Spice route to Japan

It was a usual evening at the textile and craft shop that I run in Santiniketan. I was chatting with the sales girls to find out how their day had gone, when a few people entered the shop. I noticed a young Japanese girl among them. I knew she was not one of the students at the university because I know almost all of them (since they frequent our adjoining cafe).

She went around the shop, picked a few small things and brought them to the cash desk. She then turned to me and asked whether I was "Keyadi". How did she know my name? She had said she was recently in Dharamshala where she met another Japanese girl who gave her my reference. Intrigued but pleased that my fame was spreading, we started to chat and i discovered that she was a graphic designer and now on a long trip in India.
 

She asked whether she could visit our workshop so we fixed a time for her to visit the next day. She came over and I showed her around and explained all our processes. She took many photographs and over coffee afterwards she told me that our cafe had really inspired her, because she wished to open one in Tokyo some day. "What kind of cafe?" I asked. "A Tamil breakfast place," she said. I thought I heard her wrong but realised I hadn't when she continued, "because Tamil food is so healthy."

Much as she was looking forward to starting the cafe, she was distressed about not finding fresh coconuts in Japan. I sympathised with her and invited her home to give her "chutney" ideas without coconut. I thought my partner, who is Tamilian, would find it interesting to meet her and she could gain by referring to our recipe books on South Indian cooking.

The day she came over for lunch I planned a slightly unusual Tamil menu. She sat in the drawing room for a polite five minutes and then asked whether she could watch my cooking. I was putting the last finishing touches to the meal and as she looked over my shoulder taking pictures I realised that she was familiar with everything I had made. However, she was interested in photographing some of the spices (the Bengali ones) that she found in my masala dabba but didn't exist in her Indian spice file. This file, so typical of the Japanese, had little plastic sachets of spices with neat notes below each.

Over lunch we learnt that for the last six months her base has been Madurai where she has been learning Tamil cooking whenever she is not travelling. She also spoke fluent Tamil because apparently she had started learning the language in Japan even before she came to India! Her pictures on her laptop of far-flung places like Ladakh and Kutch and the north-east seemed to be dominated by pictures of textiles and weaving techniques and food and cooking processes.

After Santiniketan her next stop was Bhubaneswar. I gave her addresses of weavers in the Sambalpur district who she could visit to satisfy the designer in her. After a few days however, I received a mail from her with no mention of weavers but loads about how the guest house she found in Bhubaneswar was empty because of the low season and how that provided her an opportunity to learn some Oriya cooking from the guest house cooks!

In the mail she also said how much she had enjoyed our interaction and promised to return to Santiniketan either to show products that she would design or the Tamil husband that she might acquire!