“This way or that?” I asked. The knife-edge gleamed chancily as my hand curled tighter around the solid wood of its handle, index finger extended to steady the blade. I was eight. Ten minutes ago, my mother had slid a peeled onion into a bowl of cold water. Now she patted it dry, handed it over, and turned her back on me.
“This way or that?” I repeated.
“Either way. Vishnu protects both ways.”
It was my first time with a sharp knife, and it was good to know that whether I cut the onion across or lengthwise, Vishnu would take care of my fingertips.
“Vishnu protects the onion,” my mother clarified. “You protect your fingers.”
“But why—”
“Later.”
Stories that begin later usually last a lifetime. This one is just midway in the telling. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now, for this is the story of onion.
*****
It was late. The universe snored. Vishnu, the Protector, twitched uneasily on his cushiony bed, which, as you know, is the serpent Time.
“Why won’t you sleep?” grumbled the snake. “I can’t, if you won’t.”
“Sorry. My day isn’t done yet. I get the feeling somebody still needs me.”
“Not a prayer in the air, and my hearing’s way better than yours.”
“True. Still, I better investigate.”
Vishnu lying on the serpent Time, with Lakshmi massaging his feet and Brahma in heaven. Chromolithograph from Wellcome Collection. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Vishnu called out for his guards Jaya and Vijaya.
“Who’s waiting to see me?” he enquired.
“Nobody,” answered the guards in unison, lickety-split.
Vishnu yawned. “Send Nobody in,” he instructed.
“I told him it was too late to meet you,” said Jaya.
“You know it is never too late.”
“I know, but I didn’t want to hurt him by speaking the truth.”
“Which is?”
“He’s dirty,” said Jaya.
“Filthy,” amended Vijaya.
“Smells terrible.”
“Madam will disapprove,” said Vijaya, to end the discussion.
Vishnu guffawed. “Lakshmi? Disapprove? Have you seen some of her friends?”
“Scum,” agreed the guards.
“Come on then, take me to him.”
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Vishnu strolled out with the guards who pointed grimly to the visitor: a small muddy onion, sobbing in a corner.
Picking the onion up, Vishnu asked, “Why, little fellow, what’s making you so miserable?”
“You,” declared the onion and sobbed some more.
Vishnu waited in silence till the onion announced, “I’m so disgusting, they don’t want me—”
“Who is they? Plants? Animals? Birds?”
“Nah. Humans.”
“But I made you specifically for them. It was one of my generous days. I remember thinking what a lavish gift for humanity.”
“A gift nobody wants. You are to blame, entirely. Why did you make me like this?”
“Like what? What’s a little bit of mud between friends—”
“I don’t mean the mud. I smell!”
“And so you should, after all the trouble I’ve gone to. It was no easy task, that smell! Coaxing all that sulphur out of the soil, transforming it into amino acids to conjure magic molecules that sing in the skillet. You, dear onion, are the bulb that will illuminate humanity. You whet the appetite, you warm the heart, you heal the sick, and you transform the clumsiest cook into chef supreme—”
“But they don’t know any of that, do they?”
“Give them time. Meanwhile, you can make them behave, if you show them I’m on your side.”
“How?”
“Get me a knife, Jaya—”
Vishnu swiped the knife right across the onion a dozen times. When he lifted his hand, the onion rolled out in perfect circles.
“Now the other way.”
By his magic, the onion was whole again and Vishnu sliced it lengthwise, and asked, “What do you look like now?”
Using his other half for mirror, the onion exclaimed, “I’m a conch!”
“And earlier?”
“I was a wheeeeeel!”
Vishnu held up his emblems of protection, the shankha and the chakram, and they looked exactly like the two versions of onion. “No matter how they cut you, I’ll be watching!”
The onion beamed with pride, but Vishnu wasn’t quite done yet. “There!” he said.
‘‘I’ve just tweaked a gene that will help you get even with those who made you cry. The next person who slices you will shed tears within 30 seconds.”
And that put quite a strut in the onion as he rolled home.
*****
Is there any truth in this story?
What happens when the knife slices through the onion?
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Cell walls crack up, enzymes go rogue, and fierce sulfurous odourants slam the nose at first sniff. Within seconds, another enzyme which makes an even stronger chemical, floods the onion: syn-Propanethial S-oxide—PSO—the stuff that tears us up.
Slide the onion into your skillet and heat changes PSO into the aroma of all things joyous, 3-Mercapto-2-methylpentan-1-ol, or MMP. Tenderly, now. A slow simmer takes the onion from armpit to ambrosia.
Humans are the only ones with a receptor to smell the aroma the onion releases when cooked. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock
But there is more to the onion than flavour.
Antioxidants enough to stave off the next pandemic lurk in every whorl, not excepting the gauzy peel. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancers, arthritis—the onion has molecules to slay them all, but we still have to work out how. Yes, the onion’s aromatic MMP can only delight us humans, we are the only ones with a receptor to smell it.
Stands to reason. Which other species cooks, anyway?
What? No onions, no garlic? If you won’t let the onion protect you, I doubt if Vishnu will.
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. They are the authors of Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right (Roli, 2023).
