CARNIVOROUS IN COIMBATORE

A Texan vegetarian fell for Kongunadu cooking, quail and all.

- Julian Manning

When Dad took me to the potluck at his local watering hole, my eating an empty hot dog bun with ketchup stirred an uproar. Befuddled Texans came up and said, "Son, I think you forgot to put a dog in that bun," and before I could beg them to sneak me one, my dad responded, "We are raising him vegetarian," with the pride people advertise grass-fed cows.

I was vegetarian because my family went meatless around the time of my birth, feeling that slaughterhouse meat was inhumane. It was an admirable decision, except they paired it with a move to Texas from NYC.

The Austin of today is very different from that of the '90s; then, being a vegetarian kid garnered the same attention as supergluing a traffic cone to one's head, and turned school lunches, soccer BBQs, and camping trips into a neverending ordeal of picking pepperoni off pizza. I didn't even want to eat meat because of the taste. All I had to go on was the bit of baloney my friend dropped in preschool, which tasted of the carpet I found it on. Like most kids, I just wanted to fit in, and the proverbial taste of Texas in my pre-teens was built on baloney.

Then, everything changed with a recession. My parents decided to leave the States and start new careers in India.

All of a sudden, at 11, I found myself in Coimbatore: a town where the new Harry Potter movie was censored for 'witchcraft', and shopkeepers told my mom what a 'beautiful little girl' she had because of my mop-head hair.

I lorded my displeasure at the move over my parents with the tenacity only a child entering their teens is capable of. But while I initially tried to survive off PB&Js, I soon secretly savoured the pop of mustard seeds over buttery bites of Pongal and frothy filter coffee washing down gooey, ghee-gobbed morsels of red banana sweets. Crisp cones of buttery dosas dipped into drumstick-heavy sambar were joined by fenugreek, banana flower masala, and ragi counterparts.