Bulgur Upma
The Case for Living in (misunderstood) Immigrant Neighbourhoods
Last December, after viewing 30 Dutch houses of all shapes and sizes, we bought a house in Charlois, a neighbourhood in the south of Rotterdam.
We fell in love with a salmon- pink coloured house with a little backyard, much against the advice of our high-brow expat community. We heard the words unsafe, dodgy area, over rounds of chai, but most couldn’t explain why. As millennials, we of course consulted the internet to be briefly comforted by a million search results, on the fly.
Our neighbourhood in most aspects is a regular Dutch neighbourhood with a basisschool, several parks and General Practitioners, a few supermarkets, quiet residential lanes mostly frequented by cats and a few thousand bicycles. The only way it differs is that ours is a neighbourhood full of immigrants — Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, Pakistanis, Indians, South Africans — people of all colours, united in their middle-class-migrant toil. It is this fact, the missing whiteness, this rampant otherness, that quietly lends an unchecked iffy feeling to our neck of the woods.
Before our move, we rented an apartment in Kralingen, a safer (read whiter) neighbourhood to the north of the Maas river. We lived there for two years, without any troubles, and without any sense of community. We didn’t get to learn the names of neighbours, let alone finding the opportunity to get to know them. But a month into living in Charlois, I had learned the name of every single family that lived on our street. Two months into the move, I had met one neighbour for coffee and the other for a long walk. Now, nine months since we moved, I know why the lady who lives next door divorced her husband, I know that the man who lives two houses from ours walks dog-for a living or for pleasure, I’m yet to find out.
A five minute walk from our house I see a little Turkish store, almost overshadowed by the giant supermarket Albert Heijn. I walk through its narrow aisles, lined with olives, dates, spices and spot something that looks familiar. Bulgur, it’s the first time I read the name of this grain that looks almost like a grain we call daliya in India. Google confirms both are some form of broken wheat, I bring this kind of new ingredient home.
To a pan, I add some mustard seeds and curry leaves, a south-Indian tempering that I know from learning about my partner’s Tamilian roots and food culture. Then I chop an onion, courgette, carrot and paprika, that perhaps grew in a Dutch green house. And after sautéing this colourful mix, I add in a glass full of the Turkish Bulgur. After simmering together for ten minutes, everything is well combined, strikingly new yet surprisingly familiar.
And this is what life in an immigrant neighbourhood feels like — a warm mix of novelty and familiarity, confusion and comfort, belonging and becoming. A beautiful sum of differences, like a bulgur upma if you will.