Comparisons are odious

Recently the food ministry admitted coyly to secreting 67,000 tonnes of rotten grain, just a fraction of the hoard in a country with starving children everywhere. A national daily retorted angrily:
 ‘17.8 million tonnes, or as much as France consumes in a month, is at risk of rotting.’

When I read that, the hungry Indian child at the heart of the story vanished. Instead, I had been coerced into considering the appetite of a nation that has lived off cake for three centuries. I resented the parallel. My anger shifted target, while the facinorous food minister scampered away, scot-free.

Comparisons are odious: they confuse, misdirect, obfuscate. They also have a very long reach across space-time, as I realised last week, in New York.

Helping my daughter move into her University dorm in Manhattan, I was confronted with posters everywhere. REPORT BEDBUGS! they exhorted.

The Big Apple is reeling under the horror of Cimex lecticularis. Bedbugs compelled the closure of a Time Square AMC cinema. They have even infiltrated American penetralia: an Abercrombie & Fitch, a Victoria’s Secret and Elle magazine on Broadway. This infestation is strangely linked to another American dread by a comparison that goes back two millennia.

The secret life of the bedbug is too risqué for Sunday reading, but its death is pure chanbara. Crushed by an outraged victim, the sated bug explodes in a burst of blood and a racy aroma that smells a little like something Americans love to hate. This Yankee aversion is fostered by another parallel the khatmal offers with a visual clue.

The first guy to make this comparison was an ancient Greek, name unknown. Pottering about the agora, eyeing the latest in duty-free, he was intrigued by tiny brown grains that looked like—
‘Kori!’ he exclaimed, and scooped up a fistful.

The shopkeeper sternly ordered they be put right back, unless he could afford their price.

He obeyed, but rebelliously kept back one small seed. It looked a lot like the kori that swarmed his bed. He wasn’t paying a silver decadrachm for a handful of bugs!

The seed crackled between his teeth, and rasped his tongue. Amazingly, that didn’t irritate him. His brain was drenched with the green scent of freshness. A joyous surge of appetite hurried him home. It was the bug-like seed, koriannon, that did it, he would boast later. It took another 1,400 years for English to inherit the word as coriander.

I was ten when I discovered the delicately crenate leaves and lacy white flowers of dhaniya were named after a bug. I also learnt, happily, an alternate name. ‘Coriander’ I would never use again.
Cilantro was closer to the truth. It had swish. It was the sort of word that travelled with horses and silver spurs, plumed hats and sweeping velvet cloaks.

Thirty years later, I came up against the American aversion to cilantro. The average American hadn’t heard of Cimex lecticularis, but cilantro smelled like a bedbug to her.
“How can you tell,” I’d ask, “if you’ve never smelt a bedbug?”
A quick shudder was all the answer I got. And this over fresh green leaves, mind you, with nary a brown seed in sight.
I should have known. Another ancient Greek put it neatly: Parallel lines meet at infinity.

Cilantro, incidentally, is still the name of the bug, routed via Spain.
I’ve decided to give both European names a miss. My favourite herb deserves the dignity of its original names: dhanaka and kothumalli. There are parallels here too, but these I can live with. Dhaniya does look like grain, and what else can a fresh green bunch compare with, except a bouquet of
fragrant flowers?

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write as Kalpish Ratna