Excerpts from Annapurna’s Bounty, Indian Food Legends Retold by Veena Gokhale
Mingling sweet, sour, and spicy notes, this inspiring retelling of diverse food legends from India, paired with delicious recipes, will feed mind, body, heart, and soul.
Released in June 2025, by Dundurn Press, Annapurna’s Bounty has appeared on several recommended reading lists including July 2025 Reads for the Rest of Us, Ms Magazine, CBC’s14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month (May) and Mentioned as a new and upcoming release in an article in Giller Prize’s news, Honouring Influential Fiction by Asian Canadian Writers for Asian Heritage Month
Book Description
Annapurna, the Indian Goddess of Nourishment, presides over this rich harvest of stories reimagined for the twenty-first-century palate. Here, food manifests as ploy, bargain, symbolic communication, a bone of contention, a lesson, as it weaves through the lives of a cast of characters — kings and commoners, witches and goddesses, gurus and bandits, refugees and travellers.
Each story is followed by a vegetarian recipe offered up by a character.
Infused with humane values, expertly blending the timeless and the contemporary, the magical and the everyday, encompassing East, West, and the in-between, this fusion of fiction and food will delight and inspire.
Below we present excerpts from two stories in the collection.
The Fisherman and the Sorceress
Ijay squatted by his father’s boat, smoking a beedi. This simple, local cigarette was the last one he had rolled before running out of tobacco. He had no money to buy more. Nor could he cadge from anyone, because he owed everyone, and he did not just owe beedis.
He wished he had some tobacco. The leaves to roll it in could be found in the woods, and he knew how to create a spark by striking stone to stone. All he needed was a little tobacco, just a little bit. He wished for many things, but none of his wishes came true.
He saw a circle of men a little way off on the beach, drinking toddy, the local hooch, talking loudly, and laughing — his father and brother among them. But he could not join their circle. It was getting dark. Soon the tips of their beedis would glow red in the gloom.
A familiar hunger-anger gnawed at him. Every day he took a boat out to sea at dawn and sat in it, with a line thrown overboard. There was usually an old, weather-beaten boat available that no one wanted. The rest of the fishermen caught fish, even big fish, while he caught nothing. Ijay cast his nets just like the other fishermen. While their nets would be heavy with fish, he would find only a handful in his. Cursed he was, accursed to the core. The rare day when he felt a tug on the line and slowly started reeling it in, he would feel the fish suddenly jerk away. When the line came up empty, the hook, dangling free, mocked Ijay. Every time the fish escaped, he experienced shame, a shame that had lodged deep within.
All the fishermen were busy — looking after their nets and boats, fishing, going to the market — their lives entangled with those of their wives and children, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends. He watched this gregarious parade of daily life from the sidelines. The fishermen did not want him around, afraid that they might catch his bad luck. Ijay kept away from them as much as he could. He avoided his family, creeping into their hut when his father and brother were asleep and leaving before they awoke.
As Ijay ran his hand along the rough wood of his father’s boat, he was invaded by despair. He did not have his own boat when even the humblest fisherman in the village had a small rough-and-tumble craft to call his own. He was of marriageable age but had no wife. Who would give his daughter to such a loser?
Ijay was just coming to, aware that he was in an enclosed space. Opening his eyes momentarily, his gaze encountered a round roof. He tried to focus, but his eyes closed and he drifted off. After a while he came to again. This time he took in the carefully woven criss-cross pattern of the roof. He found himself thinking that it must be very early.
He had come to Bhuvana at midnight. She lived apart from the rest of the village, in the woods, a thorny fence marking her territory. She was a witch, herbalist, and midwife all rolled into one. Desperation had driven Ijay into her lair. Desperation, hunger, and shame that pushed his head down. The unspoken accusations of his father and brother echoed in his mind. He was not entitled to food, not to toddy, not to tobacco. Not even to his sleeping mat. When he came to see Bhuvana, she welcomed him. She understood his problem at once, though the words were scarcely out of his mouth and offered a solution. Bhuvana had wrought her magic, magic black as the ever-churning sea on a moonless night. But would it work?
Annapurna’s Soup Kitchen
Tell me story.” Tara stood at the door of the study, holding a book. Pigtails framed her oval face. She had large dark eyes and skinny forearms.
Amy looked up from the paper she was marking. Essays were scattered all around her. A couple had fallen off the table and were lying on the intricately patterned wine-red carpet. She was only halfway through marking, and the papers were due the next morning.
“Later,” she said.
“No!”
Tara’s bedtime was creeping up, and Amy had refused her twice already. When will she start reading? Amy thought.
“Annapurna again?” Amy drawled.
Tara nodded, clutching the book to her chest as if it was Chuck, her stuffed rabbit. Amy got up from her desk, sighing, and moved to the sofa. Tara cuddled up beside her, smiling.
Amy considered the kitschy book cover. There she was — Annapurna — a graceful, bejewelled woman with long, dark, and lustrous hair, wearing a red saree with a gold border, standing by a pot of yellowish porridge or something, and holding a ladle. Shiva stood beside her, holding a begging bowl. Both Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, were smiling.
Shiva was striking: lean, muscular, and an enticing shade of blue. He wore a tiger-skin as a loincloth. Some of his dark hair was piled up in a topknot, and the rest fell to his shoulders. A thin jet of water — the holy river Ganga — flowed out of the topknot. His hair ornament was a crescent moon. A cobra with a raised hood twisted around his neck. His forehead was marked by three horizontal strokes. In the middle was his third eye, closed at this time. Necklaces made of large brown seeds decorated his bare chest and arms.
So over-the-top, thought Amy. A second-generation Goan Canadian, born Christian, Amy was not religious, yet there was a little shrine chockablock with Hindu gods and goddesses in her kitchen. Her husband, Madan, a first-generation immigrant from India, was more traditional. When Madan’s mother, who lived in India, had visited them for the first time a few months ago, she had brought along another reference to divinity — a multicoloured, illustrated storybook about Goddess Annapurna. Tara had taken to her granny and to Annapurna. Very soon, the book had become her favourite bedtime read.
Amy’s eyes continued to rest on Shiva. Tara tugged at her arm. Kissing Tara on her forehead, Amy opened the book.
About the Author
Veena Gokhale, an immigrant shape shifter, has worked as a journalist, teacher, literary curator, and in the non-profit sector. She has also given Indian vegetarian cooking classes in French and English. She has published three works of fiction — Bombay Wali and Other Stories, Land for Fatimah, a novel (Guernica Editions, 2013 & 2018), and Annapurna’s Bounty, Indian Food Legends Retold (Dundurn Press, 2025). Having lived in ten cities across three countries, she now calls Tiohtià:ke-Montréal home. Visit her at: www.veenago.com
Book Details
Publisher : Dundurn Press
Publication date : June 3 2025
Language : English
Print length : 232 pages
ISBN-10 : 145975459X
ISBN-13 : 978-1459754591