous people who are eager to learn.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/build-literacy-for-families-in-honduras/.

NEXT STOP: HUNGARY

HAITI

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Edwidge Danticat’s heartrending book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, tells the story of Sophie Caco, who lives in Haiti with her Tante Atie. Sophie’s mother Martine has gone to New York to work in order to send money back to help her family. Sophie is happy with this arrangement, since she doesn’t even remember her mother and she loves Tante Atie. But when Sophie is twelve years old, Martine sends for her, and Sophie is forced to leave Haiti and move to New York.

Sophie goes to school and does everything that’s expected of her. As she and her mother start to develop their relationship, she learns that the reason she has never known her father is because she was the product of rape. Some unknown man pulled her mother into a field and raped her when she was just a young girl, and her mother still has terrifying nightmares about it every single night.

When Sophie is eighteen, a man moves into the house next door. Joseph is a musician, and he is the same age as Sophie’s mother. Sophie and Joseph are attracted to each other, and since Sophie’s mother works two jobs and is away from the house for many hours every day, it is a simple matter for Sophie and Joseph to spend time together. When Sophie’s mother finds out about the relationship, she is angry. She takes Sophie upstairs, makes her lie on the bed, and tests her to see if she is still a virgin. This virginity testing is every bit as invasive as it sounds. She tests Sophie every week until Sophie decides she’s had enough and takes matters into her own hands.

This experience and Sophie’s response to it cause long-term emotional damage to her, even though she knows it’s a practice that has been passed down over the years. Her own grandmother had regularly tested her daughters’ virginity. “I have heard it compared to a virginity cult, our mothers’ obsession with keeping us pure and chaste.” Sophie sees a therapist to help her work through the issues and joins a sex phobia support group, but her mother never does seek therapy to help her deal with the trauma of her rape.

Throughout Breath, Eyes, Memory, the struggles of the Caco women – Sophie, her mother, her grandmother, and her Tante Atie – are portrayed with honesty and tenderness. Each of the women try to do what is best for their loved ones and for themselves, although the consequences of their actions are often not what they intended. “There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms.” In the end, what they are all seeking is freedom from the burdens they have been forced to bear simply because they are women.

COOK

The happiest time for Sophie in Breath, Eyes, Memory was her childhood, during which she lived in the village of Croix-des-Rosets, Haiti, with her Tante Atie. One morning after Sophie has been told that she’ll be going to New York to live with her mother, Tante Atie makes her cinnamon rice pudding for breakfast. The smell of it “scented the whole kitchen.”

That sounded pretty great to me, so I looked online and found a recipe for Du Riz au Lait on the “Haitian Recipes” website. The only tricky part of the recipe was that it called for condensed milk, something that can’t easily be replaced with just one of the usual plant-based milks. Fortunately, I found a recipe for vegan condensed milk on the Karissa’s Vegan Kitchen website, and it worked perfectly.

This rice pudding was so good that I would eat it every morning for the rest of my life if it weren’t so time-consuming to make. I’m not a fan of raisins, so I left those out except for the few I added for the sake of the photo below.

GIVE

I was certain after reading Breath, Eyes, Memory that I wanted to donate to an organization helping women who face gender-based violence. Fortunately, I found the perfect project on the GlobalGiving website. The Foundation for the Advancement of Haitian Midwives is training midwives in “identifying barriers to seeking care, cultural/societal norms affecting health, sexual and reproductive health, respectful and privacy protected care, principles of trauma informed care, types of gender-based violence, human/women's rights according to Haitian law, medical exam of the victim, medical-legal aspects/reporting and ethics/professional development.”

According to the project description, “Haitian Midwives are part of the community in which they live and work. They are in the optimal position to provide culturally sensitive evidence based care to Haitian victims and survivors. Midwives attending the training will come from each of the 10 departments of Haiti and return armed with the proper tools to adequately address the issue.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/gender-based-violence-training-haitian-midwives/.

NEXT STOP: HONDURAS

GUYANA

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The book I chose to read for the South American country of Guyana was Frangipani House, by Beryl Gilroy. It’s the story of Mama King, an elderly woman whose family has moved away from her and from Guyana. Since they are not there to take care of her, they put her in a nursing home for women called Frangipani House.

Mama King is not happy there. She dislikes Olga Trask – Matron – who runs Frangipani House. Matron is described as “a comely, honey-brown predator of a woman.” After having been a strong, independent woman all her life, Mama King feels that “now, time and life, her daughters and the matron had all conspired to deprive her of her faithful friends, work and hardship.”

During her time at Frangipani House, Mama King is often lost in dreams and reminiscences. She dreams about her husband Danny, who disappeared when she was pregnant with their second child. She thinks of her two daughters, who now live in the United States, and worries about whether she was so caught up in working to keep them housed, clothed, and fed that she neglected to show them enough love. She has happy memories of her grandchildren, whom she helped raise so their mothers could work, but bitter memories about having those same grandchildren taken away from her care when their mothers no longer needed her help.

Eventually, Mama King decides she’s had enough of Frangipani House and makes a plan to escape. Her children and grandchildren must then come together to decide what to do. Ultimately, however, Mama King decides her own destiny.

COOK

Yams are a staple of Guyanese cuisine, and they play a part in one of Mama King’s happier reminiscences: “She used to walk with Danny and then run fast across the field. He could never catch her. Life was good in those days. Laughing was easy. Tilley came in the yard with her six and in next to no time, they would build a fire and roast yam and potatoes and corn. Then Ben would banjo and the children would dance for pennies.”

I looked online for Guyanese recipes featuring sweet potatoes or yams and found one for sweet potato cakes on the Guyana Outpost website. The only change that needed to be done to veganize the recipe was to use an egg replacer instead of the egg. The sweet potato cakes were delicious, and I would definitely make them again.

GIVE

The GlobalGiving website listed four projects for Guyana. In honor of Mama King, I would have liked to donate to a project helping Guyanese seniors, but that wasn’t one of the options. Instead, I chose an organization that provides free air ambulance services to remote areas of Guyana. According to the project description: “Since 2001, Remote Area Medical (RAM) has provided a free air ambulance to thousands of Amerindian villagers in remote Guyana. In this isolated region, RAM's air ambulance is often a person's only access to medical care, making the difference between life and death. RAM flies its Cessna 206 into 28 different airfields to transport villagers to facilities for vital care.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-free-air-ambulance-in-remote-guyana/.

NEXT STOP: HAITI

GUINEA-BISSAU

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I knew when I picked up a book called The Ultimate Tragedy that I was not going to be writing a very uplifting blog post about the West African country of Guinea-Bissau. This book, by Abdulai Sila, tells the story of Ndani, a young Bissau-Guinean woman who leaves her village to look for work in the city. She wants to leave the village not only for better opportunities, but because the local djambakus, a religious leader, has declared that Ndani has a wicked spirit in her and that she will live a life full of tragedy. Since that time, no one in the village has wanted anything to do with her except for her stepmother, who is her friend and confidant.

Ndani finds work in the home of a Portuguese couple. The wife isn’t happy to have her there at first, but that changes when she decides that it’s her duty to convert Ndani to Christianity. The husband’s intentions are considerably less spiritual, and Ndani ends up having to leave the household.

She goes back to her stepmother’s house and stays there until the Régulo (village chief) decides that, since Ndani is educated and has lived in a white household, he wants her to be his wife and take care of the big house he’s having built to upstage the Portuguese Chief of Post who has insulted him. That doesn’t work out the way the Régulo had intended it to, and he moves out, leaving Ndani in the big house. Soon, the local schoolteacher fills that void, and he and Ndani have a son together.

Circumstances permit Ndani and the teacher to build a life together, and they move to a different town with the hope of starting over. However, tragedy follows Ndani once again.

The Ultimate Tragedy is a classic tale of man (or, in this case, woman) against fate. Ndani has done nothing to warrant her tragic destiny, and no matter how she tries to outrun it, things never end up going well for her. The teacher, who was educated by Catholic priests, believes the prophecy by the djambakus is just a superstitious belief and that evil spirits don’t exist, but he suffers because of his relationship with Ndani too. The ultimate tragedy appears to be that Ndani cannot escape her destiny, and neither can the people closest to her.

COOK

I found a vegan recipe from Guinea-Bissau on the allrecipes.com website. It was posted by a woman who had been a Peace Corps worker there. The dish is Guinean peanut sauce with butternut squash, and it was very easy to make. Stewed chunks of butternut squash are simmered in a sauce made of peanut butter and tomato. It sounds like an odd combination, but it was actually quite good.

GIVE

There was only one project for Guinea-Bissau listed on the GlobalGiving website, so that’s the one I chose. Fortunately, it sounds like a great project helping rural communities in one of the poorest areas of the country. According to the website: “The project will install clean water wells, build latrines, establish market gardens and train young people and women on how to maintain these resources and take ownership of their community's development” in five remote villages. This is immensely important in a region where people have to walk for hours every day just to find water. More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/water-health-and-womens-empowerment-guinea-bissau/.

NEXT STOP: GUYANA