Dark leaves of summer

What a story,’ sniffed my friend as we emerged from a three hanky movie. ‘Talk of chicken soup for the soul, this really warmed the cockles of my heart.’

Chicken soup has no houseroom in my soul. Like Paulo Coelho, it is way beyond my gravitational field. Does the heart really have cockles?

I first met the word in a nursery rhyme — “Mary, Mary, quite contrary / How does your garden grow? / With silver bells and cockle shells / And, pretty maids all in a row”. It sounds sinister, but the cockle here is a scallop shell, as in that old song about Molly Malone singing cockles and mussels, alive-alive-o!

Cockle came into English from the tarty coquille, French for shell. The mollusc is usually symbolic of a more gender-specific body part. Locating it in the heart is very Barbara Cartland, but surely the phrase is older? Mid-seventeenth century, a corruption perhaps of cochlea cordis, the posh term for the heart’s ventricles in learned Britain.

Warming the cockles of one’s heart should make it beat faster. The idiom instead conveys the warm fuzzy feeling that restores faith in human nature. Heartwarming might seem inviting on cold grey London evenings, but in the heat of our subcontinental summers, one yearns for woh jo dil ko thandak pahunchaaye, or manam kulirnda cheidi.

Idiom over-rides divisions of language and culture because it is rooted in the human experience.

Qurrat-ul-ain, the Urdu word for delight, is the same as the Tamil kann kulira katchi, that which cools your eyes.

With summer upon us without the customary interlude of spring, coolth beguiles with its many seductions — shade, sharbat, ice, green mangoes, cucumbers, curry leaves…Curry is a saga by itself but curry leaves cannot pass  without comment.

The northern karipatta is clearly a translation of curry leaves since curry is a Tamil voyager on Indian ink. So what’s the word for curry leaves in Tamil? Karuvepilai, black neem leaf. Others swear by karivepilai, black curry leaf. Both sound phony to me.

The leaf has nothing to do with curry. The option confuses it with neem. They look different and smell different. Could botanists mistake one for the other when no chef would?

Last week I came home to vepilaikatti, literally, a block of neem leaves. But that it isn’t. It’s a wickedly racy combo of citron leaves. Should every aromatic leaf be confused with neem? It has, at best, a modest body odour  austere and faintly medicinal. It cannot aspire to the tease of citron nor the sensuous languor of curry leaf. 

After three days of determined pursuit I discovered the error was phonetic, not botanical. Curry leaf isn’t karu-vape-ilai but karu-vep-ilai. Vep is heat in Tamil. The curry leaf explains itself as karuvepilai, dark leaves of summer.

That makes perfect sense. What can cool the parched throat better than buttermilk aromatic with curry leaf? As for the ills of the season, from prickly heat to diarrhoeas, the curry leaf cures them all.

And the botanist in this story? Johann Koenig, a Latvian pupil of Carl Linnaeus, lived briefly at Tarangambadi, today’s dysphonic Tranquebar.

Botanist to the Nawab of Arcot, he described and catalogued the flora of Madras, and karuvepilai entered the Western narrative as ‘curry leaves’ and is named in his honour. The dark leaf of summer is Murraya koenigii.

Dysentery killed Koenig in Orissa in 1785. Ironically, the remedy specific to his illness wasn’t used to save him.