Cooking stories

Food has always been an important part of our lives. Its centrality not only connects to our survival but also is an important catalyst in bringing people together. In the past almost two months, I travelled to the rural areas in the Himalayas across two countries. From valleys to the mountains, I tried to cover maximum I could with limited resources. Occasionally their culture was similar but sometimes it was totally different. Whether it was the Gurungs in the Annapurna Range and Newars in Kathmandu valley of Nepal or the Monpas in Arunachal Pradesh in India, one common string which linked them all was their impeccable hospitality and their food.

Every time a story was told, we were either sitting in somebody’s kitchen or sipping a hot cup of tea looking at the mountains. It never happened that a story was being narrated to me without any of the above. The ambience in which stories were narrated was my favourite part. But why the stories were narrated in the kitchen around the fireplace? I wondered.

When I visited my first village - Khilang in Nepal, I was all excited to listen to the stories. I did my homework well, I thought. I reached on a bright sunny afternoon and explained the community what I was looking for. They assured me to share their backyard stories. When we met in the evening I thought stories would be unfolded only to find almost the entire village coming together for a feast celebrating my visit. When I visited Sikles in Nepal I spent the day talking to the owner of the guest room where I stayed. He told me I had to wait for the evening to listen to their stories. Similar was my experience from Arunachal Pradesh, India. Here, it so happened that I visited the intended places and monasteries twice searching for the relevant people who could share with me the oral narratives. And having to visit places twice in the mountains incurs a lot of time – something which I didn’t have in abundance. The wait seemed to be endless.

However, as evening dawned, the village elderlies came back home after a tiring day, the sun went down the mountains and the twinkling stars took over the stage, the stories unfolded. Every evening irrespective of the location, I along with community members and the story teller would sit in the kitchen around the fireplace talking stories. Sometimes it was the monk, the village headman or the story teller himself. While the lady of the house served us tea or dinner, the men would be the narrators, and the children would gather around trying to listen to our conversation inquisitively. Evening gatherings in the kitchen brought the community together and created the perfect ambience for story-telling in the Himalayas.

Warmth of the fireplace, dim lights of the kitchen and the beguiling story teller would take anyone back to the era of the bygones. As I travel to Bhutan now, I await to explore the treasures of this land, their folktale and legends, talking stories around the fireplace in the kitchen.