Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - The Settlers Cookbook

O UR FAMILY TREE IS puny, barren in large part. The roots dont go down deep enough to produce a plenteous crop of ancestral stories or fruity relatives . The few memories hanging on are losing colour and juice, soon will wither and fall away.

The human urge to trace long, biological bloodlines is strong. But our far past was swept away by careless fate impetuously carrying off my folk across the seas, away, away to new beginnings. They took little and left behind even less. Like many other East African Asians whose forebears left India in the nineteenth century, I search endlessly for (and sometimes find) the remains of those days. Few maps mark routes of journeys undertaken by these migrants; hardly any books capture their spirit or tell the story. Then Africa disgorged us too, and here we are, people in motion, now in the West, the next stopover. There is no place on earth we can historically and unequivocally claim to be ours, and so we have become adept wayfarers who settle but cautiously, ready to move on if the winds change.

Ayar Ata, a Kurdish refugee in London, writes an ode to capture the global drifters attachment to bits and pieces portable, potent reminders of loss and gain too:

Under my bed there it was my seemingly little suitcase

inside it my few precious belongings.

A present from my Grand mum, an evenly shaped

light blue stone with white spots spread all over it, a familiar

piece of early morning sky with stars twinkling in the palm of my hand

A photo of my mother smiling at me in despair

waving and wondering

A broken watch with frozen hands.

I carry around with me unfashionable bags holding too many things I dont need but might, just in case: extracts of the Koran in Arabic and English, an old photograph of my university in Uganda, a hanky used to mop up tears when I married Colin, a pill box and rosary that belonged to my mother, hospital notes, job references an exiles survival kit.

In my sunny, high-tech kitchen, one small cupboard keeps cooking paraphernalia I brought over from Kampala in 1972, the year we Asians were cast out of Uganda by the sadistic black nationalist Idi Amin. I had arrived in Britain a few months before his expulsion orders and was never to return to my old homeland. Into a storeroom back home went a box with my precious vinyl collection Cliff and Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Helen Shapiro (where did she go?), Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Jimmy Ruffin, the Beatles, Jim Reeves, Millie, Sandie Shaw, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Hindi song discs by Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Talat Mehmood and Mukesh, and poorly recorded Congolese jigs which always incited my buttocks to quiver. Also placed in storage (never reclaimed) were my Eng Lit books, a painstakingly assembled canon of the greatest writers. Many were gifts from eager educators who had drawn this avid pupil into poetry, drama and the novel. Almost all my photos, wrapped tenderly, catalogued then arranged in a small, red suitcase, were entrusted to a friend who then had to join the exodus. No time then to think of photos.

Why I transported old pots and pans to England I cannot explain. I try but am unable to throw them away. The motley collection has had several stays of execution. During cleaning fits, I chuck them into a box to be dumped, and they return back to the house, just in time.

There is a wooden contraption for grating hairy, brown-shelled coconuts. The device has not been used on these shores and is mummified with paper and layers of oil to keep it from cracking and rusting. Two slabs of wood are cleverly put together to make a folding stool. A flat, oval, rusting metal blade sticks out in front, like the head of a tortoise.

The coconut was broken, its sweet, cloudy juice drained into a glass which always went to the favourite child in the extended family, always a boy, always overweight and a bloody nuisance. Then the kitchen servants sat astride the grater as if on a saddle, except it was so low their knees come up almost to their shoulders. With both hands they rolled the half-sphere over the blade with a zigzag edge. Sometimes, they slashed their hands and harsh employers abused them for what they thought was native idiocy. Or for contaminating the white flesh with their inferior blood. Boiling water was added to the grated coconut, and the mixture was then poured into a straw basket shaped like a long sausage to be squeezed. Imagine the agony. The burning, pitchy hands added a sweetness you can never reproduce.