Our neighbour, Kumari

I have yet to share with you the tales of someone I will call our “Indian Angel”: Kumari. She and her family live right next door to us. Kumari and her husband Predeep live with their two children Prijin (16 years old) and Kitty (12 years old) in the Predeep family’s ancestral home. The Predeep extended family includes Dr. Meena, our landlord, and her family, their sister Patma and her family and another sister and they all live on the family’s land. We are living in an extended family-community with everyone looking out for the other. Kumari speaks English quite well, having gone to an English School here in Varkala before she got married. Her children and husband speak only a little English (as the children go to school in Malaylam).

Predeep is in poor health and no longer works outside the home, so in order to bring in some income Kumari has opened her home to foreigners to cook traditional, vegetarian South Keralan meals. As well as cooking the most delicious meals, she has given us a window into the life of a modest Keralan family. For these reasons and many more, we will be forever indebted to her and her family. I will speak more of that later, but I would now like to share with you the experience of our first meal in the Predeep home.

We arrived at 6:30 p.m. by which time it was already pitch black outside and, as there are no streetlights, we walked next door to their house with the aide of our torch (flashlight in India). The family greeted and ushered us into their simple dining room. They all have gorgeous smiles and perfect white teeth! Kumari wore a beautiful sari and Predeep had on a lungi (sort of like a wrap around skirt that goes to the knees). As we sat at the plain wooden table Kumari laid out huge, freshly-washed banana leaves that were our plates and then started bring in the food. First was Kerala red rice, which has larger grains and is nuttier than the basmati we are used to when we eat Indian at home. As Kumari placed the many vegetable curries on the table she told us what each was: Kerala green beans, lady fingers (okra), a potato curry, a vegetable curry, a lentil Dahl, beetroot, carrots grated with coconut, eggplant, channa (chickpeas), sambhar (a very spicy Dahl), Soya balls in a tomato sauce, banana curry, chapattis and papadoms. Wow!!! She explained how we should put the rice on the front half of the banana leaf and then all the other dishes in a half circle around the rice on the top half of the leaf. The presentation was extraordinary with the colours of all the different dishes of red, green, yellow, orange and white showing up beautifully against the green leaf background. Almost every vegetable had been cut into very tiny pieces or shredded by a hand held shredder (very time consuming). Now for the taste…out of this world! Although one might call all the dishes ‘curry’ every dish had a different texture and flavour. Having cooked for foreigners, she had omitted the chillies in most of the dishes which left them bursting with flavour without burning the inside of your mouth! They were spicy without being hot! Delicious! Steven, Rob and Kathleen loved the hotter channa and the Soya ball dishes. I am still working on ratcheting up the chilli pepper intensity level I can handle. Having eaten at a few restaurants in India, I know that Kumari is not the norm in most Southern Indian cooking! We staggered home from our first meal at Kumari’s with full tummies and totally impressed by the feast that we had just eaten.

Eating a Kumari dinner at our house.


When we talked about coming to India, Steven often dangled the allure of perhaps hiring our own cook. I wasn’t sure if I was totally sold on this idea. The thought of someone else being responsible for the meals was appealing but tied in with that meant that we would have someone else in the house during the day. We cherish our family privacy and I wasn’t sure about having someone in our kitchen most of the day. Kumari next door has solved these concerns. Our routine is for Kumari to cook in her kitchen and then bring the food over so that we can eat at home. We have agreed that she will make us two suppers a week. Each supper provides us with leftovers for a lighter supper the next night, so in essence she is supplying us with four suppers besides a lunch once a week. We eat supper in a restaurant on the cliff at least once a week and we always eat lunch once or twice a week in town when we go for groceries. So you can see, apart from breakfast, we are not doing much meal preparation in our house. It is the best of both worlds. We feel very fortunate indeed.

Happy hour on our rooftop while dinner is being prepared!

Kumari’s cooking has led to much discussion about which is the best dish. Rob’s favourite dish is the potato curry; Steve’s favourite is the beetroot dish as he has never had anything like it before, Kathleen’s favourite is Soya balls and mine is lady fingers. Everyone loves her chipatties and the papadoms! Kumari’s specialty is her South Indian banana curry dish, which people always want the recipe for (us too!).

Besides the delicious meals Kumari’s family also provide us with a personal insight on life in small town Kerala. The Predeep family lives off the land. They have a cow and a calf, which provide milk for the family and milk to sell to the extended family and neighbours. They have a coconut grove that they use the coconuts for themselves and sell the rest for income. Nothing is wasted. The coconut tree provides the family with the coconuts (both fresh and dried), coconut oil for cooking and making soaps, the wood from the tree is used for firewood for cooking, the fibre from the coconut husk is used to make rope, the leaves are used for food for the cow, the stem of the leaves is used to make brooms and the branches are woven to make walls and roofs for houses.

An important part of our experience in India is meeting people and learning more about their way of life. For the insight they provide and the kind way they have befriended us, we are indeed grateful to have Kumari and her family for neighbours.