| Almost the first thing you notice about Uma Nair is her hair "" hardly surprising then that M F Husain has drawn her with her abundant tresses beside a coconut tree in her native Kerala. |
| A German photographer from Vogue at Heathrow airport was more taken by her profile and asked to take pictures (with, it's true, her hair open), having spotted her perusing a Christie's catalogue of nude photograps. |
| "He said," she says with a twinkle in her eye, "that after taking pictures of anorexic models for 17 years, he was happy to photograph a woman with real curves." |
| It isn't the sort of thing you expect an English teacher would want her 10th-grade students to hear, but you suspect Nair might get a laugh out of it. She is that rarity, a good teacher and, possibly, a friend who motivates her students into performing better, then takes them for practice as choir singers. |
| To the outside world, Nair is better known as an art critic, sometimes curator, and author of the recently-published tome on Paresh Maity with a cover price of Rs 10,000. |
| Her father, an engineer with Indian Airlines, paid twice that sum for a plot of land in New Delhi, arm-twisted into it by her mother, a college principal (Nair is a third generation educationist) who woke at four every morning to cook for the family. |
| "At Modern School," recounts Nair, "Ram Rahman and Pablo Bartholomew would finish off my tiffin in the first period." |
| With that reputation to live up to, you expect Nair to be fussy. She gets her meat and fish from the same vendor in INA Market that the family has patronised for 45 years; the groundnut oil she uses for her cooking is pressed fresh; her sabut garam masalas "" star aniseed, cinnamon, saunf, cardamom, cloves, pepper "" she buys not, as you might suspect, from Kerala, but in Washington DC or Singapore. |
| Nair's earliest memories are of rushing platefuls of prawns from her mother's kitchen to her father in their home of Burmese teak facing the river in Champakulam village "where the boat race began as the first Nehru Trophy, and of which my father and uncle were patrons". |
| She would have liked to cook us a poached fish in plantain leaves but it's the wrong season, so we get to sample her son's favourite recipe. |
| In her home with its wooden floor, an amazing collection of pottery (some of it stored in her bathrooms!), art hanging from her walls, and a spotlessly maintained kitchen, Nair begins the process of cooking in the traditional urli before transferring the roasted ingredients into a pressure cooker. |
| She brings the same passion to her cooking as she does to her research on art. "Writing is a responsibility," she insists, "it requires self-control and wisdom to say something without hurting anyone." |
| While she's not above calling a spade a spade, Nair is also incredibly disciplined "" getting up at 4:30 to meditate, go for a walk, to sing gospel and conduct choirs in English and Hindustani. |
| Incredibly, she forgets the south Indian coffee that has been filtered for us, and calls at night to apologise, long after the tiffin she's packed with her Syrian Christian recipe for the lamb, and another childhood favourite, "keema crumble", has been consumed. I tell her I'll be back "" for the coffee, and seconds. |
| FAVOURITE RECIPE |
| ERACHI OLATHIYA |
| 800 gms mutton, cut into small pieces 3 large onions, sliced 25 gms garlic, chopped 1-inch cube ginger, grated 3 tbsp dhania powder 2 tsp red chilli powder ½ tsp garam masala ½ tsp turmeric powder Salt, to taste Groundnut oil, for frying the masala 2 sprigs kari patta |
| In a pan, heat the oil, then add onions and fry till golden. Add garlic, ginger and all other masalas and bhuno (roast) till dark brown and nicely done. Now add the mutton and bhuno a little more, then add 1½ glasses of water and bring to boil. |
| Now transfer to a pressure cooker and cook on low heat for exactly 15 minutes. Serve with parathas or roomali rotis. (Beef and chicken can be cooked similarly.) |
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