'Paneer Diving' by Janani Sreenivasan
A guest post written by my friend, collaborator, and our upcoming Subscriber Salon guest, Janani Sreenivasan (writer, director, composer, filmmaker, political campaign strategist).
Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness, is underway for 2022, and will soon become a recognized school holiday here in New York City. As a child, these festivals and observances would pop up throughout the calendar year without warning (Pongal, Harvest; Navaratri, a celebration of the divine feminine; etc) and what they primarily meant to me was a chance to go paneer diving.
In the small Oregon town where I grew up in the 1990s, we had a healthy little Indian immigrant population from all over: folks spoke Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Kannada, Tamil (us), and other languages, but to each other, we just spoke English. It was through the North Indian family events that I discovered paneer, the cheesy cubes you all know and love from Indian takeout.
South Indian cuisine does not include paneer, and my mother would not simply lay it out for me like cheese and crackers. To eat paneer, I had to go to an IP (not intellectual property or Internet protocol, but an Indian Party). And once I got to the party, there was a certain undercover technique one had to employ to get it.
At these house parties, the food was either laid out in long, steaming pans from a caterer or in the family’s own dishes, and sometimes it took a little prior investigation to determine which dish held the paneer. Sometimes you were deceived: what looked like it could hold paneer actually held korma or dal or something else that was not cheesy and therefore a disappointment. This is where diving came in.
What you had to do was take the spoon and slowly, surreptitiously stir the dish until the paneer cubes surfaced, and then, while serving yourself, “accidentally” plop half of the cubes onto your plate and then quickly cover them up with sauce, so that nobody knew what a sociopathic little thief you were.
Then you covered the scene of the crime with rice, vegetables and side dishes and ran away with your bounty. You ate it all, and then a few minutes later, you got a new plate and came creeping back again – very casually, as if it hadn’t even occurred to you to eat yet — and did it all again.
I probably personally hoovered most of the paneer served by Indian families in Corvallis in the 1990s, and thinking about it makes me think about the things from our cultures of origin that we actually need and hold on to.
I still have deep, visceral reactions to eating Indian food, hearing the classical music and the film music, wearing the clothes — but it is also a deeply optional experience. When I think about holidays revolving around lights, the first one that comes to mind is Christmas. When I order the inexcusable amounts of takeout that are fueling me through the election, they’re mostly Thai, or the special pizza that nobody else wants (black olives, jalapeño, and little cubes of feta reminiscent of my old crimes). If I speak Tamil, it’s a phrase here and there to my family.
I have stopped grieving this; life is about moving forward and experiencing new combinations. But all immigrants, and everyone who has ever made a cultural migration or leap, carry their distant, formative memories inside them for their whole lives. It’s as inextricable as DNA — but as with DNA, it isn’t always destiny.
Six years ago, I was in Colorado with the Clinton campaign helping film a pro-Hillary Diwali video with the Indian community in Aurora. There was no paneer to eat, but in the backyard where we filmed, I recognized the outfits, the languages, and the profound sense of comfort and peace I used to feel surrounded by the aunties and uncles of Corvallis. And the same sense of general Indian party chaos that used to make it so easy to steal paneer.