Mira Nair's ‘F’ in life — Food

When you get a chance to interview Mira Nair, you grab it with both your hands and blindly do it. If not for anything else (never mind that you loved Monsoon Wedding and Namesake), it’s because she is as expressive and involved as interviewees come. She will answer your questions even though it’s the last thing she’d want to do, rib you  playfully and even do pretty good impersonations (as we discover during the course of the interview). Yes, the woman exudes energy and it’s easy to see why she is one of the most admired film makers in the world today.

Leaving movies and the Padma award aside for the moment, the director, sitting in her brother Vikram Nair’s newly launched restaurant, Khaaja Chowk! held court on the glorious subject of food.

“I love food”, she declares, jesting, “sometimes a little too much.” This love for food, you realise, is something that runs in the Nair family. “My brother (Vikram Nair) is a good chef and makes some very good Khao Suey. His wife is an amazing cook, too” she says, appreciatively. For the creative auteur she is, Mira poetically reflects, “I think cooking a meal is the ultimate creative act.” And then, she reveals her 100% desi side when she says, “I like unpretentious street food that is chatpata and tasty and nothing overly rich which is terrible for your veins.”

Food, they say, is one of the most evocative memories one carries with themselves through a lifetime. Something that holds true with Mira too. “I grew up in Bhubaneshwar and one of my first food memories, apart from my mother’s cooking, is of these vendors who would go house to house with these three-tiered baskets hefted on their shoulders. The basket would have three degchis (pots) filled with singhada (water chestnuts), samosas and rasagullas in them. They were just fantastic!” she recalls with gusto before going to mimic the hawker’s cry, nasal twang in place. “They’d go Singha-a-a-da” she animatedly jokes and adds to good effect, “I can do the whole impersonation for you!” “That was our ice-cream-like treat,” she fondly says.

As someone who shuttles between New York (for work), East Africa (where she lives) and everywhere her work takes her, it’s easy to assume that Mira’s tasted the whole world on a plate. The biggest change she has seen in the global foodscape over the years is how homogenous it has become. “Food tastes pretty much similar everywhere and I also love the fact that Japanese food, which I like, is everywhere” she enthuses.

Working in an extremely creative job where stress rides high, Mira agrees that she escapes to the kitchen to de-stress. “I cook at home a lot”, she reveals. And then, she opens up a bit more, giving us a peek into the home-maker lurking underneath her super director persona: “Every Saturday, I make Idli Sambar and on Sundays, I make Poha and Coconut Chutney. This is the routine breakfast menu on the weekends at our home.”

And then, just like that the interview came to a close over a succulent piece of chicken kebab that had her almost ecstatic. You have to try this, she goaded, reminding us of Ruth Reichl’s words — “Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.”