Chilli-Wrapped Tongue
An illustration of an open mouth with big pink lips, teeth and a tongue coming out that’s wrapped in a red chilli with flames around it. Illustration: Yelly Chuan
Words by Isabelle Quilty.
I feel blood and country flow when I taste turmeric. It stains my cuticles the day after, the yellow a little reminder of the night before. Bollywood classics played loudly from the new flatscreen. Water, flour and ghee glued to my mother’s fingers, never in her ever-perfect manicure. My sister steals bits of dough for us to eat before mother notices, while it’s always my job to taste the curry sauce and ensure it has the perfect balance of salt, spice and chilli.
The perfect curry lies in the perfect blend of spices.
1. Turmeric
The spice is yellow, vibrant and bitter. I always add more than the recipe tells me to. It is the soul, I think. A pattern etched out over generations. From mother to daughter, to me. A collective memory shared by millions all over the world. I grew up in a white neighbourhood. Sunday roasts, sausages and boiled meat. But every now and then, a spark of soul. A curry, to remind me of a brighter, more vibrant world. A culture, a language, a whole identity just out of reach. A memory I could taste.
2. Cumin seeds
When the sun washes over my skin and the earth, or the wet and smelling rain runs beneath my feet and my black hair is a mess of hot curls, I am the roots and the roots are me. Bark, ants and timber. The soft gradient of grey to dark. My skin is brown and pale all at once, my eyes of the darkest midnight, no romanticism to be found where there is no iris to see. The cumin seeds provide the hot, pungent smell of the earth. The seeds carry history. When we let them pop and dance in the oil and fat of the ghee, history can sing right on your plate.
3. Salt
Remember these words. Every part of the recipe is crucial, you see.
The kids will call you a terrorist. Little jabs here and there. Soft punctures under the skin. You’re tougher than that. Iron is poured down the throat. There it sets, hard and cold. If they tear away your skin, your heart will always be safe. A pinch, a tug, a stab. Words run off your back. They melt into the mixture, a small addition to the big picture. Just as a pinch of salt can bring out the finer flavours. Salt to taste. Over and over.
4. Fiji spice blend
How do you know someone isn’t like you?
Is it their accent, the slope of their nose or the melanin in their skin?
Who taught you to scrunch your nose at the sight of someone’s lunch? Was it the Devon sandwich packed for you day after day?
Maybe they lacked the ritual.
I think of the long car rides to Sydney every six months, the little pilgrimage to the barrels of spice imported from Fiji. Every six months, our cupboard is stocked up once again. There’s jalebi stickiness on my sister’s fingers, a mango lassi tucked in the cupholder. Two hours, for the blend. For our curry.
Imagine my shock when I had Thai green curry for the first time and discovered not all curry in the world was my mother’s. I wrinkled my nose and pouted. No chapati, no salty goodness. The horror.
Perhaps I simply couldn’t taste the memory, the ancestry that exists there for so many others.
5. Chilli
There is power in every seed
Feel it push beneath the skin
My tongue waters at the prospect
Of the pain
The thrill
Childhood and adulthood
Clash when the sharpness of all that is red and passionate
Clings to the flesh
It remembers me every time
With a warm greeting
That builds
And builds
Far in the back of my throat
It finds that I am a curiosity
Metal and the cold once inhabited my insides
They called the cavity in my chest home
But this chilli
With its memory and heat and passion
Finds only ice-water instead
There’s room for growth here
To let the melted water give way to the seeds
The memory
Take root
Brandish all that I have learnt
And remember this chilli-wrapped tongue
Various illustrations of spices in six different squares. Illustration: Yelly Chuan.